Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex is the quintessential English beauty spot. In
the bed of the valley a river meanders lazily down to the sea. Cows graze in
lush green pastures. The smooth flanks of the South Downs rise on either
side until those to the east terminate abruptly in the sheer chalk cliffs of
the Seven Sisters with their panoramic views of the English Channel.
This idyllic scenery is enjoyed by more than 400,000 visitors a year. A
beautiful photograph of a 19th-century coastguard cottage on the valley’s
westward side sustained Robbie Turner through the horrors of the Second
World War in the film Atonement. But Cuckmere Haven is also — though the
casual hiker would never guess it — the centre of a raging controversy over
government plans to let it revert to what it was before man began tinkering
with nature: a tidal estuary with saltmarsh and mud flats.
The Environment Agency spends up to £50,000 a year on keeping the river mouth
clear, on maintaining great shingle barriers on either side of it so that
the sea cannot roll in, and on repairing the deteriorating banks of a
channel the Victorians cut through the valley in the 1840s to aid navigation
and stop the river flooding.
The agency reckons that to keep the valley as it is would cost £18 million
over the next half century — money it badly needs for the protection of more
populated coastal areas against rising sea levels and increasingly frequent
storms induced by global warming.
The time has come to “work with nature, not against it”, says Peter Midgley,
the agency’s Kent and East Sussex manager. The plan is to end maintenance
work gradually so the sea can flood the valley at high tide once again. Mr
Midgley, 57, positively relishes the prospect. There will be more birds,
more marine life and much greater biodiversity, he says. “It will be even
more lovely. It will be more natural. At the moment it’s a completely
man-made, man-maintained landscape.”
Others are appalled. Thousands have signed a petition to save the Cuckmere
valley. Nigel Newton, the chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing in
London, who owns one of the coastguard cottages, sees it becoming a dreary
mud flat resembling Passchendaele, the First World War battlefield. “I defy
you to name a more beautiful place in the whole of England, but this
school-geography-project-gone- wrong will wipe it out,” he says.
The row over the Cuckmere valley is not a one-off. It is a harbinger of things
to come right round England’s low-lying eastern and southern coastline, from
the Humber to the Solent, as the impact of global warming becomes
increasingly pronounced.
Thousands of acres of coastal land have been surrendered to the sea already,
and this process of “managed retreat” or “managed realignment” is gaining
momentum as the Government accepts, in effect, that Britannia no longer
rules the waves. “However good we are at engineering, nature is more
powerful than us,” says Mr Midgley. “We can slow its effects but, at the end
of the day, nature is going to win.”
Sea levels are rising by 2mm a year, a rate projected to increase to about
15mm by the end of the century. That rise is exacerbated by a tectonic tilt
that is depressing southern Britain as northern Britain rebounds from the
Ice Age. Climate change means storms will batter coasts more often.
In the face of such threats the Government is increasing sharply its spending
on schemes to counter floods and coastal erosion. It has earmarked £2.15
billion for the next three years, though much of that will be spent on
inland schemes. But, like Canute, it realises that it can no longer defend
the entire coastline and must give priority to the protection of more
populated areas.
That means “some very difficult decisions” will be required, Hilary Benn, the
Environment Secretary, admitted recently. The Environment Agency, which took
over prime responsibility for 6,000 miles of coast and 800 miles of coastal
defences from 90 different authorities last month, had to study every
stretch of shoreline and say “here are areas we really do need to protect
and others which may be difficult to protect for ever from rising sea
levels”, Mr Benn said.
Farmers and property owners are appalled at the prospect of becoming the
country’s first climate-change refugees. There is, for example, an uproar in
Norfolk over a suggestion by Natural England, the Government’s conservation
advisory body, that several miles of coastal defences between Eccles and
Winterton are unsustainable, and that the sea should be allowed to flood
25sq miles (65sq km) of the Norfolk Broads including six villages, hundreds
of homes and thousands of acres of prime farming land. “It would be a
tragedy to lose a wonderful area of the country by allowing the sea in
without a fight,” declared General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British
Army and a Norfolk landowner.
There is another outcry farther down the coast where the Suffolk town of
Southwold and the neighbouring village of Walberswick are bitterly resisting
agency plans to stop maintaining flood defences along the Blyth river
estuary that separates them. The agency says that the plan would save £34
million over several decades. Locals say it will destroy 40 homes and
hundreds of acres of farmland, and have delivered a 1,500-signature petition
to Mr Benn wearing Churchill masks invoking the wartime leader’s “fight them
on the beaches” spirit. “We have been defending this coastline for thousands
of years and this is the first government to decide that we will give in,”
John Gummer, the former Environment Minister and Conservative MP for Suffolk
Coastal, complained recently to another newspaper.
A new strategy for preventing the Humber estuary from flooding is also causing
concern. It envisages 1,500 acres of farmland reverting to wetland in the
coming decades, threatening several villages and 2,000 properties. The
upside would be enhanced protection for 400,000 people, including the entire
population of Hull, living on land that is at present liable to flooding.
What compounds the property owners’ anger is that the Department for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs offers no compensation where sea
defences are allowed to lapse.
But while farmers fume, and ask why the British do not defend their coastline
like the Dutch, environmentalists are thrilled that thousands of acres of
marshes, drained for agriculture in previous centuries, are being restored
to their original state.
In the Blackwater estuary in Essex, 200 acres (80 ha) of land at Abbotts Hall
Farm were flooded deliberately in 2002 when five big holes were punched in
walls that had held the sea at bay for the previous 300 years. Maintaining
those walls would have cost £500,000 over the next 20 years.
Today the area is a thriving salt marsh teeming with redshanks, wigeon, egrets
and teal, its waters a nursery for herring, dover sole and sea bass. “The
ecological success is massive,” says John Hall, director of the Essex
Wildlife Trust.
In the 14th century the Essex coast was bordered by about 100,000 acres of
marshland. That has been whittled away to less than 2,500, but finally the
process is being reversed. The Abbotts Hall experiment — the biggest in
Europe at the time — has since been replicated at numerous sites in the
Blackwater, Crouch and Humber estuaries, and in the Wash.
The Environment Agency calls these new marshlands “soft defences” and sings
their praises. They are less ugly and much cheaper to maintain than “hard
defences” — concrete walls and shingle barriers that would have to be built
higher and stronger. They absorb huge amounts of water, making floods less
likely. They also break the power of incoming tides, absorbing almost all
the energy from storm waves before they hit dry land.
“It is a real win-win,” says Alison Baptiste, the Environment Agency’s grandly
named Making Space for Water Co-ordinator.
Back in Cuckmere Haven the argument rages on. Tony Whitbread, chief executive
of the Sussex Wildlife Trust, enthuses about a scheme that will, he
believes, enhance the valley.
Mr Newton disagrees vigorously. He accuses the Environment Agency of
destroying beautiful habitats in the guise of returning them to nature
merely to save money.
“Managed retreat is embracing defeat,” he says.
