Coastal Management & a Distinctive UK Coastline
Why People Want to Defend the Coast
Around 17 million people in the UK live within 10 km of the coast. They have homes, businesses, ports and farmland to lose. Where coastal erosion eats into the land at speed — or where storm flooding threatens low-lying ground — communities demand defence. The challenge is that defending one stretch of coast often damages another, and the cheapest defences are not always the best. Hard engineering tries to stop the sea. Soft engineering tries to work with it.
Hard Engineering: Big, Visible, Expensive
A sea wall is a concrete or stone barrier that reflects waves. It defends towns well — the curved sea wall at Blackpool has protected the promenade since the 1920s — but it costs around £6,000 per metre, and reflected waves can scour the beach below. Groynes are wooden or stone fences built out into the sea; they trap sediment moving by longshore drift, fattening the beach. The downside is that beaches downdrift are starved of sand, sometimes accelerating erosion further along the coast. Rip rap (large boulders piled at the cliff foot) absorbs wave energy cheaply but looks unsightly and can become unstable in storms.
Hard engineering protects what it shields but often shifts the problem along the coast. Soft engineering accepts coastal change and works with it — usually cheaper but slower-acting.
Soft Engineering: Working With the Sea
Beach nourishment involves pumping sand from offshore onto an eroding beach, restoring it as a natural buffer. It looks invisible once finished and protects the cliff behind, but the sand erodes over time and must be topped up every few years. Lincolnshire’s coast is renourished annually at a cost of around £7 million. Managed retreat is more radical: defences are deliberately removed or breached, allowing the sea to flood low-value land such as farmland or marsh. Salt marshes form in the new intertidal zone, absorbing storm energy and creating wildlife habitat. The Medmerry scheme in West Sussex (2013) is the largest UK example to date.
A Distinctive UK Coastline: The Holderness Coast
The 61 km Holderness coast in East Yorkshire, between Flamborough Head and Spurn Head, is one of the fastest-eroding coastlines in Europe. It is made of boulder clay — a soft, unconsolidated material left behind by glaciers around 18,000 years ago. The cliffs retreat by about 1.5–2 metres each year on average, and individual storms can take 5 metres in a single week.
Why so fast? Three reasons: the rock is soft and slumps when wet; the long fetch across the North Sea generates powerful destructive waves; and north-easterly storm waves hit the cliff at an angle that drives strong longshore drift south. Material eroded from the cliffs at Mappleton or Hornsea is carried south to feed the sand spit at Spurn Head.
In 1991 the village of Mappleton received a £2 million scheme of two large rock groynes plus rip rap. The defences saved 30 homes and the cliff-top road. But by trapping longshore-drift sediment, the groynes starved the coast immediately to the south. At Cowden, just 3 km down the coast, erosion accelerated to 10 metres a year. Farmland and a caravan site there have been lost. The Mappleton case is a textbook reminder that coastal defences shift the problem — they rarely solve it.
How Holderness Has Changed Over Time
Roman maps suggest the coast was 4 km further east 2,000 years ago. Some 30 villages have been lost to the sea since the Domesday Book in 1086, including Ravenser Odd — once a major port. Today, places like Skipsea and Hornsea are partially defended; others such as Aldbrough are not. Climate change adds pressure: rising sea levels mean higher base water levels for storms, and more frequent winter storms mean more cliff failures per year. Local councils now use a shoreline management plan that decides for each stretch whether to ‘hold the line’, ‘advance the line’, ‘manage realignment’ or ‘take no active intervention’.
Residents whose homes are at risk want defences. Farmers losing fields want compensation if the policy is to retreat. Environmental groups support managed retreat because salt marshes are valuable habitats. Engineers worry about the engineering integrity of older sea walls. Government agencies (the Environment Agency in England) have to balance cost-benefit: defences are usually only funded where the value of property at risk exceeds the build and maintenance cost. That means low-value farmland is often allowed to flood while towns are protected.
Holderness erodes at 1.5–2 m/year because boulder clay is soft, fetch is long across the North Sea, and waves arrive at an angle that drives strong longshore drift southwards.