Photo: A house on the edge of the cliffs at Easton Bavents, Southwold, Suffolk. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian
As sea levels rise, thousands of people on the coast of Britain have been forced to move inland. But a handful of hardy souls refuse to abandon their property to the ravages of the waves. After all, they say, we have fought off invaders before.
Bryony Nierop-Reading is being evicted by the sea. Since Cyclone Xaver struck the Norfolk coast in December 2013, threatening to destroy her bungalow atop the sandy cliffs of Happisburgh, she has been living in a ramshackle caravan perched on what is left of her small paddock.
Beyond a temporary “road closed” sign, the asphalt comes to an abrupt end, hanging over a precipice. The bright yellow cliffs are pockmarked and slumping, constantly worried by the waves. A haphazard path to the beach drops over dark slabs of clay – which looks solid, but crumble to the touch. On the beach, decaying remnants of wooden sea defences offer no resistance to the waves. Severed water pipes stick out from the cliff face like broken limbs, the only remnants of a seaside suburb.
From the window of the caravan, Socrates the cat gazed implacably over the dereliction, and the flat, grey North Sea. Beside him in the caravan’s crowded living room, dozens of sweet peas and other tiny seedlings bent towards the glowering sky. Surrounded by hundreds of fading paperbacks, her guitar, penny whistle and cats, Nierop-Reading, a slightly gruff woman of 70, shuffled letters from the council and her solicitor. On 23 January, a council officer had picked his way across the old carpet tiles, laid like paving slabs over the mud, to Nierop-Reading’s cream plastic door and served an eviction notice, giving her until August to leave her land.
“I arranged my bed so I could sit up and watch the sea,” she remembered. “Every day was exciting. It was like being on holiday all year.”
Like most people who choose a home on the cliffs, Nierop-Reading, who has pursued a varied career as a schoolteacher, garden designer and tractor engineer, felt an intimate connection with the sea. She bought her three-bedroom bungalow with nearly an acre of land in 2008 and, although the cliff just beyond her garden was rapidly eroding, she still hoped she would enjoy a 25-year retirement there. The house was bigger inside than it first appeared, partly because of the great expanse of sea beyond each window. “I arranged my bed so I could sit up and watch the sea,” she remembered. “Every day was exciting. It was like being on holiday all year. In the summer, the sun never really goes down. There’s always a glow across the northern sky.”
On the night of Cyclone Xaver, however, “one didn’t have any kind of relationship with the sea apart from keeping well away from it”. At Happisburgh (pronounced Hazeborough), people gathered on Beach Road to watch the storm as it peaked in the late evening. Spray surged above telegraph poles on the clifftop. “It was terrifying. It was horrifying,” said one villager. “The land was shaking.” Nierop-Reading had witnessed previous storms, when malevolent waves casually swiped chunks the size of small cars from the cliffs, so she hurried out of her bungalow, not even pausing to […]
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