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.

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 grab a duvet, and sheltered in her caravan on the furthest corner of her land from the sea. “The cats slept on me and kept me warm,” she said. “When it became light, I looked across at my house and thought, ‘Good, it’s still there.’ When I walked over I realised that, although the house was still there, the cliff beneath it was not.” Quite calmly, she began transferring the contents of her bungalow to the caravan. “People said how brave I was, but it was bravado. I was absolutely numb.”

In 1953, a tidal surge killed 326 people on the coasts of England and Scotland. The 2013 storm surge was higher in many places but, thanks to well-organised evacuations and the concrete and other hard defences constructed in the decades after the 1953 floods, no one drowned. The surge swept away another 12 metres (40ft) of land at Happisburgh. In the following days, neighbours crammed Nierop-Reading’s kitchen units into the caravan’s second bedroom and she purchased some blue plastic piping from the local plumbers’ merchant and hooked the caravan up to her old water supply. “I ran an engineering business at one time. I’m very practical,” she said.

The storm had knocked down the telephone wires but “the telephone people came and very kindly just swung the cable around” and joined it to her new lodgings, so she could restore her internet connection. To use the lavatory, she walks down Beach Road to her nearest neighbour. “I try to imagine that if you lived in Blenheim Palace you’d have to walk almost as far to the toilet as I do here, so I’m not complaining.”

“I’m an environmental evacuee. We fought off invasions for ever . Now we’re saying, ‘Ok sea, you can take us’"

A week after the storm, Nierop-Reading watched as her dangling bungalow was demolished by council contractors. “Technically speaking, I’m an environmental evacuee,” she said. She found her present situation bewildering. “We fought off invasions forever and now we’re rolling over saying, ‘OK sea, you can just take us.’”

The British Isles are more edge than middle. Britain’s coastline is longer than India’s and more than 15 million citizens live by the sea. We have always been powerless to halt the waves – a stone age tsunami wiped out the last residents of Doggerland, the vast plain that joined us to continental Europe 9,000 years ago – but that has not stopped us trying. We have built towns and cities behind sea walls (since 1982, London has been protected by the Thames Barrier, a series of rotating gates that stop high tides from swamping the capital) and, along the low-lying coast of East Anglia, reclaimed thousands of acres of productive farmland by draining estuaries and salt marshes.

The defence of the realm is getting harder and the people who live along its coastlines are divided between those whose ambition is to hold back the sea and others who insist the government must step in and help people retreat. Since the beginning of the 20th century, scientists have recorded a 19cm rise in mean sea level; by the end of the current century, it will be between 52cm and 98cm higher, according to cautious predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Environment Agency, the government body responsible for flood defence, expects 7,000 homes and buildings to be lost before the end of the century to increasingly stormy and rising seas. Ten times more will go if existing sea defences are not maintained, but every government since 1949 has decided that no one who loses their home to the waves will qualify for compensation. And yet when some of those precarious homeowners have decided to fight the sea, it has become a battle against the authorities.

* * *

Thirty-five miles south of Happisburgh, the sandy heathland of Easton Bavents, near Southwold in Suffolk, feels like the end of the world. It was once England’s most easterly point, in the days when it continued a mile out to sea. What remains is rough grassland overgrazed by rabbits and dotted with bramble patches and dilapidated buildings – including an old wartime shed where Wrens collected messages and dispatched them to be decoded. The cliffs are the colour of nicotine-stained walls, sandy and rapidly crumbling into the sea, threatening to take a dozen homes with them.

For 90 years Easton Bavents has belonged to a family of farmers named Boggis, as if they had stomped straight from the pages of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. On a cool, bright day in early spring, the North Sea broke listlessly against triangular concrete blocks on the beach. I drove past numerous hand-painted “private” signs and up a rough track to the high cliff edge, where Peter Boggis stood waiting. He wore a fisherman’s jumper, cords, oversize spectacles and an enormous beard of the kind that has become fashionable, but which on Boggis spoke of a certain independence of mind. He was 84 and possessed of a deep, calm voice, which he deployed slowly, carefully weighing every word.

Boggis, a former agricultural engineer, had attempted to salvage a coastline suffering catastrophic erosion by creating a new kingdom. The solid clifftop we were standing on, a mound of dun-coloured soil and hunks of rubble populated with weeds, had been built by Boggis himself. “When I first came here the cliff was back here.” He pointed to a spot 10 metres inland.

We drove over to his grandfather’s house, a few hundred yards inland. Behind tightly trimmed hedges of privet stood the brick-and-pebbledash chalet Boggis shared with Anna, his partner. Beyond were rank weeds, scruffy pines and a collection of yellow diggers that looked as if they had stopped work a decade ago. We stepped into his study, which featured two large Apple Macs and a tower of old fish crates filled with paperwork. A picture of the Virgin Mary gazed down from above an old fireplace. As we talked, a kaleidoscope of bright light played on the ceiling, a blessed reflection from the sea.

Peter Boggis, standing on part of the sea defences he constructed. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

Boggis’s grandfather was a tenant farmer and butcher who used his life savings to buy the 400-acre Easton Bavents estate in 1925. Now it was half the size: the waves had devoured the rest. Boggis moved here when he was three, in 1934, when his father built a house overlooking the sea. As a boy, Boggis spent each summer with his family in two caravans joined together on the beach. “My brother and I would sleep in one end and my sister and the nursemaid would sleep in the other end, and my mother and father slept in the kitchen. To have a childhood living here was absolutely fabulous – the whole summer on the beach and the company of hundreds of visitors from a small campsite, which we ran.”

After a childhood spent beside the sea, at 18 Boggis joined the navy. When he returned to live in Suffolk, he became an agricultural engineer. All the while, waves nibbled at the family farm. The soft sands of the Suffolk coast are famed for disappearing. Five miles south is the lost city of Dunwich, once an international port as important as London. The mythology of Dunwich is rich and strange: some say it was wiped out by one catastrophic storm; others claim you can hear the bells toll in its churches, which now lie under the North Sea. A series of 13th- and 14th-century storms eroded its cliffs and shifted its river further north, making the port unviable. According to Boggis, however, Easton Bavents was relatively untroubled by erosion in the 1930s, when houses were freely built on the cliffs. Faggots – tight bundles of sticks five feet long that have been used in sea defences and flood banks since medieval times – were dug into the beach below the cliffs at critical points, and this modest gesture seemed to be enough.

Follow the logic of traditional sea defence, and the coast would be swaddled in concrete. But defending only some places makes undefended areas more vulnerable: defences block the natural erosion that would spread deposits of sand or shingle along the shores. On Yorkshire’s Holderness coast, one smallholder measured how the sea took 51 metres of land between 1951 and 1998. Over the next five years, after sea defences were reinforced with granite at nearby Withernsea, the smallholder lost another 48 metres. In Suffolk, Boggis noticed a similar trend: the rebuilding of Southwold’s sea defences after the war dramatically increased erosion at Easton Bavents. “In 1991, I advised the authorities – the local council, Defra, and so on – that unless our coast was given some protection I would act in the future, once I had sufficient time.” In the 1990s, Boggis was still busy running his own engineering consultancy. “Ten years later, I was free to start.” Carefully, almost stealthily, he began the most audacious project in his life: a DIY sea defence to protect his dwindling estate and all the homes built on it.

Boggis fixed me with a disconcertingly fierce gaze as he revealed the preposterous scale of his one-man stand against the sea. He borrowed a bulldozer and laid a foundation of peat on the narrow beach below the cliffs. Then he sought out soil stripped from building sites and roadworks. It usually cost builders a fortune to get rid of waste, but canny Boggis charged only a modest fee. Word of this cut-price dump quickly spread. “I suddenly found the phone was going all the time with people asking whether they could bring in materials. Providing the material was of suitable standard – not toxic – we accepted it.” Before long, the beach at Easton Bavents resembled a modern mining operation – a giant rampart a kilometre long, 25 metres wide and five metres high with rocks at its base. “We peaked at 120 lorries a day, bloody great eight-wheelers,” he said. “We deposited 28,000 tonnes of material before bureaucracy realised what was happening. It’s funny what you can do with nothing, and at no expense to the nation.”

Some residents of Southwold were quietly appalled by these industrial-scale earthworks but Boggis had many admirers, not least in the tabloids where he was dubbed King Canute. (Nierop-Reading, of course, was “Granny Canute”.) Boggis estimated he created £400,000-worth of defences at no expense to anyone. The district council complained that his defences contributed to lower beach levels at Southwold, but he argued that his fortifications did not jeopardise his coastal neighbours, because a third of his bank was washed away each year and he constantly replenished it. “We fed the beast,” he said. “The idea of it was, the sea would take the land that we were depositing, rather than the cliffs.”

* * *

In the Middle Ages, the authorities sometimes encouraged people to dump their rubbish over the cliffs because it would help protect the land from the sea. The rulers of the modern era, however, were horrified by Boggis’s actions. In 2002, Environment Agency officials were visiting his site almost weekly, demanding that he comply with the relevant waste laws. He insisted he was acting within them. He was granted an exemption and permitted to continue. Later, after objections from “various bureaucratic groups” – the district council, Natural England, and the National Association for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty – the Environment Agency again banned him from dumping soil below the cliffs.

For six months Boggis complied. “Let them think they are gods,” he said, and he invested £1,500 in the Encyclopedia of Planning, eight thick brown volumes, each the weight of a small child. These enabled him “to present my arguments in a sensible order. I never opened my mouth without knowing what the answers were first.” When he deduced that the authorities had no legal grounds to stop him, he restarted the work.

“I’m not a rebel,” he said, adding softly: “I’ve been very bad at complying with bureaucracy.”

As more and more lorries trundled down the rough track to his earthworks, Boggis knew that the authorities would make another attempt to halt him. He raced “to try and get the work completed before the bureaucratic axe” – he paused and thought for a long moment – “decapitated us”.

In 2006, the cliffs of Easton Bavents were designated a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) by Natural England. The new designation was primarily based on the precious fossil beds within the soft cliffs – Boggis’s ramparts would prevent erosion from exposing these treasures. The farmer believed that the valuable fossil beds were actually just to the north of his land. But the classification forced him to stop work.

Boggis had beaten the sea, but when he took on the government there was only ever going to be one winner

Armed with his planning encyclopedia, Boggis went to the high court “with the intention of pursuing the fact that every Englishman should have the right to protect their homes and property”. He paid for two barristers and when his money ran out they agreed to work on a no win, no fee basis. Boggis won in the high court but Natural England appealed and in 2009 the three judges found against him, ruling he must obtain planning permission for his work, which the authorities would never grant now the land had been deemed an SSSI. He had beaten the sea but when he took on the government, there was only ever going to be one winner.

Boggis’s plan was to continue feeding the sea but, over the decade in which he has been prevented from reinforcing his earthworks, his enormous bank has vanished, apart from the heap of compacted earth where we stood. There was now a big bite out of the cliffs behind the disappearing defences. One house had been demolished and another 1930s semi was on the brink after winter storms gobbled up its garden.

“It just shows you the absolute stupidity of bureaucracy,” said Boggis, “that this area is being wasted to the sea on a whim. I’ve never been angry about it – anger is a waste. I enjoyed it. OK, they’ve beaten me, I must accept that” – a smile spread across his face – “but I’m ready to start again tomorrow if I got the chance.”

Recently, Boggis had been ill but he still looked younger than his years. “It’s the additional dose of sunshine you get from the reflection on the sea,” he said. “Most times it’s tranquil here. Other times it’s frightening. We have to respect the sea and realise how great its powers are. It is a corrosive media to the nation but whilst we cannot stop it permanently every endeavour should be made to prevent the regress of the land.” His gaze turned fierce. “I’m not saying there isn’t sea level rise or environmental warming but I think it’s one of the biggest con tricks ever brought against the general public. This has been going on for years – they bring the children from the schools down to the beach and brainwash them that nothing can be done.”

* * *

Beneath torrential rain in Beach Road car park at Happisburgh, 16 sixth-formers from the Fens, 70 miles away – another part of East Anglia reclaimed from the sea over centuries – huddled in a loose circle. They were studying aerial photographs of erosion printed on canvas and pegged to the dripping fence. Malcolm Kerby, a stocky, garrulous 74-year-old with thick grey hair, was explaining the relevance of coastal erosion to all their lives. Originally from London, Kerby retired to the seaside, dreaming of a quiet life sea fishing, until coastal erosion reshaped his life.

“You might as well get interested now because I promise you’re going to be directly involved in this, or funding it via taxation,” he said, oblivious to the rain cascading down his motorcyclist’s jacket. “We want social justice. We just want what’s right. At the moment the whole system is so unjust.”

The cliffs at Happisburgh have been crumbling for centuries. Erosion in 2013 revealed fossilised 850,000-year-old human footprints, the oldest outside Africa. In 1845, a farmer drilled a 12-acre field with wheat; by the morning, his entire crop had disappeared into the sea. After the 1953 floods, the authorities built new steel and wood defences to “hold the line” around the village. These sturdy barriers, with dark wooden groynes stretching into the water, slowed the erosion and new bungalows were built behind them. By the early 1990s, the defences were decaying and the local council decided it would be too expensive to rebuild them. Erosion increased dramatically and, by the mid-1990s, houses on Beach Road began to slip into the sea.

When Kerby moved to Happisburgh, he enjoyed its down-to-earth feel, unlike the gentrified North Norfolk coast. “Here it’s real people and anybody will help anybody. It’s not like Burnham Market, where your excreta doesn’t pong.” When he attended a parish meeting about coastal erosion, he was amazed that 600 people turned up. He started helping and ended up campaigning not only for the rights of Happisburgh residents whose homes were threatened by erosion but for coastal communities around the country. Kerby started out as a rebel like Boggis and Nierop-Reading, but he readily admits that his views changed. He was soon working with the authorities to change the way they tackled coastal erosion. “When I got into this I knew absolutely nothing. I thought we were dealing with a lazy local authority. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t defend it – the first job of the government is to defend the realm, and so on – but then I went away and learned about the physical processes.”

Concrete sea defences at Easton Bavents in Suffolk. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

Kerby visited sea defence experts in Holland, where 1,836 people died in the 1953 floods and the nation’s very existence depends on coastal fortifications. During long meetings with British civil servants and his local MP, Norman Lamb, Kerby became fluent in the language of “coastal cells” and “shoreline management plans”. Over the years, he worked with six different ministers responsible for flooding. One – Labour’s Huw Irranca Davies – had studied coastal processes for his degree. “When you looked at him you didn’t see this empty pond behind his eyes,” said Kerby. “The other five were useless, worse than useless.”

Kerby learned how the authorities viewed small places like Happisburgh: the low value of its threatened properties would never justify expensive sea defences. But Happisburgh posed a moral problem too. It had been defended in the past and people had bought homes in the expectation that it would continue to be protected. As Jane Archer, a former Beach Road resident whose home was demolished by the council, put it: “Every summer the council would come and tidy up the sea defences and do a bit of work. Nobody realised that the council didn’t have an obligation to keep them up – we all assumed it was one of the things they did, like road maintenance.” When North Norfolk district council published a new shoreline management plan in 2005, suggesting it would no longer “hold the line” everywhere, Kerby’s house lost a third of its value overnight.

The government’s admission that it could not protect the whole realm was shaped by an academic concept that became fashionable in the 1990s: “managed realignment” or “managed retreat”. So far, schemes allowing salt water to flood land once protected by walls or barriers have been implemented on farmland without residents. A corner of Northey Island, Essex, was the first site of managed retreat in 1991, and there are now much larger programmes such as Medmerry, West Sussex, and Wallasea Island, Essex, which re-establish wildlife-rich coastal wetlands on estuaries once reclaimed for farming. So far, this has been a geographical solution, not a human one. Most coastal residents are suspicious of managed retreat, and not just because they would rather live at the edge of the land. The Coastal Protection Act of 1949 is implacable: governments do not compensate for homes lost to the sea.

For fear of looking weak, few politicians dare admit the limitations of coastal defences in a century of rising seas. After the winter storms of 2013, Neil Parish, a Tory backbencher, cried out in parliament: “We have got to force the sea back and keep it out, not retreat from it like we have been for years.” This is natural territory for Ukip, whose heartlands – and winnable seats in the 2015 election – lie along England’s vulnerable east coast. Michael Baker, Ukip’s candidate for North Norfolk at the general election, insists: “Defence is the first duty of government. It is not only necessary to protect our country from invading human forces, but also from invasion by the sea and rivers.”

Before the last election, pressed by the campaigning of Kerby and others, the Labour government took a first tentative step towards an orderly retreat from the sea. In 2009, a trial programme called Pathfinder offered £11m to help coastal communities “adapt” rather than build more defences. Adapting meant moving inland.

There have been 15 Pathfinder schemes around the country but Happisburgh, at £3m, is the biggest. In 2010, the local council offered Beach Road residents a right to build a replacement home on the landward side of the village. Alternatively, they could sell this development right (and their existing homes) to the council and receive about 50% of what their house would be worth, were it not threatened with imminent collapse. Early in 2011, nine families sold up.

None of the residents used their planning rights to build homes in the village because they could not afford to, Jane Archer explained. Some moved into council houses inland. Others, such as Archer and her partner, Chris Cutting, bought a new home, “nowhere near any water, definitely not near any sea,” she said. They now run a car mechanic business close to their home, 10 miles inland. They gave up their four‑bedroom bungalow by the sea and could only afford a semi‑detached former council house (plus mortgage) with the £96,000 they received from Pathfinder. But they tried to see it as a financial decision: their bungalow would not have hung on to its clifftop perch for more than 10 years, and was already unsellable.

“We decided to take the money and run, basically,” Archer said. They did not hang around to watch their bungalow being demolished as part of a refurbishment of Beach Road. The homes were replaced with a car park and wood-clad toilet block, which could be moved further in when the land ran out. The council sold the former residents’ planning rights to developers who will now build new homes on the village’s landward side. By selling these rights, the council amassed funds for Happisburgh’s “next adaptation to the sea”, as Kerby explained. “If we get it right it becomes almost natural roll-back. It’s an eminently repeatable and sustainable exercise.” To propose any other solution, Kerby believes, would be dishonest. “It’s terribly wrong to let people know you can defend the coast when you can’t.”

* * *

The sky was darkening and the light at the top of Happisburgh lighthouse turned towards us, a slit of yellow like a cat’s eye. Nierop-Reading told me why she had refused to run. Under Pathfinder, she was offered £53,000 to leave, a handsome profit on the £25,000 she had paid for her home a few years before. “It didn’t feel right to double what I paid under the public purse,” she said. “It’s not what I do.”

The council repeated its offer and, according to Nierop-Reading, became quite annoyed when she would not accept it. “Thou shalt not live in a place that is dangerous – it’s one of the modern commandments,” she said. She did not want to live in her caravan forever, but hoped to stay until 2016 when her daughter and son-in-law could buy the small house she owns three miles inland, allowing her to acquire her own home without calling on the state for any assistance.

She claimed that by using Pathfinder funds to remove the tangle of old defences on the beach, the council had in fact condemned her home to its rapid disappearance. “I had no reason to think I would lose the house in the time frame that I did,” she said.

Seeing Beach Road “being destroyed piecemeal was absolutely tragic,” said Nierop-Reading, “not just the buildings but the people you talked to every day. They were driven out in all directions. Pathfinder, which was meant to help communities adjust, has knocked a big hole in the community.” Boggis’s local council in Suffolk is currently offering up to £25,000 for a handful of homes on the brink. This is to cover demolition costs, with a “planning advantage” to assist residents in the unlikely event that they could afford to build themselves a new home. “It’s nothing but a bureaucratic shambles,” said Boggis, who does not qualify because his home is expected to last another 50 years.

Bryony Nierop-Reading and the remains of her house on the cliff edge at Happisburgh, Norfolk. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

In Happisburgh, most villagers seemed to agree with Kerby that Pathfinder was the best deal they could get. If it continued, the village could gradually migrate inland, even when its pub and fine 15th-century flint church topple over the edge, as predicted, by the century’s end. But Pathfinder will not continue. When the government reviewed this experimental policy it concluded that it looked perilously like compensation, which the government does not do.

“We need to accept the fact that despite all the politicians’ fancy talk, we’re not going to be able to do anything about climate change and sea level rise,” said Kerby. “That’s OK if we’ve got the right policies in place to take care of the people, but we haven’t.”

At least during the storm surge of 2013, Happisburgh was, in the favoured cliche of coastal engineers, resilient. Neighbouring villages lost homes and businesses but because nine clifftop dwellers had agreed to relocate, Happisburgh did not hit the headlines: its only casualty was the bungalow belonging to Nierop-Reading.

The last of the daylight had gone from the western sky. The sea just over the precipice to the east was the darkest purple. “I think this is why I’m still sane,” Nierop-Reading said, surveying the edge of her world. Then she turned back to her caravan, where she would spend the evening, refusing to draw her curtains on the crumbling cliffs and the waves beyond. •

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