'My Norfolk village is sliding into the sea – and my house will be gone in a few years'

When Nicola Bayless moved into her house in 2004 it was in the middle of a pretty street in Happisburgh, on the Norfolk coast. 

It is no longer in the middle of the street: it is perched just on the end, the last building before the cliff. The neighbours to her right fled as the cliffs on which their houses were built crumbled and their homes slipped into the sea, a fate which she estimates will happen to her home in the next few years.

“We just keep saying if we have a good summer and the sea is kind to us, it will be fine,” says Bayless. “But then we wake up one morning and half the field over the road has gone. We just don’t know any more.”

The 46-year-old nurse is one of thousands of people living along the British coast who have to face the “inconvenient truth” that their homes will soon be underwater due to rising sea levels and rapid coastal erosion, according to Sir James Bevan, head of the Environment Agency. 

This week Bevan told a conference that there is “no coming back for land that coastal erosion has taken away or that a rising sea level has put permanently or frequently under water”. He went on to say: “In some places, the right answer – in economic, strategic and human terms – will have to be to move communities away from danger rather than to try and protect them from the inevitable impacts of a rising sea level.”

For the residents of Happisburgh and other villages like it, this is less of an inconvenient truth and more of a devastating reality. Although estimates from the climate science research group Climate Central say that coastlines up and down the country are at risk of being under flood levels by 2050, East Anglia is particularly vulnerable because the soft sandy rock underneath it is so prone to erosion.

Bayless’s parents bought the red-brick semi-detached house in 2000, when a surveyor estimated that the house would stand for 150 years before the cliff eroded. When her parents died, she inherited it, and moved in along with her two daughters Darcie, now 19, and Violet, 14.

She thought she would get to live in the house for the rest of her life but, in the two decades since, the coastline of the village has crumbled away much faster than predicted. Strong storms and changing weather conditions have badly weathered the cliffs, taking with them a dozen or so homes and a caravan park. “My mum would be so shocked to see it today,” says Bayless. “They would be wondering how we got a sea view.”

As we speak in Bayless’s living room, windows look out onto workmen attending to the house over the road. They are disconnecting it from the gas and electricity supply, ready for it to be demolished safely.

Rules mean that Bayless will soon have to do this to her own house: she must move out of her home when the cliff edge comes to within five metres of the building. It will cost Bayless around £2,000 to have her home demolished, she says. “I want to move but who will buy this house?”

Being in the house when the cliff is breaking up is a scary experience. “When the cliff falls it’s like a little earthquake: the house shakes,” she says. “There’s a big crack in the house with subsidence.”

One morning this year she woke up after a night of storms to find another chunk of her road had fallen in. “I bawled my eyes out when I saw the road,” she says. 

Having a house built on sand has put the lives of Bayless and others like her on hold. Bayless has a new partner and would like for their relationship to progress, but moving in is difficult, she says: “He won’t move in here because he is worried about the cliff.”

For the past few years she has also put off doing the DIY jobs around the house that she’d like to, thinking there’s little point, given the house won’t exist for much longer. “It's falling to bits but we don’t want to spend money on it,” she says. “When a pipe bursts we just mend it for now.” Naturally she has buildings insurance, but it doesn’t cover erosion.

Bayless bought her two siblings out of the house when their parents left it to the three of them, hoping she would one day be able to leave it to her own children. But the inheritance has dissolved before their eyes, she says. 

“I can show my daughters where I lived and grew up,” she says. “But they will be standing on the beach with their children, saying: ‘This is where mum grew up’.”

When they are forced to move out of their house, the family will move together into a bungalow further up in the village that Bayless had bought as a rental property, to provide her with an income when she retires. That rental income will go away, and the bungalow itself will be at risk of coastal erosion at some point, given the current rate of attrition. 

Given the emotional and financial stress that erosion is causing people along parts of the British coastline, it is tempting to assume that the problem could be easily solved by building tougher sea defences to keep waves from lashing the cliffs. 

Happisburgh authorities did try this for much of the second half of the 20th century, with wooden and concrete defences built along much of the coastline. But, as the cost of maintaining them rose, they fell into disrepair. 

And while defences can hold back the sea in the short term, in the long run the effect they have is “negligible” on a soft-rock headland like Norfolk, according to Robert Nicholls, professor of coastal engineering at the University of Southampton. “Norfolk is a chronically erosive coast but now climate change is going to make that faster,” says Nicholls. “It's causing an acceleration of that erosion and exacerbating the flood risk.” 

He says that the rapid rate of erosion now is even partly caused by the sea defences built in the 1950s. The coastline is currently in a “catch up” period of erosion after the years of defences: as the cliff naturally crumbles, it delivers sand onto the beach. That sand is gradually taken away by the tides, and in the meantime helps to break waves and reduce the force by which they are hitting the cliffs. 

But, after decades of defences in place, there is less sand than there would be on the beach, meaning the waves are hitting the cliffs with more force and making them retreat even faster. 

“Some people argue that the defences bought some time, but now they have been removed, the coastline is where it would have been without them,” he says. “So the net effect is negligible.”

Another solution is therefore helping existing residents to move out of their homes and rebuild their lives elsewhere. Many residents of Happisburgh did get some help to move out under the Pathfinder Project in around 2011, where the council purchased the most at-risk homes for a reduced price, helping people move further inland. 

But Bayless says her home wasn’t eligible, given that it wasn’t that close to the cliff edge in 2011. “We’re 10 years on now and we’ve still not been offered anything,” she says. 

Other solutions will still need to be found for non-residential buildings in the village, like the lighthouse, which is one of the oldest in England, and the impressive Grade I-listed 15th century church, which was admired by the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner. The artist JMW Turner visited the church in the 19th century and drew a sketch of it, which is now held by the Tate.

Angie Fitch-Tillett, cabinet member for coastal management at North Norfolk District Council says: “The community of Happisburgh was successful in being an example of adaptation of a whole community under the Pathfinder Project some 10-12 years ago. This was to allow a previously blighted village to have a future by demolishing domestic properties at risk and allowing them to be rebuilt inland, away from the coastal erosion zone. This also was the case for a severely at-risk and popular caravan holiday park, lifeboat station, visitor car park and beach access. The community is now thriving.”

Bayless says that some people have described her as an “eco-refugee”. “I have to leave my home because of climate change”, she says. “It’s scary stuff.”