Sewage on the Beaches

There's been a lot of concern over the past week or so about the state of our coastal waters.  Recent heavy rain, falling on ground hardened by weeks of drought, overwhelmed some sewage systems in the country.  Under an arrangement permitted by the regulator, water companies released untreated sewage straight into rivers and the sea.  This step prevents the unpleasant flooding that would otherwise occur in homes, hospitals, offices and along roads.  The Environment Agency issued warnings about water quality to sea bathers all along the south coast.

The centre of Eastbourne's sewage infrastructure is the fort-like works at Langney Point.  This is where Southern Water treats the sewage from the town and the settlements around.  It then pumps it out to sea through a long outflow pipe.   

Further west, by the Wish Tower, is the Granville Road Storm Overflow.  This discharges raw sewage directly on to the beach at times of heavy rain.   I think there's another one at Langney doing the same thing (probably more often).

I've been trying to educate myself on how this all works and how we've got to this point.  I've found a paper to help me put it all in context.  It's titled "Were Health Resorts Bad for your Health?  Coastal Pollution Control Policy in England 1945-76", and was published in the Environment and History Journal in February 1999.  The author is John Hassan, a historian at Manchester Metropolitan University who specialised in water. 

The article traces the beginning of the systematic practice of sewage discharge into seas and rivers back to the industrial revolution.  Coastal towns, as their resident and visitor populations grew, abandoned their old practice of depositing effluent in dug-out cesspools.  Instead, they built short drains through which they directed sewage straight into the sea.  The common view was that the sea's salt and mass would disperse and dilute the waste.  

All this sat uneasily with these towns' main selling point for visitors - their offer of an invigorating, healthy natural environment.  It soon became apparent that the sea was not as clean as it might be: unpleasant items were visible;  an occasional stench blew in with the tide.  

Local government, however, was reluctant to take action.  Resident ratepayers objected to costly schemes whose main beneficiaries were the visiting tourists; or neighbouring councils who themselves may have done nothing to address their own polluting.  

So authorities confined themselves to carefully positioned outfall pipes at or beyond the low tide water mark, from which their town's untreated sewage was debouched.  Here in Eastbourne, such an outflow was placed off the then remote Crumbles shingle bank (where it is today of course, although the surroundings are now built up). 

As time went on, concerns grew, and in particular fears of disease from bathing in these filthy waters.  Inshore fisheries became contaminated, with poisoned shellfish causing death or serious illness.  Outbreaks of Cholera and Typhoid occurred.   But official medical opinion remained sceptical.  A direct link between sea bathing and serious disease could not be established.  These illnesses equally affected those who had been nowhere near the sea.    

After the second World War, coastal pollution began to attract more attention.  Official surveys of our tidal waters indicated deterioration.  At the same time, seaside holidays were becoming ever more popular.  Rising living standards and the advent of holidays with pay reinforced the trend. Development of coastal resorts intensified, but investment in infrastructure to address increased pollution failed to take place.  Further concern was expressed about health risks, in particular the fear that sea bathing might be behind the Polio outbreak in children. 

The authorities for their part saw pollution controls as too costly.  The country could not afford higher environmental standards while there were more pressing demands on public funds.  The official position acknowledged that some beaches were aesthetically revolting.  But there was no evidence swimming off them caused serious harm to health.  Then occurrence of such illnesses as Cholera and Typhoid began to reduce.  This was actually down to wider, unconnected public health improvements, for example the Polio vaccine.  It masked the absence of any effort to clean up our bathing waters.   

The 1960s saw the emergence of the Coastal Anti-Pollution League, a pressure group founded by a husband and wife whose daughter had died of Polio after swimming in the sea.  In addition to its conventional campaign, it published an annual list of clean beaches - damning those omitted.  Whatever the league and its founders actually felt about the evidence for health risks, they focussed instead on aesthetic and amenity considerations.  Support grew.  A degree of pragmatism was involved - the campaign acknowledged that raw sewage pumped a mile or so out at sea might present less health risk than fully treated sewage debouched closer to the beach.  Official resistance began to soften.

This trend was mirrored in mainland Europe.  Fledgling European institutions placed environmental considerations at the top of their priorities.  The way was clear for the UK to implement the European Bathing Water Directive of 1976.  Campaigners and pressure groups now had a potent legal basis on which to take action against polluters.

This is where my paper's study ends.  There's no doubt more to consider as the water industry built new treatment works, and the EU published further directives.  The privatisation of water and sewerage was significant.   Brexit will provide a new chapter in the story, now or in due course.

For us and our investigation to understand better our town, the analysis gives us a couple of things to ponder:  

• the speed of development and population growth in coastal towns, and the struggle to build infrastructure to keep up with it; 

• the tension between resident taxpayers, and the interests of visitors and those whose livelihood depended on them.   

More on this in due course.

Settlement in Sussex 1840-1940

To recap, I've been looking at some old academic studies (across various disciplines) which use Eastbourne, or its surroundings, as their subject matter.  

Last time, I finished off a look at a study of the development of Sussex's coastal resorts from the middle of the nineteenth century to halfway through the last.  We learnt about the significance of industrialisation and its effect on people's spending power and leisure time.  We saw how pre-existing settlements along the Sussex coast grew to meet the market for Londoners seeking holidays or taking up residence.  

Now I'm going to have a look at a study exploring the impact of transport changes - specifically, the arrival of the railway, followed by the car and bus - on the size and organisation of Sussex towns.   

The article is titled "Settlement in Sussex - 1840-1940", and was written by W H Parker.  It was published in the journal of the Geographical Association in March 1950.  The paper itself was read out at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Brighton a couple of years earlier. 

The dates we need to keep in mind are 1840 or thereabouts, when the first railway is put down in the county, and then some fifty years later in 1890 when the network there is more or less complete.  The car appears first in 1895, with the bus ten years later.  But railway is dominant until the end of the first world war, and there is no general use of either cars or buses until the 1920s.  The final date to mark is the electrification of the railway in 1930, which speeds up journeys, particularly into London.

We'll look first at the situation just before the railway appears.  Then look at what happens when it does start to roll out.  Then we'll look at the impact of the car and bus.  Finally, we'll touch on faster trains enabled by electrification.  

So just before the railway, we find that newly wealthy families have already started to settle in Sussex.  Those with more leisure time than previously are seeking diversion through visits to the coast.  And former labourers - no longer working in the open air, but in factories or stuffy offices - feel the need periodically for holidays in the fresh air by the seaside.

As for Sussex towns, Brighton is busy and fashionable by this time, as is Hastings.  Towns like Bognor, Worthing, Seaford and Eastbourne have felt the effects of this growing visitor interest, but they remain small, stagnant and seasonable - probably as a result of their poor roads.  Sussex's ports no longer play the prominent role they once did.  Rye remains the biggest, with Shoreham, Littlehampton and Newhaven all carrying on some business.  Like the coastal towns, they have stopped growing.

In contrast, the inland parishes are getting bigger.  The ancient boroughs of Lewes and Chichester have solid populations.  Smaller market towns such as East Grinstead, Arundel, Petworth and Horsham remain busy as market towns for local farm and artisan produce.

So then the railways arrive.  

First the towns.  On the coast, they begin to grow.  Brighton spreads into Hove to its west, and Preston to its north.  Likewise, Hastings absorbs St.Leonards.  Eastbourne, Worthing, Bexhill and Bognor all get bigger.  The ports likewise become small towns. 

The increased population of these towns becomes more concentrated. Workers need to live within walking distance of their work.  They move in from the rural parishes around the towns.  Given much of the work is personal or domestic - working for other people living nearby - this compounds the concentrating effect.  Slums result.

The railway station becomes the heart of the population.  It becomes the source of most necessities of life as well as being a point of arrival and departure for journeys.  This means that people need to live near it.  And new settlements don't expand out from the station, but rather from the next station along the line.  The original town and the new settlement expanding from the next railway station eventually meet.  A bit like Eastbourne and Hampden Park. Or Brighton and Hove.

The railway has a further impact on the inhabitants of inland Sussex.  Rail-connected market towns now distribute imported produce, rather than goods sourced locally.  Unemployment and depopulation of the rural parishes follows.  The population is then replaced - to a certain degree, and only in certain railway connected places - by people moving to the countryside to take residence in villas.

Railway stations create new settlements, in addition to boosting existing ones.  They can't be built on hilly downland or forest ridge.  So new towns may appear around a station in a valley - perhaps down from the existing ridge settlement.  Heathfield is an example of this.  

And the company building the London to Brighton line deliberately places stations between villages, so it can serve more than one place - and settlements duly grow around them.  So Three Bridges comes about, between Crawley and Worth.  As does Haywards Heath between Cuckfield and Lindfield, Hassocks between Hurst and Keymer.  

 

But despite the growth of the towns, there is no new development in other locations along the coast - for the obvious reason that people can't easily get to them.  In fact, the population of non-urban coastal parishes falls.  Whole lengths of the Sussex coast remain in a natural state.

This is the position with the railway well-established.  Then the car arrives.  

An obvious point first.  Roads don't have stations.  Their impact is felt continuously along their course.  And they reach all settlements. Every town will have road access.  Also road is unaffected by the limitations of physical geography.  A road can climb a hill.

So immediately roads begin to reverse the previous concentrating effect of the railway.  Houses are now dispersed across land bought cheap as a result of the agricultural depression.  Buyers could set their houses among extensive grounds.  Towns are cleared of slums.

The empty spaces between towns along the coast are now developed, as the car makes them accessible.  The natural coast begins to disappear.  Ridge top sites become popular again, as do some of the villages whose rural labour occupants left for the town during the railway period.  

The final element in this story is the electrification of the railway.  It boosts places like Haywards Heath.  The town is still a railway station settlement, with residents commuting to Brighton and London.  But the car permits houses to sprawl across the countryside.  Other Sussex towns become London commuter dormitories.

Bringing this all together then, what have we learnt?

• Before the railway, we have some prosperous people beginning to visit or settle in coastal Sussex.  But most of the county is dominated by agriculture and market towns, hampered by poor roads.  There are a few ports.  

• The railway comes and the coastal towns expand as places of tourism and residence.  The population concentrates around railway stations and slums result.  Livelihoods of rural labour in inland Sussex are destroyed, with the countryside  vacated, replaced in some railway towns by commuting villa residents.  

• The car comes and disperses the town population, cheap agricultural land is developed for more spacious housing, and existing towns expand.

• The town of Eastbourne is benefiting from all these changes.

This sets us up well for our future investigations.

London by the Sea - Part 2

I said that I would have another look at the article by Brighton academic Sue Farrant  - "London by the Sea" - with its analysis of the development of Sussex's coastal resorts from 1880 to 1939.  I wrote about what she said about Eastbourne specifically in my earlier blog.  I'm now going to cover some of her broader analysis.

We start at the beginning of the Nineteenth century.  Coastal resorts across the country tend to be places solely for the aristocracy or otherwise wealthy.  In Sussex, we see Brighton and Hastings already established as fashionable resorts.  Smaller settlements are scattered about the coast elsewhere, but their facilities are limited.  

What starts the change is industrialization.  This creates new social and economic groups, in particular those working in services.  Members of these groups have some disposable income, and the time and wish to take holidays.  Existing coastal resorts start to change to cater for these new visitors.  And new resorts are built, to meet the overall increase in demand. 

The outcome is specific resorts favoured by different social classes.  And in some resorts, the seasons are segregated along similar lines.   

Resorts also grow into substantial residential towns.  Convalescent homes come too, as do private schools.  A tension emerges between those whose livelihood depends on visitors, and permanent residents whose priority is to maintain the character (and social "tone") of their town.   

These trends are seen most obviously in Sussex.  Its resorts are closest to London - where this new demand is greater than elsewhere. Since Sussex has no industry, the coastal resorts can draw on under-used rural labour from the Weald to work on construction sites and enable rapid development.  The population more generally migrates to the seaside.

These broad forces affect all the Sussex resorts.  They all have differing starting points, before developing in their separate ways.  But they can be split up into four broad categories.  

Brighton and Hastings, the older resorts, are able to adapt quickly to the widening market and build on earlier success.  Brighton's industry and employment is not solely dependent on tourism.  But Hastings' is, and suffers dire unemployment in bad years - a theme picked up in Robert Tressell's "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists".  

The progress of the smaller Georgian resorts - Seaford, Bognor and Worthing - is stuttering.  Development companies fail before completing their projects. 

The fashionable self-contained settlements built alongside bigger resorts - St. Leonards and Hove, and Brunswick Town - develop in different ways:  St. Leonards is absorbed by Hastings; Hove maintains its independence from Brighton.  It thrives.  

The Victorian new towns of Eastbourne and Bexhill, covered in my earlier blog, benefit from active and determined local landowners.  They maintain their high social status up to the Edwardian period and beyond.

From 1914, as we saw in Hastings, the problem facing all these resorts was seasonal unemployment.  But some towns compensated with specialist services and independent manufacturing.  The other constraint was lack of any other means of transport but the train. This meant facilities were over-concentrated in inner towns and the central seafront areas.

From the 1920s, all the resorts grew as a result of the boom in building.  Cheap farm land was released for development.  Capital was available to invest.  Emerging modes of travel - car and bus, as well as the growing train network - enabled large-scale private and council house-building further out from centres.  At the same time, pressure groups formed to lobby for greater protection of nearby threatened downland and otherwise precious green spaces.

From the 1930s, two new rivals emerged.  First, the so-called "planned" resorts.  Second, the more informal, dispersed coastal developments.   

Examples of the former were Goring Park near Worthing and Ham Manor near Littlehampton.  These were carefully laid out, socially-zoned estates, both built in grounds of large vacated country houses.  

Informal, unplanned resorts - for example Selsey Bill and Camber Sands - were made up of scattered railway carriages, buses, huts and bungalows.  Such settlements were only accessible to car owners.  They had a marked and controversial effect on remote coastal spots.  

Peacehaven was perhaps the most infamous example of this.  Planned initially in a grid lay-out, it developed haphazardly, absent of effective planning controls.  Small houses were built in purchased plots, scattered untidily over a large area.  For planners working for local authorities all along the coast, Peacehaven became a lesson in exactly how not do it.

So where does this leave our investigation of Eastbourne?  What we know now is that its early years were driven by wider social, demographic and economic forces which affected similar settlements nearby.  We're slowly accumulating further articles and books to help us understand this better.

More in due course.

Ravilious - Drawn to War

Like many others it seems, I enjoyed the new film about Eastbourne artist Eric Ravilious - "Ravilious - Drawn to War".  So much so I've already seen it twice - once at the cinema, once at home on Curzon's great new home streaming service.

The film is framed by Ravilious's death in the Second World War.  His life, marriage, affairs and of course paintings and designs are all explored - up to the point he disappeared on an RAF flight off the coast of Iceland.  The story's told in extracts from letters and his wife Tirzah's autobiography; interviews with admirers, experts and family members; and rare photographs from family collections and some previously unseen footage (of Ravilious and Tirzah's marriage in London in 1930). 

It's this footage which particularly sparked our interest - for what it showed about how Eastbourne's different social classes interacted in the first half of the last century. I thought I detected in the film's grainy sequence the unease felt by both Eric and Tirzah's families at what was happening that day.  

Tirzah was the daughter of a well-connected Lieutenant Colonel who'd retired to Eastbourne.  And her mother came from a wealthy Belfast shipping family.  Eric on the other hand was the grammar school educated son of a shopkeeper.  

Tirzah's class were those wealthy individuals and families who'd first holidayed in Eastbourne in the Victorian times, then settled in the large villas across the town in the decades following.  The villas now converted into nursing homes, split into multiple occupation, or otherwise knocked down and replaced by modern blocks of flats.  

The family home was on Arundel Road.  This was on the margins of the wide tree-lined avenues, elegant terraced squares and public gardens that made up what would have then been clearly identifiable as the Upperton estate.  (The house, like many of its kind, is gone now, replaced by a 1970s block of flats.  But some of the old trees remain in the gardens at the back - the house was called Elmwood, as is the block which replaced it.)

Tirzah's father served as a Poor Law Guardian, overseeing arrangements at the Old Town workhouse - a role then regarded as philanthropy.  He dabbled in politics, standing unsuccessfully for a ratepayers' party whose sole political aim was to curtail local government standing.  Tirzah attended one of the many private schools which existed in the town - West Hill, on the corner of Mill Road and Carew Road - again demolished.  Then to the art school, where her teacher was Ravilious.

Ravilious's background was the other end of the social scale.  His family lived in a modest terrace on Glynde Avenue, north of Hampden Park.  His father sold antiques (or maybe bric-a-brac) from a shop at the back of the Grand Hotel - so a living dependent on selling goods to people like Tirzah's parents.  He was declared bankrupt eventually, and also had an eccentric religious side - behaviour which caused Eric much embarrassment.

Tirzah was expected to marry someone else - a local man from a similar army family who took up a role with the Colonial Service in Africa.  Tirzah's account in her autobiography of how this dilemma played out is a screenplay waiting to be written.  But it was Ravilious she chose, and her life took a course quite different from the one on which her social background might otherwise have sent her.  

As ever in life, these things are never quite black and white.  Tirzah's father grew fond of Ravilious, and showed kindness to Eric's father during his final illness.  Her family always seemed at hand to support the couple as they navigated children and then her illness.  And Tirzah herself wrote warmly of Eric's mother.  

In the end, the thing which strikes anyone who grows familiar with the Ravilious story is this - the main characters all have their foibles, whichever layer of society they belong to; but they're still people you'd love to have known, to have met.

 

London by the Sea

As mentioned last time, I'm currently looking at some old academic articles that use Eastbourne as their subject of study.  I first examined one about housing development and its impact on local people's appreciation of the natural environment.  Now I'm looking at a study entitled "London by the Sea: Resort Development on the South Coast of England 1880-1939".  

The article was published in the Journal of Contemporary History in January 1987.  The author is Sue Farrant, who lectured in history and tourism at Brighton Polytechnic.  (I've since discovered that Sue is still writing about local history - under the surname Berry - and has published several books about Brighton).

The article introduces some of the economic and social forces driving development of resorts along the Sussex coast.  It then goes on to assess these resorts' similarities and differences in the decades that followed.  It covers a fair amount of ground, so I'm going to look at what it says about Eastbourne first, then write another blog about its analysis of the other resorts and the bigger picture.

Eastbourne is one of a group of Victorian resorts built on sites where there'd been some small-scale resort-related building in the Georgian period.  Bexhill is another.  The original settlement took the form of clusters of facilities with one or two boarding houses nearby. 

The town's subsequent development into a larger resort relied on risk-taking by the main landowner, the Duke of Devonshire, whose estate was directly involved in building and the funding of new infrastructure.  From 1849, his agents sought to develop the town into a high class resort.  And the town went on to flourish during the national building boom of the late 1870s and early 80s, becoming the fastest growing resort in Sussex.

Initially, the estate far outspent the town's local government on resort facilities.  It supported among other things construction of the pier, Eastbourne College, the Devonshire Baths -  as well as gas, water, drainage, the sea defences, the parades, and the scenic road from the town to Beachy Head.  

In 1891, the new Duke (the 9th) decided to reduce this spending.  The investment's original purpose - to generate income for the estate - was not being achieved.  The council stepped in.  By 1914, it was taking greater responsibility for the provision of basic services, and was maintaining the promenades,  developing landscape parks and providing facilities such as golf courses, libraries and museums.  

The initial development by the Devonshire estate (and by the Gilbert family, the other big landowner) was socially "zoned".  The south western area was a high class residential suburb.  The centre was shopping.  The north east contained working class housing.  The estates' agents imposed strong building controls which reinforced these differences.  Councillors - made up of builders, professional men, tradesmen providing for high class clients (for example, booksellers), plus those who had moved to the resort to live - continued to strive to preserve the town's image as a high class resort.  

Initially, Eastbourne's dependency on the railway and lack of any other form of cheap transport confined the development of facilities to inner towns and central seafront areas.  But by the 1890s, the advent of the motor car began to change this.  From 1920 onwards, a building boom led to increased urbanization.   The depressed price of land, the availability of capital to invest in building and greater choice of travel facilities (for example car, bus or train) resulted in large scale private and council housing development on newly released farmland.

The town was not without its employment challenges .  Agricultural workers from the Weald had come to Eastbourne and other resorts and worked in building.  Their wives and daughters sought positions in domestic service.  But the local economy was vulnerable to seasonal and cyclical recessions, which depressed demand for these services.  There was unemployment when the tourist season was poor or when demand for housing from newcomers to the town temporarily declined.  There was little other employment - the construction of a major railway engineering works which would have broadened the town's economic base and created jobs was blocked.  In 1887, there was a parade in the town to ask for more action to relieve unemployment.  In 1911, the local newspaper highlighted over-crowding in houses on small estates not owned by the Devonshires or Gilberts.    

So bringing all this together, Eastbourne enjoyed great success as a resort from the middle of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the Duke of Devonshire's patronage.  It sought to maintain its "superior" tone as it grew.  But like other resorts, it began to face challenges - changing clientele, suburban development, employment, and housing for the lower paid. 

I'll cover this bigger picture in a future blog.

 

The Impact of Suburban Expansion on Landscape Quality

I feel it's time to get going again with what is after all the main purpose of this society - to investigate what has happened to the town of Eastbourne over the years, and what has made it the place it is today. 

To that end, I've dug out some old journal articles - all of which make use of the town as source material, although their authors represent a variety of academic disciplines.  I'm going to write about more of these in weeks ahead.  For now, I've been looking at a geographical study from the 1970s which sought to measure the impact of new building on people's appreciation of the town's natural landscape  - specifically the houses built in the decades after the Second World War.

The article - titled "The Impact of Suburban Expansion on Landscape Quality" - was published in 1977 by the Royal Geographical Study.  It was written by academics Geoffrey Smith from the University of Manitoba and Catherine Sykes from the University of Birmingham.  

The study's context was a widely held view at the time that the natural environment of coastal towns had been spoilt in some way by housing developments on their margins. The planners of the time knew that the local population needed more houses, and accepted that they would have to permit building on open spaces to get the necessary numbers.  But how would they take a decision on which places to use and which not to?  It was not always easy to get a reliable view of local opinion.  Campaign groups and special interests tended to drown out other voices.  

So the authors of the study went to Eastbourne to test two hypotheses:  first, that people's appreciation of the natural landscape in which they live lessened when it was built on;  second, that people valued a landscape more the longer they had lived within it.  

The study's method was to choose 18 locations across the town where recent house-building had taken place.  Two photographs of each site were produced - one taken in 1945 before development; then one in 1975, after.  A random sample of local people were then asked to rate their appreciation of the landscape before and after.  

The study covered three broad areas - first, sites along the base of the the Downs on the western edge of the town - where houses had been built towards the scarp's edge from Meads up to Ratton;  second, across Willingdon Levels, so the Hampden Park area; third, Langney and then down to what was then the Crumbles.

I should declare an interest at this point.  As far as I can tell from the quite rudimentary map reproduced in the article, one photograph in the first group is of the site where I grew up in the 1970s, near the Golf Course in Old Town - on what used to be called Motcombe Laine.  

In the case of this first group, the strong view was that the quality of the landscape had deteriorated as a result of the housing.  This was even more the case in sites where the housing was at the upper end of the market - so the Ratton estate, and the Motcombe Laine site where I grew up.  

The same assessment was made of the sites in Hampden Park and Langney, albeit to a lesser degree.  And in the case of the Crumbles, the reaction was the reverse, in that development was seen to have enhanced the landscape.

Just to complete the picture, the researchers found only a mildest of associations between appreciation of landscape and length of residence, although the association was undoubtedly there.

It's not possible to say what use was made of the study, or whether the local opinion it captured influenced development decisions from the 1970s onward.  

I suspect it did.  To my knowledge, there was no further building (of scale) along or up the scarp - the downs itself are protected.  Instead, outside the confines of Eastbourne Park, estates spread across the levels, and also out from Langney.   And then of course there is the new harbour and all the new build on top of what was The Crumbles.

A walk in Eastbourne - 6 March 2022

We (well, my dog and I to be specific) spent the day in Eastbourne three weeks ago.  I thought I'd share a few thoughts I had while we were there.  

It was a fine, clear day, a little blustery, but perfect for walking, so that's what we did - along the seafront and up to Beachy Head via Whitbread Hollow; then northwards along the ridge to Willingdon.  We then came down and headed back on lower ground to where we started, via Hampden Park and King's Drive.  On the way, we paid our usual homage to the site of the childhood home of artist Tirzah Garwood, on Arundel Road on the Upperton rise.

I had two things on my mind as I walked:  one, the town's coastal geography and sea defences, and how the latter are going to need to be rebuilt as the sea level rises in the decades ahead; and then two, the state of the downland escarpment, as all the ash trees die and are removed, and the replanting which will follow. 

Both developments will change the way the town looks in years to come.  

I guess it's easy to overlook that the layout of Eastbourne's seafront is anything but natural.  As you walk along the lower promenade from the Wish Tower towards Holywell, as we did, you are walking along a concrete sea wall.  And its primary purpose is to protect the now landscaped higher ground from erosion by the sea.  The shingle on the beach is placed there to absorb the power of the waves.  The timber groynes were built to limit the effect of long shore drift, the process by which the tides drag shingle and sediment further east up the coast.

The old maps show a huge tidal lagoon covering what we now call Pevensey Levels, but the water extended also to the lower lying eastern parts of Eastbourne.  The long-shore drift then created the Crumbles, the huge shingle bank on which the roads of Seaside and Sovereign Harbour now stand. Its formation cut off the lagoon and allowed the land to be reclaimed.  With the seas now rising, there is a risk that this area, in whole or part, will be subsumed once again unless the sea defences are raised.  And the problem is that thousands of houses and infrastructure have now been built on the land where this will happen.

The Environment Agency and the local council are currently sharing information with the public on what lies ahead if we do nothing.  They are less specific at this stage on what must be done to prevent this, seeking first public opinion on all the relevant considerations.  I assume what we're looking at, although it's not yet said in clear terms, is a raising of the sea wall. The present one is already a major piece of engineering, but it's less visible from the pier to the east, and at Pevensey Bay it doesn't exist at all as such.  

Further engineering - so-called "hard" engineering - will need to happen in the years ahead.  Its result will no doubt dominate the coastal view for many miles either way.

From the cliffs, we walked inland along the ridge of the scarp, with views of rolling downland to the west, and floodplain levels to the east.  But for me the striking sight was the spreading devastation caused by ash dieback disease on the scarp beneath.  The dead trees are now falling and the woods look like the aftermath of a battle.  

If you look at old photographs of the scarp, you see that at one stage they were almost bare of trees, except for the odd plantation, like the one on the Marquess of Willingon's former Ratton estate.  The hills were still quite bare up to the 1970s, when I was growing up.  I had thought ithis was the result of grazing sheep, but apparently it was rabbits keeping scrub growth down.  Once Myxomatosis begun to kill the latter off, bushes and blackthorn began to spread, with larger ash and sycamore trees following.  Soon gaps reduced, then disappeared altogether, and the slopes became wholly wooded.

Half of me wouldn't mind a return to those old days of open downland.  Indeed, the most exhilarating part of the walk was the clear part above Chalk Farm from which we descended.  But equally we need more trees.  There are various plans to create a virtual forest along the slopes with more diverse trees than the sycamores which would otherwise replace the ash if nothing were done.  So I will go along with that.

The final stage of our walk was our pilgrimage to Elmwood, 5 Arundel Road.  Once the family home of artist Tirzah Garwood, it was a large semi-detached Edwardian villa, big enough to accommodate a large family with housekeeper and gardener, with a wood of elms at the back (hence the name),  a tennis court and kitchen garden.  Now it is a five-floor 1970s block of flats, with outbuildings housing garages.  The only evidence of its former life is a couple of old elms at the back.   

It was time to go home.

Further reading/viewing on the subjects above

Eastbourne's coastal defences

An FAQ document on the Environment Agency's plans for the coastal defences.

https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/solent-and-south-downs/pevensey-bay-to-eastbourne/user_uploads/202112-peveb-faq.pdf

The Downland scarp

A talk by Eastbourne-based environmentally-minded Tory peer on plans for replanting the scarp - with some fawning deference to Her Majesty the Queen at the beginning  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CY1c4E3cSs

A site with an aerial video of the effects of ash dieback on the scarp.

https://actionashdieback.co.uk/action-on-ash-dieback/

Tirzah Garwood

Long Live Great Bardfield - Tirzah's autobiography, with a superb evocation of 1920s Eastbourne life.