The Suffolk Heritage coast: Southwold v. Sizewell

The Suffolk Heritage Coast is in the news as the government agrees to the construction of a new and nationally important nuclear power station at Sizewell whilst a strike at the port of Felixstowe has put at risk the daily operations of the largest container port in Britain. Suffolk sits alongside the eroding edge of England, a study in contrasts but of growing national economic importance. And with a new Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister with adjacent constituencies in Suffolk and Norfolk, perhaps it will enjoy enhanced political significance too.

Until comparatively recently, this was Betjeman country. Agriculture and fishing together provided employment. Picturesque villages both inland and along the coast were served by strikingly large churches built on the proceeds of medieval wool wealth. Everything seemed unchanged since at least Victorian times. Carefully husbanded reed beds and inland waters provided sanctuaries for migrating birds. The modern world intruded from time to time – most acutely as USAF and RAF aircraft flew over en route to attack Nazi-occupied Europe – but never for long and quiet isolation soon re-asserted itself. 

The composer, Benjamin Britten, made his post-war home in the small town of Aldeburgh but he was born in the nearby and much larger fishing port of Lowestoft. The two places are now worlds apart as are many of the towns and villages along the Suffolk seaside. Nor is the Heritage Coast as idyllic as it can appear in weekend newspaper supplements and as it once was in reality. Recent decades have seen the growth of plumply upholstered and newly-enriched upmarket communities resented by many of those born and bred in the area and who now feel marginalised. 

Michael Palin used to be a regular visitor to the seaside hotspot of Southwold where his parents lived in retirement. From the late 1960s till the mid-1980s, he travelled there by train each month from north London. Arriving at Darsham station his mother would meet him and drive him on to Southwold: “You knew”, he later wrote, “that unlike anywhere else on the route, it would not have changed. It would still be comforting and unrushed …”

Well, not anymore. What forty years ago had been a quiet, old-fashioned, unpretentious seaside town with a High Street lined with ordinary shops serving the wider local community, has become a redoubt of high-priced second-homes rendered dark and dead to the world in the winter months. “Incomer” money – often bolstered by City bonuses – has fuelled an ever-ascending rise in property values. Few locals can any longer afford to live in the town whilst retail outlets and Adnams – the local brewers – draw on staff who live miles away in more affordable places. Traditional shops on the High Street have largely made way for the kinds of clothing and speciality outlets more usually available in London. MacDonald’s has no place here and even Waterstones thinks it best to camouflage its corporate self behind a bookshop pretending to be otherwise.

The Heritage Coast stretching from Orford northwards via Aldeburgh and Walberswick to Southwold has become a privileged littoral, an end in itself, increasingly resistant to unwanted intrusions. Driving past the meandering waterways and swaying reeds bordering Snape Maltings – home of the annual international music festival – onwards to Aldeburgh, billboards are lodged in nearby fields decrying Scottish Power’s intention to establish offshore wind farms which, we are told, will be a blight on the Heritage Coast. And bulging up between Walberswick and Orford, the white dome of the Sizewell B nuclear power station appears like an alien presence in an otherwise familiar and treasured landscape. 

Here on this beautiful coastline three worlds sit awkwardly alongside each other. Long-time Suffolk residents and their young families who are being squeezed out of the local housing market. Relatively new arrivals savouring a summer playground and keen to fashion their nests to their liking in an ecologically fragile neighbourhood. And huge – often foreign-owned but UK government-backed – companies intent on expanding local opportunities to meet burgeoning national energy and other needs. In crude shorthand it is a case of Southwold versus Sizewell.

Despite protests from articulate and often prominent local objectors at what they see as the wrong development in the wrong place, the go-ahead was given by the government on 20 July for the construction and operation of a nuclear power station near Leiston. This will become Sizewell C, the third nuclear facility to be built on this section of the coast. Opponents’ various arguments about alleged shortages of local water as coolant, damage to the local ecology, the questioned reliability of EDF (the French company leading the project), failed to make headway. The Truss government is likely to take the same view as the Johnson one and strongly support the development. Sizewell C is all set to spring up alongside the ageing Sizewell B and the mothballed Sizewell A power stations on the borders of the North Sea.

Not that any of this will have an impact on the ground any time soon. The new reactor will take at least 12 years to be built and won’t be contributing anything to the national grid before 2034 at the earliest. Its supporters see it as a key part of a low carbon future, eventually generating 7% of UK electricity needs. Many locals seeking work in the area as well as those who will be brought in for the purpose, expect Sizewell C to offer employment opportunities rare in Suffolk with a ripple effect on the local economy. For those anxious about Sizewell C’s potential effect on local wildlife or its impact on the expanding and very prosperous coastal communities from Orford to Southwold, there is likely to be a continuing battle to have the decision reversed. Doubtless many in Suffolk and in Britain more generally will accept the government’s decision as a necessary part of a national effort to provide for the country’s future energy needs. However the view from the plushly fashioned and equipped houses in Southwold and neighbouring communities is likely to be less benign.

There is no simple equation by which to evaluate a complex choice as to whether or not to build a new nuclear power generator on the Heritage Coast.  Nor is it a choice for Suffolk alone. The effects of the decision will however resonate across an already challenged county and coastline. Fishing communities have been in decline for decades and the once thriving port of Lowestoft remains comparatively deprived economically. Agriculture is increasingly large-scale and mechanised with constrained employment opportunities. Housing shortages and a lack of affordable properties to rent add greatly to local concerns. There have been tensions in the past between the needs of fishing, agriculture and tourism along what is now the Heritage Coast. But it was always one world and people rubbed along quietly enough. 

It doesn’t seem quite like that anymore. Different worlds now sit cheek by jowl on the same stretch of Suffolk coast. Metropolitan escapees want enclaves and townscapes preserved in aspic for their occasional visits and for those who rent their homes as holiday-lets. Ludicrously expensive beach huts function as summer play-pens, deckchairs out the front, small gas rings set inside (an Aga wouldn’t fit), faux simplicity for the well-heeled. Such conspicuous and exclusive plenty set alongside more challenged local communities risks provoking social discontent. 

The expanding communities of weekend homeowners along the Heritage Coast are seeking escape and respite. They are buying into a kind of dream; but it’s a dream in which other people must feature and who in turn need to have affordable homes and adequately paying jobs. If these very different sets of people can’t find ways to rub along together in future as they used to do in the past, the dream could turn sour. Against that background Sizewell C rather than being an unwelcome new development may prove itself an economic lubricant and help provide a better mix of opportunities for local people. 

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