Managed Retreat

Along the eastern shore of Britain the line between sea and land has been sketched many times and any particular stroke we might consider now as definitive tells us more about our place in time than about the place’s place in space. Up and down the coast are fields re-claimed from the brine, drained, each one a little victory in a guerrilla campaign against the tide, fought for and barricaded in, fortified with bank and stone work. The war, of course, was actually lost millennia ago when climate change had worked its assault on the northern ice and a distant frozen fortification was undermined - releasing a tsunami across Doggerland, our Palaeolithic Atlantis, the fabled land bridge across which the first hominids had walked here. Since then the German Ocean, the North Sea, has provided our moat – a stretch of water separating the British archipelago from the continent to which it belongs.