Lost to the Sea: Norfolk & Suffolk Britain's Vanished Coastal Communities

About this book

Lost to the Sea: Norfolk & Suffolk relates the stories of how the human communities along the coast of these counties maintained their struggle with the sea. From very early Neolithic times, when global changes created the Continental Shelf and raised the cliffs along Britain's eastern shorelines, through Roman and medieval times, the first villages and towns were gradually established, only to be faced with the problem of the sea's incursions onto agricultural land. In the 1950s, Rowland Parker's classic study of Dunwich, a key town of Suffolk engulfed, set the scene for a long-standing interest in how the sea's challenge has been met. There have been successes and failures, and Stephen Wade tells the story of the seaside holiday towns and fishing communities that have had to struggle for survival. In Lost to the Sea: Norfolk & Suffolk, the reader will find stories of the people involved in this titanic effort through the centuries. The narrative moves down the coast from Hunstanton to Southwold, tracing the losses and the gains, not only in measurements of land, but in the tough human experience of that environmental history.

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Biography

Stephen Wade is a biographer and social historian, usually known for his writing on crime history. Now he turns his historian's eye on the often heroic tale of man's struggle with the sea. This book follows on from his comparable account of the towns lost to the sea in East Yorkshire & Holderness, and is written with a background of his experience of East Anglia simply as a traveller, as he has known that coast. Stephen's other recent books include Going to Extremes, The Justice Women and three volumes in the Your Town in the Great War series (all Pen & Sword), and No More Soldiering (Amberley).