Jeremy Webb is a Norfolk, England based photographer. View more work from Jeremy online at:
Jeremy Webb at Photoarts.com - features a portfolio of torchlit still life.
Jeremy Webb on Flick'r shows samples from my Visual Diary Project 01.01.06 - 31.12.06.
Creative Vision - features brief info on my book "Creative Vision"
Documentation - shows documentary work from a recent portfolio at 2.7
Coastal Landscapes - shows further examples of Norfolk coast landscapes.
Every bit as devastating, but not quite as sexy as those tv news clips of the polar ice cap crumbling into the sea, the Norfolk coastline offers us one of the most visible examples of the impact of climate change in Western Europe.
Norfolk itself is a county which retains a special character of isolation and freedom in part due to its sparse population and geographical position - it sticks out into the southern North Sea like a rather muscular and well-sculpted backside. It's on the road to nowhere. To find yourself in Norfolk is no accident - it's impossible to simply pass through - you have to arrive. And it's a place where people come to recuperate, to refresh, and to buy a second home if you're a DFL (Down From London) and enjoy sailing, bird watching, or simply getting away from it all.
Its principal city Norwich, is a small city by british standards but has everything which other larger urban sprawls have, except motorways. It regularly features amongst top ten lists of best shopping cities, or most attractive city, and this is mainly due to its architectural mix, compact size and position at the hub of the county. The coastline lies a quick 20 miles from Norwich. You can reach it by traveling north west, due north, north east, or due east and find yourself in a completely different landscape each time.
Coastal landscapes here are incredibly varied - low cliffs with shingle beaches dropped off by passing glaciers, exposed and windswept sandy dunes, mud flats and creeks, seal colonies, wide open skies, all peppered with small seaside towns which provide a traditional ice cream and sand castle summer holiday for families from all over Great Britain. But whether you're staring out of a penny arcade on the seafront at Great Yarmouth, or scanning the flat horizon from a bird hide in Brancaster, there is always the presence of the North Sea threatening that delicate co-existance where the edge of the land meets the sea. Many of its most bleak and beautiful stretches are the most raw, most untouched, most isolated and most fragile natural environments in Europe, providing nesting grounds to many rare bird species and acting as natural barriers to the beautiful fresh water Norfolk Broads inland. But what chance of survival do these sparse SSSI's (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) like Holkham or Winterton have against a predicted 3 or 4 degree rise in temperature by 2050? What effect would predicted temperatures equivalent to those of todays southern Spanish climate have on these areas of outstanding natural beauty?
Like other photographers, many of my first experiments with a camera happened on holidays at the seaside. I used to visit the Norfolk Coast with a boyish bucket and spade naivety to photograph the pretty chalets and beach huts in a blinkered but enthusiastic reverie of colour and misplaced romanticism. As a photographer I've lived most of my adult life in Norfolk, bumbling along in my twenties - finding my way at my own speed, and being able to take occasional assignments abroad to Africa, and the USA, unencumbered by children or any other responsibilities for that matter. My thirties helped to consolidate my ambitions, and begin a period of happy, settled family life in this county of Norfolk which always felt stuffy and stifling to me as a restless teenager, but now in my early forties just seems to fascinate and intrigue me more and more.
As a naturalised Norfolkian I fear for the future of this landscape and the lives and prosperity of its population in an uncertain future tagged more and more closely with the labels of Climate Change and Rising Sea Levels. Here it all is - in all its gory detail. Now I feel as if I'm archiving this wonderful landscape before it's gone for good. Some of my projects in the recent past have been infused with the use of photography "in absentia"; fractional details left behind to speak bigger truths, and the traces of things left behind. It's more artful you see, to allow small details to whisper their truths than have bold representations of frame-filling substance shout out their crass message to an audience. Much of my personal and documentary work still incorporates these approaches but with the growing knowledge that this precious landscape is being eaten away before our very eyes, these artful aesthetics seem trite and unsubstantial. A different approach is required.
No-one really knows what to do. What can you do? Pouring money down a deep dark hole won't stop the sea level rising. But then again, I don't live on top of the cliffs in the tiny lighthouse village of Happisburgh where even the issue of compensation for those whos homes and businesses are at risk, is dealt with by a collective burying of heads in the sand by civil servants and their employers in the far-off committee rooms of Westminster. Central government wring their hands and try to fend off pestering local authorities, promise occasional sums of money to shore up sea defences then retreat to more pressing matters arising - roads, driving the economy forward, the usual sort of thing.
And money does occasionally reach these communities to repair these battered groynes and revetments at Overstrand or Happisburgh, but the battering continues, the landslides are frequent, and so are the calls for central Government to completely rethink its coastal defence strategy. Current spending on flood defence is roughly £570m a year, although many want to see a minimum of £750m or more. How can the insurance industry possibly insure at-risk homes when all the current evidence points towards an increasing rate of environmental threat (flooding combined with other climactic changes such as increase in storms and torrential downpours) and a decreasing rate of investment to blunt it?
The bald truth is that for many places along the Norfolk coastline, money will no longer be spent on sea defence and drainage systems, but no-one is actually coming right out and saying so. Politicians certainly can't because it's an inconvenient truth. Pile money into the wrong places now and our future generations will carry the cost of maintaining failed sea defences erected in the naive optimism of a still post-industrial mindset for years to come. This country will soon have to adopt a more humane compensation policy if investment in sea defences is quietly being withdrawn. In other European countries they operate simple systems where insurance policies carry a levy to provide compensation for similarly afflicted populations who have lost their homes and livelihoods to the powerful forces of nature at its most angry.
The entire coastline of Norfolk can't be protected from the sea, so areas of higher development and population such as the towns of Cromer or Great Yarmouth (on the brink of constructing a huge expansion to its harbour mouth) will attract precious investment leaving those uninhabited coastal salt marshes - described by Barry Gardiner, biodiversity minister as "more rare than rainforests" - to fend for themselves. Throw in coastal dredging, with its large-scale movement of sediments, sand and gravel, and it's hard to imagine a more serious scenario awaiting those undeveloped coastal environments further along the coastline.
It's not simply a question of crumbling land, an encroached coastline, and a warmer and less predictable climate. Warming sea waters are driving plankton northwards, along with the attendant fish and sea birds further up the food chain creating potentially massive upheaval to a fishing industry already blighted by quota rows and territory disputes. Norfolk has an increasing elderly population (well above the national average) now living or looking to move to the coast, and the Association of British Insurers predict that 30,000 properties on the Norfolk coast are at significant risk of future flooding from rising sea levels whipped up by severe storms and tidal surges. Now factor in the disruption caused to port traffic, tourism, and the offshore energy industry, and the bigger picture just gets bigger and even more terrifying every day.
Meanwhile, before and after every storm, researchers from the nearby University of East Anglia hop on their jet skis and quad bikes and set about collecting valuable data used to monitor the flooding threat to coastal communities. By using echo sounders to measure the depth of water, and GPS to record their locations, the information can then be combined to produce accurate and predictive 3D models of the sea floor. Deeper seas give rise to bigger storms which will inevitably lead to greater flooding. As if to rub sea salt into the wounds, it appears that geologists have suggested that the south east of the country is slowly sinking at a rate of 2mm a year, with the north west slowly rising as we tilt on an axis running roughly from Exeter to York. This is due to the land literally rebounding or slowly righting itself after ice age glaciers began to retreat from land north west of this axis 10,000 years ago.
Time for some simple maths. Government assumptions suggest a sea level rise of 4mm per year in this region. Add to that a 2mm dip of the land in the east, and we have a total of 6mm to contend with. Central government asks coastal authorities to make plans for 100 years ahead, leaving coastal planners sinking to their knees as they imagine the unimaginable - a sea level rise of 60cm in 100 years time. As with any awareness adoption curve, the leading edge are already there, the early majority are latching on, and the late majority and laggards are not far behind.
The only thing we can say for sure is that the sea will take its own course, find its own way, and the landscape will soon be changed forever. Further stretches of coastline will be left for nature to reclaim as collective resolve and resources simply drift away. Already, the words "Managed Retreat" are stomping brutally into the collective consciousness of the population much like the words "Greenhouse Gas" did in the late1980's. What's happening here on the Norfolk coast is of course happening elsewhere in many places around the globe.
We're slowly coming to realise that for some coastal landscapes, nothing can be done and nothing should be done. If carefully and sensitively managed, certain coastal habitats can be returned to the sea once King Canute can be encouraged to "let go" - and letting go (as any good buddhist or relationship counsellor worth their salt will tell you) is what good relationships are all about. Our newer, more informed relationship with climate change is already developing. It's already happening in the south eastern county of Essex where rare birds have returned to reflooded land which has in effect created a whole new wetland habitat. It's also happening in Norfolk where the shingle bank at Salthouse is no longer being bulldozed into artificially high (and still easily-breachable) banks at a cost of £100,000 a year.
Photographers are always tuned-in to look out for the exotic, the far-away, the bright and shiney. Sometimes what's happening on your own doorstep is also worth noticing. As a photographer, I feel as if I'm on the edge of something which is yet to fully form but every time I visit these wide open stretches of deserted coast, I feel a tingling on the back of the neck like a twitching primeval pulse. As if duty or homage drives me to witness this shifting, creaking wilderness. Despite the warnings and the pessimism and all the stark predictions of the environmental lobby, being in a place like this is still a nourishment to treasure for as long as nature grants us a glimpse. You don't have to be a new-ager to find the experience a deeply spiritual one. And once you've visited, and Norfolk leaves its indelible impression on you, it kind of sticks to your skin like sea spray.
This first edition of the Atlantic Basin Project has been made possible by the efforts of members of the Independent Artists Cooperative and its in house collective Rock Can Roll Independent and through the generous support of the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council.