Climping Beach, Southwick, Littlehampton - could your coastline be next?
This article was written by one of our Young Reporters, a scheme that gives 14 to 18-year-old school students a chance to write for a real newspaper. Find out more at the Young Reporter website.
West Sussex coastlines, over the past few years, have come under rising threat from coastal erosion.
Whether it is a lack of sea defences, a lack of quality within those sea defences, or merely a lack of awareness to the severity of the situation at hand – coasts across West Sussex are eroding quicker and more dangerously than ever before.
Beaches like Southwick and Littlehampton beach have come under threat recently, but Climping Beach, just 20 miles from Brighton, is a prime example of the reality that lies before residents of these unsuspecting seaside communities.
Since Victorian England, sea defences have been tried and failed on this small strip of beach, with all but two still standing today.
First came timber groynes, which are an incredibly common, but mostly effective, way of reducing erosion.
They block the longshore drift of sediment across a beach, trapping it on one specific side of the sand. Over time, this forces the beach to become wider and wider, which means it can act as more of a hinderance to waves, and absorb more energy to protect the landforms and structures behind it.
However, due to the fact the groynes on Climping Beach were made purely from wood, and not a more withstanding material like rock, they were easily wiped away during Storm Ciara in 2020.
Next came a rather surprising form of sea defence, one that certainly did not begin with the purpose of reducing erosion.
During World War II, large concrete tank traps were installed within Climping Beach, to stop invasion through the coast. However, nearly a century after the war has ended, these concrete traps stay standing.
Why, you may ask?
Well, these humongous slabs of hardy concrete provide a perfect barrier to intercept strongly breaking waves and stop the strong tides reaching the back of the beach, which would be sure to cause erosion.
Finally, in 2023 as a last-ditch and emergency measure to reduce erosion, 5000 tonnes of shingle were recycled from local areas and scattered onto the beach.
Shingle itself is ground up pieces of pebble and rock, placed onto beaches and formed into a ridge to provide protection from the unforgiving sea to the landforms that lie behind it.
These ‘shingle bunds’ still stand today, but along with the concrete slabs help turn the image of the beach into something not so beautiful anymore.
When talking to the Telegraph in 2024, one resident stated the beach now looked like a “bomb site”.
This observation poses a crucial question, and one that needs to be considered immediately.
How far should we really go until we just respect and accept these natural happenings, and let them take place on their own?
After all, there is only so much money a small village like Climping can feed into sea defences, and if the erosion has come so far that there is a point of no return, is there a point anymore?
The people living in the houses on the Climping Beach coastline may have a strong answer to this, but at what point do we have to tell them the risk of erosion is too high, and they may have to relocate?
These are all questions to be talked about amongst people high in power in the West Sussex area.
What do YOU think?
