With its wonderful beach and bracing air it is a Norfolk village that has always been a popular retirement spot.
However, the unrestrained force of the North Sea is increasingly conspiring to crash on on the idyll of residents of Scratby, near Yarmouth.
Each winter storm brings the prospect of more erosion, which has already brought the clifftop to within 50m of the nearest homes, and the looming fear of becoming the next Happisburgh.
And the outlook for villagers, whose plight has hitherto remained in the shadow of their North Norfolk neighbours, took a dramatic turn for the worse this week when Environment Agency officials bluntly said there was no chance of funding a £3m rock berm to protect the cliff face from California to Newport.
Because of there being no realistic prospect of bringing the scheme to fruition, Yarmouth Borough Council as now told residents it cannot justify spending £88,000 on a feasibility study, the course of action it had pledged to follow in November.
Describing the agency response as “devastating news”, members of Scratby Coastal Erosion Group (SCEG) yesterday vowed to continue their fight for justice.
Group secretary Jim Bratton said: “Without action, properties on the seafront at Scratby will start falling in the sea, and no one knows the timescale. It could be within five years. People in this area are living on a knife edge worried about their personal future.”
He had lived in The Esplanade since 1995 and about 10m of cliff had been lost in that time, mostly in the last two to three years.
Blaming offshore dredging eroding sandbanks rather than global warming, he said the clifftop was now barely 15m back from the Promenade which had sewage pipes running under it. As soon as they collapsed, up to 50 homes would be uninhabitable.
He said: “Some homes are worth £400,000 or more. Over the next century, property worth more than £26m could be destroyed.”
He added that a rock berm on the neighbouring stretch of coastline, built 13 years ago, had demonstrated its worth.
Parish councillor Ron Eminson said: “A lot of the people who retire here have medical conditions that should benefit from the environment. But they are sitting here worried out of their minds every time there is a storm.”
John Bristo, whose family has owned a home in Scratby for 45 years, said SCEG would be pressing the council to take up their case with the Environment Agency and call for changes to the latest draft of the shoreline management plan (SMP) which was proposing “no active intervention” on their stretch of coastline. They would call on the council to back their demands for compensation for lost homes. As the law stood, they would even face the bill for demolition when their properties began to collapse.
The council’s head of regeneration and environment, Tim Howard, said although the authority could not justify a feasibility study for a scheme that had no chance of becoming a reality, it would not walk away from the problem.
He said: “A paper suggesting amendments to the SMP will be going to cabinet later this month.”
The £88,000 was still in the council’s budget and it might be possible to spend it in other ways to help Scratby, such as small-scale work on existing defences or in preparing a good case for SMP amendments.
* This article originally appeared in the Eastern Daily Press on February 8th, 2008.
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