Selsey Seaside: Funding coastal defences to protect homes

The West Sussex town is planning to Hold the Line against the encroaching sea

By Hilary Gavin

HANDS UP those of you who don’t know that King Canute once sat on a beach to command that the waves lapping Olde England should “go back!”

As a schoolgirl growing up in the Sixties, we’d scoff at the conceited Viking who “obviously”, in our minds, felt that he had been an omnipotent ruler.

Today history paints a very different picture of Canute (or Cnut) as a modest king who wanted to prove he was merely mortal, and not God, to his courtiers.

To be honest, I think I’d have taken more notice of King Canute as a schoolgirl if someone had told me he’d been sat on the estuary at Bosham at the time.

If you’ve never heard of Bosham (pronounced Boz-ham, not Bosch-ham as the Americans tend to say), it’s a picturesque ‘Saxon’ village in Chichester Harbour lying just eleven miles by road from Selsey on the Manhood Peninsula.

On Tuesday, 1,000 years on, I couldn’t help thinking of King Canute when Selsey residents heard how modern-day experts intend to “Hold the Line” against an ever encroaching sea at the town with state-of-the-art coastal defences.

I, for one, am a firm believer that society learns from past mistakes so I was reassured when Rupert*, the guest speaker from Coastal Partners, outlined the team’s plans to save not only homes in Selsey from a watery grave but to breathe life into the marine eco system there too.

Saying that, I was shocked to hear that 1,000 homes could disappear beneath the sea over the next 100 years if ecologists and engineers, and their associates, don’t act to replace outdated sea defences that might not be suitable for repair.

As a layperson, I admit to being ignorant about environmental mapping and modelling, but I took a sharp intake of breath on hearing 700 homes could be at risk of tidal flooding soon.

I only hope that Jess Brown-Fuller, our local MP, and her aide, who was sat next to her on the front row at the packed hall at the Selsey Centre in Manor Road (see pic) on Tuesday evening, were taking detailed notes during Rupert’s presentation.

For those who don’t know, Coastal Partners consists of a partnership of five councils, Havant, Portsmouth, Gosport, Fareham, and Chichester which joined forces with the other four authorities three years ago.

On Tuesday Rupert gave residents a potted history of Selsey’s ecology from an island separated from other villages by the Broad Rife before farmland was drained and the village was expanded to a large one in 1813.

Selsey grew once again from 1910 to 1930 when groynes were built and East Beach was elevated as a barrier to protect low-lying farmland.

But the town development only really began in 1948 during Selsey’s post Second World War building programme. Rupert told residents that Selsey had one of Britain’s fastest erosion rates between 1909 to 1948 to its east as five to seven metres, and one or two properties, were lost to the sea every year.

Selsey’s lifeboat station took a battering during those years before the 1949 Coastal Protection Act signalled the green light for sea walls and groynes to be built. In 1953, work started on sea defences at both West and East Beaches and paved the way for infield development when Selsey became a town of 10,000 houses.

Inevitably, Selsey’s sea walls, groynes and defences, as Rupert explained, are 60 or more years old now. As such, the are at the end of their design life and need replacing rather than repairing if the town is going to “Hold the Line”.

Of course, global warming has exacerbated rising sea levels and Rupert briefly mentioned the South Downs Shoreline Management Plan (2006) and the Pagham to East Head Coastal Defence Strategy (2009) to residents.

He then went on to update them on the current stage of the Selsey Coastal Scheme following a feasibility study in 2023 on the town’s sea defences (see Coastal Partners’ graphic above).

Rupert told the town council meeting the good news that CDC would be eligible for £35million in central Government FDGIA* funding to pay for construction work for the scheme in 2030 before breaking the bad news that this still left a significant shortfall of 10s of millions of pounds.

Residents heard that Coastal Partners will be working with Natural England on the scheme because Selsey Bill is a Marine Conservation Zone and the peninsula has RAMSAR wetlands and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

The team joined forces with Wessex Archaeology last month to collect and assess any impact on Selsey’s heritage. And they are working with Royal HaskoningDHV and consultants AtkinsRealis during the design and appraisal stage as CDC works to seek and source funding to plug the gap.

Coastal Partners will be collecting, reviewing and assessing data and plan to carry out a marine survey to map the seabed and type of reef. They are also planning to carry out bird surveys – including one of the local tern population next month.

Rupert rounded off his talk on Tuesday by inviting members of the public to meet and discuss the project with some of the Coastal Partners’ team at Selsey Coastal Scheme public events at the Selsey Centre on April 24th, 25th and 26th (see link below).

https://coastalpartners.org.uk/project/selsey-coastal-scheme-public-events/

I hope to see you there sometime.

*I wasn’t given and didn’t request any press handouts at the town council meeting and I think Rupert might have been wrongly introduced as Rupert Spencer on the night. Having looked at Coastal Partners’ website, I can only find Rupert Teasdale so I don’t know if there was a mistake. I’ll update my blog at some stage.