"Look at it this way"

Ken Worpole has been writing about Essex for decades. He wrote an influential essay called 'The New English Landscape' and has a blog of the same name. He also has a new book of essays on Essex newly published by Little Toller.

  There have been a number of proposed tidal barrages over the years for the UK. Back in 2008, there was a plan to build a barrage across the Wash, but the plans were abandoned - partly because of the impact on wildlife. Now the plans are back again.... The Rance Estuary in France is an example of how this might look - I visited that many years ago. The Wash is more local, and the EDP had a recent story on a plan for a barrage. This would stretch, apparently, from Hunstanton to Skegness, and would protect the Fens from flood risk as well as leading to the development of a new container port. It would cost £2 billion. Turbines beneath the structure will harness tidal energy from The Wash’s 780km2 tidal area, which is said to be enough to power circa 600,000 homes and businesses in the region. The infrastructure will provide a flood defence for the whole of The Wash area, extending to Peterborough and Cambridge, protecting more than one million people. Lincolnshire Live shared som...

I often post details of cliff collapses along the stretch of coastline which featured in the OCR textbooks that I wrote. This is close to Sidmouth and collapses regularly, including heading the other way to Budleigh Salterton. Last weekend saw a cliff collapse near Mundesley which is on the Norfolk coast, and was blamed on waterlogged cliff material. Some houses are now very close to the edge of the cliff and are nervous about the potential for further cliff falls. Some excellent drone footage here.

Down to Sidmouth this afternoon, and I saw the new cliff collapses which happened over the weekend - there were five of them it seems. I check on these each year I come down to Devon as they were used as a case study of coastal erosion and management in the first edition of the OCR A and OCR B GCSE Geography textbooks I co-wrote for Hodder back in the day.  While there, I saw a cameraman filming inserts for the evening news, and the presenter was then live from Sidmouth this evening. There were two landslides visible here... a larger one in the background.

Another helpful article about coastal erosion - this time on the Holderness coast near Skipsea. It includes some helpful maps, images and diagrams including a map showing the lost villages. A useful Flourish graph is also included, which can be embedded...

A useful StoryMap

As seen in 'Look at it this Way' in the chapter on coastal erosion... Eric Ravilious, #BeachyHead Lighthouse-Belle Tout, 1939. By this time Belle Tout was used as a private home. This #watercolour shows the view from the lantern room towards the newer lighthouse. #Eastbourne #EastSussex #Artlovers #arte #twitart #art pic.twitter.com/EVKkuwOwLh — Maude Frome (@frome_maude) June 30, 2018

Image: Alan Parkinson : Southwold from the Pier One of our favourite places as a family is Southwold, on the Suffolk coast. This is just over an hour from home, and always a lovely day, with good food, fine Adnams ale, a quirky Under the Pier show, and a wander into town for retail therapy and the lighthouse. The Geography Fieldwork Academy is a new opportunity for those needing to offer fieldwork for all age groups, and is based in Southwold, operating out of various buildings in the town, and offering a number of options for Geography fieldwork in an attractive location with no shortage of tourists and locals to interview, or coastal processes to measure. It was started in July by Chris Webster, a local geography teacher who has had a lot of experience in supporting colleagues with their fieldwork provision, and has now taken the plunge, and created this new venture. He has had a lot of support from local businesses and relevant organisations such as the Environment Agen...

We had a good visit to Cromer earlier this week, for a trip to meet with friend, and we went to see the Samuel Thomas exhibition , which is on at the Red Lion in Cromer for the next week or so. Samuel is inspired by his home town of Cromer (and beyond) and was very helpful, chatting to my son who is about to start his GCSE Art studies. I liked how some of the pieces were very place specific and connected the art to the landscape on several levels which Samuel explained. Which other artists do you use in your teaching who have a connection with the landscape? Image copyright: Samuel Thomas

In my KS3 Toolkit book for the GA, "Look at it this Way", there was an activity called 'First Class Landscapes' which explored the design of stamps to show a future landscape. Since then, plenty of stamp sets have emerged, and we are now about to have a really nice looking set of coastal landscapes.

Out to Cley to speak to David North of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. He gave me a tour of the reserve, and the newly acquired land to the east: towards Salthouse. This is part of a long term plan to develop a Living Landscape. To find out more, pick up a copy of the  TERN  newsletter at any NWT reserve. We discussed the plans for the new Wildlife Trust Education Centre.

Thanks to Emily from Millgate House Education  for getting in touch about a new resource they have produced. It makes use of Concept Cartoons , which have previously been used for teaching a range of subjects, but this is the first time they have been used to teach Geography.  Concept Cartoons have been used successfully in classrooms internationally to teach maths, English and science.  We have recently started producing bespoke sets of Concept Cartoons focusing on smaller subject areas. Concept Cartoons encourage students to discuss their ideas in a real life context and often lead into individual or group investigations. They are particularly valuable for highlighting common misconceptions in learning. This new resource was developed to support students undertaking fieldwork on Talacre dunes   in North Wales, but is now being made more widely available... You can download a sample of the resource from the website to see whether it looks like it might b...

Image from the book 'Boring Postcards', as featured in the GeoLibrary. Hopton is a resort near Lowestoft. Over the winter, the fearsome and relentless Easterly winds which we had on the east coast have scoured and stripped away the sand from some beaches in the area. However, some people suggest that there is another reason for the disappearing sands. This could become a new alternative to the classic Mappleton case study, and the tale of Sue Earle... I'm heading over there in the next few weeks to see what the impact of the weather has been It's a reminder that the coast is an area that undergoes constant change: from the small changes with every tide, to the longer term changes, and the impact of humans. Save Hopton Beach - has a Twitter feed , where they tweet a range of information relating to the fight to save the beach. Download the document (PDF) from the Save Hopton Beach website.

Lovely work by Jason Orton. A book of photographs on coastal erosion which crumbles away before your eyes.... Is this an idea that could be adapted for use with students ?

Listen again to this BBC Radio 3 programme from last night on BBC iPLAYER Lyz Turner's house, in the East Yorkshire town of Withernsea, is falling into the sea. "My house has started talking to me," she says. "It produces haunting sounds like far-off women wailing." This programme, combining interviews with music and the sounds of the sea, the wind, the land, the dying houses, explores how people cope with natural calamity: with anger, stoicism, distress, and art. One winter, Ron and Judith Backhouse watched as first their fence, then their shed, and finally three trees slipped over the cliff at the bottom of their garden on a private estate above Scarborough. "The crack is running up towards our next door neighbour's house," says Ron. "It's maybe five or ten metres away from his bungalow now and we're connected to him. So if he goes, we go, too."? Artist Kane Cunningham bought a condemned bungalow on the same estate...

Coastal landscapes feature in the book in the Chapter 'Living on the Edge'. One of the downsides of Twitter is that it has made me want to buy loads more books which I can't afford to keep doing. The latest tipoff came via Joe Moran. I've enjoyed both of Joe's books that I've read, particularly 'On Roads' , which I think is due a re-read. He suggested that he had enjoyed Jean Sprackland 's book on 'Strands'. There was also a nice spot of feedback in that reading the preview section that's available on Amazon there's a nice quote by Joe Moran to describe a beach... It is 'a frontier not only between water and solid ground, but also between the wild and the domestic'.

On the GA Ning, there's a posting from Stephen Savage, who works at Shoreham Beach  Local Nature Reserve. Since the beach became a nature reserve in 2006, I have been developing an education programme focusing on natural history, coastal geography and maritime history. Shoreham Beach LNR is a shingle spit with rare vegetated shingle habitat. In fact it was designated a nature reserve to help protect this local and globally rare habitat. The eastern end of the shingle spit forms the harbour entrance, with the Downs to the north and the chalk cliffs and wave cut platform further east at Brighton. Longshore drift deflected the river to the west, in the process creating the shingle spit which is now Shoreham Beach. We have worked with a number of local primary and secondary schools, providing on-site and outreach sessions and worked to develop links with these schools to provide feedback and suggestions for future development. One area we are planning to develop further is a...

An interesting exchange on Twitter a couple of weeks ago... Led me to some nice work on Hunstanton. It's the work of Tina Richardson, who is a Cultural Studies PhD student at the University of Leeds. She has been exploring areas of Hunstanton . They are mapped using techniques that relate to the idea of "Psychogeography".... ARCADES PROMENADES is one of the outcomes of Tina's work. Don't forget my earlier early-morning virtual tour of Hunstanton that I did 2 years ago.

The last blog post was about an activity in my Geography Toolkit book: "Look at it this Way"... Lessons 9 and 10 are related to a job interview for a tour company operating in the area around Milford Sound. SEASIDE TOURS Great work by Richard Allaway - job interview in East Yorkshire. This format by Richard was the original inspiration for the activity in the book. Great for those teaching about coastal processes and landforms in the UK....