"Look at it this way"

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.

I spent yesterday on the first part of a journey around the coast of Norfolk from Wells next the Sea, visiting some of the communities that were affected by the recent storm surge. The surge affected communities much further up the coast in Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire , then down into the Thames estuary. I will be writing up some of the discussions that I had with people and the stories that I collected in further posts over the next week or so. The full detail, and more images, will appear in a range of resources, including a new GCSE textbook. Here's a selection of the images I took yesterday... I was also particularly interested in this image , which shows the area of London that would have flooded in the surge if the Thames Flood Barrier had not been built. Image copyright: Environment Agency The Environment Agency has shared a range of valuable information, and I will be adding to that in further posts...

A few years ago I read (and blogged about) a book by Julian Baggini called ' Welcome to Everytown'. In it, he described spending a year in the postcode which apparently had the most 'average' characteristics of any postcode area. It turned out to be the postcode where I was born and brought up, to the east of Rotherham. Julian has now moved on to another place which has resonance for the people of England. He spent a week in August as writer-in-residence at the White Cliffs of Dover. In an article for the Times, he talks about the various views that people have about the cliffs. Are they a supportive icon of Britishness, or a symbol of exclusion ? What do they mean for different people ? Julian has also written this piece in The Guardian which is worth reading. This would be relevant for the lesson 'Living on the Edge'. Image by Flickr user HBarrison and shared under CC license, for which many thanks...

Lesson 8 in 'Look at it this Way' is called 'Living on the Edge' . It explores the pros and cons of living near the coast... This week there has been publicity of a report which confirmed something that a lot of us already knew - that being beside the seaside makes us cheerful... I was fortunate to live within a mile of the sea for 12 years. Even now, it's only 20 minutes away - in fact we popped over earlier today... Here's a picture of the Norfolk coast from my Flickr stream to cheer your day... Image: Alan Parkinson

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...