St Peter-On-The-Wall: Landscape and heritage on the Essex coast

First published in 2023 by

UCL Press

University College London

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk

Collection © Editor, 2023

Text © Contributors, 2023

Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in captions, 2023

The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.

Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner.

This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial Non-derivative 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use provided author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information:

Dale, J. (ed). 2023. St Peter-on-the-Wall: Landscape and heritage on the Essex coast. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800084353

Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

ISBN: 978-1-80008-437-7 (Hbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-80008-436-0 (Pbk.)

ISBN: 978-1-80008-435-3 (PDF)

ISBN: 978-1-80008-438-4 (epub)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800084353

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

List of abbreviations

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A contested landscape

Johanna Dale

Part I: St Peter’s Chapel and its pre-modern contexts

1 St Peter’s Chapel: What the building has to tell us

David Andrews

Appendix: The 1978 survey of St Peter’s Chapel

2 The Roman fort of Othona

Andrew Pearson

3 Dengie, Ythancæstir and Othona: The early medieval landscape context of St Peter-on-the-Wall

Stephen Rippon

4 Cedd, Bradwell and the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England

Barbara Yorke

5 Put to good use: The religious afterlife of the Saxon Shore Forts

Richard Hoggett

6 Early medieval monasteries on the North Sea coast of Anglo-Saxon England

David Petts

7 Land, marsh and sea: Transformations in landscape and farming at Bradwell on Sea, c. 1086–c. 1650

Kevin Bruce and Christopher Thornton, assisted by Neil Wiffen

Part II: St Peter’s Chapel and its modern contexts

8 ‘A building of altogether exceptional interest’: The rediscovery of St Peter’s Chapel in the nineteenth century, and its restoration in the twentieth

James Bettley

9 ‘And withal a great silence’: The spiritual landscape of the Othona Community and St Peter-on-the-Wall

Ken Worpole

10 A case study in vulnerability: Bradwell A, a trial environment for nuclear power

Gillian Darley

11 The St Peter’s Way: Leisure, heritage and pilgrimage

Johanna Dale

12 Maldon and the Blackwater Estuary: Literature, culture and practice where river meets sea

Beth Whalley

13 The last of Essex: Contemporary architecture and cultural landscape

Charles Holland

14 Care and maintenance in perpetuity? The nuclear landscape of the Blackwater Estuary

Warren Harper and Nastassja Simensky

Index

List of figures

0.1 Aerial view of Bradwell Bay Airfield.

0.2 The former flower meadow.

0.3 Pilgrims approaching the chapel in the mid-1950s.

0.4 The Chapel, 2022, by Nabil Ali.

1.1 The chapel from the south-west.

1.2 Plan of the Roman fort and St Peter’s Chapel as revealed by the nineteenth-century excavations.

1.3 Plan of Bradwell based on a map of 1583.

1.4 Plan of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.5 Plan of the church at Reculver as originally built.

1.6 Elevation of the east wall seen from outside, showing the original masonry only, and reconstructing the two arches of the screen.

1.7 Fragment of plaster with red paint probably of thirteenth-century date (arrowed) in the soffit of a probable blocked window arch in the north-east corner of the nave.

1.8 Interior of the chapel, showing the blocked screen wall and the butt purlin roof.

1.9 Reconstruction of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.10 West elevation of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.11 West wall of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.12 North elevation of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.13 North wall of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.14 East elevation of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.15 East wall of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.16 South elevation of St Peter’s Chapel.

1.17 South wall of St Peter’s Chapel.

2.1 Bradwell Chapel, from a drawing by the Rev. H. Milligan.

2.2 The upstanding Roman defences in 1907.

2.3 The Roman landscape around Othona.

2.4 Reconstruction of the Roman fort at Pevensey (Anderita).

2.5 Field investigations of Othona: 1990–present.

2.6 Othona: plan of identified Roman features and surface artefact distribution.

2.7 Military metalwork recovered during the 1864 investigations of Othona.

3.1 The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of eastern England and the boundary zones between them, and the postulated boundaries of the regio called Deningei and its major geology/soil types.

3.2 The landscape context of Othona and Ythancæstir.

3.3 Evidence used in reconstructing the extent of the regio of Deningei.

3.4 The possible extent of the 70 cassati in the regio called Deningei that King Swæfred of the East Saxons granted to Ingwald, bishop of London.

3.5 The eighth-century fish weir at Sales Point, near Othona, in the Blackwater Estuary, Essex, and reconstruction drawing by Nick Nethercoat.

4.1 The remains of the medieval church of Lindisfarne, on the site of the church founded by Aidan.

4.2 The medieval church of Lastingham, probably on the site of the church founded by Cedd.

4.3 Aerial view of Lastingham showing its position between Ryedale and the North York Moors.

4.4 Statue on Lindisfarne of St Aidan by Kathleen Parbury (1958).

4.5 Lastingham 07 and Lastingham 08: two fragments from a possible shrine of Cedd at Lastingham.

5.1 The locations of the Saxon Shore Forts, spanning the coast of Britain from The Wash to the Solent.

5.2 A map identifying the Saxon Shore Forts, from a fifteenth-century Swiss copy of the Notitia Dignitatum.

5.3 Watercolour view of the ruins of Walton Castle, painted by Francis Grose in 1766.

5.4 Aerial view of Burgh Castle from the south-west, showing the walls of the Roman fort and the parish church.

5.5 ‘Interior ruins of Reculver’s church, Kent’, by I. Baynes.

6.1 View across the Alde Estuary towards Iken.

6.2 Reconstruction of the Saxon settlement at Barber’s Point by David Gillingwater.

7.1 Reconstruction of probable boundaries of Domesday Estates (1086) in north-east Bradwell on Sea.

7.2 Reconstruction of boundaries and location of medieval and Tudor estates (to c. 1650) in north-east Bradwell on Sea.

7.3 Map of East Hall Farm in 1768, an estate belonging to New College, Oxford, from 1391 to 1865.

7.4 Map of Down Hall and Gardiners Farm in 1753.

7.5 Map of Wymarks Farm in 1714.

8.1 Interior of St Peter’s Chapel, looking west, 1907.

8.2 Visit by the Essex Field Club, 6 August 1910.

8.3 Survey drawing of St Peter’s Chapel by HM Office of Works.

8.4 St Peter’s Chapel under restoration, c. 1919–20, showing the north and west walls.

8.5 St Peter’s Chapel from the south, 1925.

8.6 St Peter’s Chapel from the south, 1942, showing damage to the roof, and barbed wire and other military debris.

8.7 Interior of St Peter’s Chapel, looking east, 1947.

8.8 Laurence King’s proposals for restoring St Peter’s Chapel to its presumed Saxon appearance, 1948.

8.9 Interior of St Peter’s Chapel, 2020, showing the hanging crucifix by Francis Stephens, 1949, and altar by Gerald Shenstone, 1985.

9.1 Medlar Cottage, the Othona Community.

9.2 One of the original wartime Nissen huts, first home of the Othona community.

9.3 The permanent sleeping yurts at Othona.

9.4 The Solar Building at Othona, made out of compacted clay dug from the ground below and elevated above flood level.

10.1 The model of Calder Hall displayed at Bradwell Village Hall, photograph originally published in the Maldon and Burnham Standard, 2 February 1956.

10.2 Voting at the Bradwell Parish Council meeting, photograph originally published in the Maldon and Burnham Standard, 22 March 1956.

10.3 View of the power station from the west in 1969.

11.1 First view of the chapel across the Tillingham and Bradwell marshes.

11.2 St Mary’s Mundon before and after coming into the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches.

12.1 Viking longship at the 1991 millennium celebrations.

12.2 Panel 1 of the Maldon Embroidery.

12.3 Panel 2 of the Maldon Embroidery.

12.4 Byrhtnoth, by John Doubleday, 2006.

13.1 A House for Essex, by FAT/ Grayson Perry, external view.

13.2 A House for Essex map, by Grayson Perry.

13.3 Blackmore Church.

13.4 A House for Essex exterior and interior sketches.

13.5 A House for Essex by FAT/ Grayson Perry, interior of living room.

14.1 Thomson & Craighead, Temporary Index, 2016.

14.2 Goldin+Senneby, Spruce Time.

14.3 Inas Halabi, WE HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THE WIND’S DIRECTION, 2019–2020.

14.4 Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb’ displayed in Gabriella Hirst’s An English Garden, 2021.

List of tables

3.1 Data used in reconstructing the ‘greater Tillingham’ estate (King Swæfred’s grant of 70 cassati in the regio called Deningei).

3.2 Concordance of the various references to coins having been found at Othona or Bradwell on Sea.

4.1 Timeline for the life of Cedd.

7.1 Domesday manors in Bradwell, tenants-in-chief and sub-tenants, 1066 and (1086).

7.2 Domesday economic statistics: population, ploughs and value, 1066 and (1086).

7.3 Domesday economic statistics: pasture, woodland, animals and fisheries, 1066 and (1086).

7.4 Bradwell occupations as indicated by 63 wills, 1565–1604.

7.5 Major exports of produce from Bradwell, 1565–1703.

List of abbreviations

List of contributors

David Andrews is an independent researcher and consultant who spent 17 years running archaeological projects in Italy and England, and over 20 years working as an archaeologist and conservation officer at Essex County Council, eventually in the role of Historic Buildings Manager.

James Bettley is an architectural historian whose publications include new editions of the Pevsner Architectural Guides to Essex (2007), Suffolk (2015) and Hertfordshire (2019). He has also contributed to successive volumes of the Victoria County History of Essex. He was awarded his PhD by the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1999 and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 2002. He has lived in Essex since 1991.

Kevin Bruce is a local historian who has researched diverse aspects of the local history of the Dengie Hundred area for over 50 years, with particular attention to Bradwell and Tillingham and the coastal marshlands. He shares his knowledge of local and natural history with visiting school groups to the Othona Community at Bradwell and gives talks to local groups and societies. He worked at Bradwell power station for 35 years and produced the booklet celebrating its 40th anniversary. Current projects include researching the impressive, newly discovered medieval walls of what is believed to be one of the bishops of London’s palaces in Southminster and the land activities around the Essex coast by the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.

Johanna Dale is a research fellow in the Department of History at UCL, where she previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research is focused on the political and cultural history of the medieval period, and her first book, Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twelfth Century: Male and female accession rituals in England, France and the Empire, was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2020. As a resident of Essex, she has a long-standing interest in the medieval heritage of the county.

Gillian Darley was President of the Twentieth Century Society from 2014 to 2021 and a Trustee of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) until 2015. She is a widely published author and biographer, broadcaster and journalist. Her first book was Villages of Vision (1975) and the most recent Excellent Essex (2019). She co-authored Ian Nairn: Words in place (2013) with David McKie.

Warren Harper is a curator and researcher based between Toronto, Canada, and Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK, where he is Co-Director at The Old Waterworks (TOW), an artist-led charity that provides studios, facilities and research and development opportunities for artists. He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, where his practice-based curatorial research project investigates the nuclear landscapes of the Blackwater Estuary and Foulness Island, and Essex’s role in the UK’s nuclear story. Warren has worked with various galleries and institutions, including Arts Catalyst, Focal Point Gallery, South London Gallery, Cement Fields and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Richard Hoggett is a freelance heritage consultant, lecturer and writer with over 20 years’ experience in the academic, commercial and local authority heritage sectors. His doctoral research, completed at the University of East Anglia, focused on the historical and archaeological evidence for Christianisation in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia, and was subsequently published as The Archaeology of the East Anglian Conversion (Boydell, 2010). Since then, he has published extensively on heritage-related subjects in numerous books and journals, and recently authored the Middle to Late Anglo-Saxon Resource Assessment for the East of England Regional Research Framework. He is an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists.

Charles Holland is an architect and a Professor of Architecture at the University of Brighton. He is the principal of Charles Holland Architects, an architecture, design and research practice based in the UK. He is a former director of the architecture and art practice FAT and a Visiting Professor at Yale University and the ABK Stuttgart. Charles writes regularly about architecture- and design-related issues and is currently writing a book – How to Enjoy Architecture – for Yale University Press.

Andrew Pearson is Post-Excavation Manager at Cotswold Archaeology. He holds a PhD from the University of Reading, is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and has research associate status at Brunel University. He is the author of six books, which include The Roman Shore Forts (Tempus, 2002) and The Construction of the Saxon Shore Forts (BAR, 2003).

David Petts is Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University. He specialises in the archaeology of early medieval Britain, with a particular interest in early Christianity and monasticism. He has been carrying out collaborative fieldwork on the early medieval monastery of Lindisfarne (Holy Island) since 2016, which has led to a wider interest in the early medieval engagement with the islands and maritime cultural landscapes from both an economic and a social perspective. He is also working on the archaeology of the later medieval and post-medieval coast of eastern England.

Stephen Rippon is Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Exeter and a former President of the Society for Medieval Archaeology. His recent books include The Fields of Britannia (with Chris Smart and Ben Pears, 2015), Kingdom, Civitas and County (2018), Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape (with John Blair and Chris Smart, 2020) and Territoriality and the Early Medieval Landscape: The countryside of the East Saxon kingdom (2022).

Nastassja Simensky is an artist and lecturer who often works collaboratively with artists and non-artists including fishermen, archaeologists, ham radio operators, composers and musicians to make writings, place-specific performances, events, sound works and videos as a form of ongoing fieldwork. Commissions and residencies include: SHERDS, Nottingham Contemporary, 2020; Zu Gast bei den KunstVereinenRuhr, Urbane Künste Ruhr, 2019; Brightspot, Diaspore Project Space, 2018; Material Culture Unearthed, In-situ Brierfield, 2018; Radiophrenia, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, 2017; Estuary Festival: Points of Departure, 2016; and Fictive Dreams, ICA Singapore, 2016.

Christopher Thornton recently retired as County Editor of the Victoria County History of Essex. He remains a volunteer researcher with that project and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He received his doctorate from the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. After holding research posts at the University of Leicester and Hertford College, Oxford, he joined the Victoria County History in 1992. He has contributed articles to five volumes in the VCH Essex series, and edited three volumes, as well as publishing many articles and edited books on local history and medieval history. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Chairman of the Friends of Historic Essex and a vice-president of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History.

Beth Whalley holds a PhD from King’s College London and works at the intersection of early English studies, political ecology and contemporary creative-critical practice. She has authored articles for Of Mud and Flame: A Penda’s Fen sourcebook (Strange Attractor, 2019), Yearbook of English Studies (2022) and Lost Artefacts from Medieval England and France: Representation, reimagination, recovery (York Medieval Press, 2022). She is also a project coordinator for two of Historic England’s Cultural Programmes in Somerset.

Neil Wiffen is a Broomfield-based historian who has worked at the Essex Record Office since 2000. He was the Honorary Editor of the Essex Journal between 2007 and 2020, and he is currently studying for a PhD in Landscape History at the University of East Anglia. His main areas of interest are agricultural and military history.

Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian, whose work includes books on architecture, landscape and public policy. In recent years he has focused on recovering the social history of communitarian experiments in town and country, writing extensively about the Essex landscape and its twentieth-century social history, in such books as 350 Miles: An Essex journey and The New English Landscape. His most recent book, No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen (2021), is a study of a wartime Christian pacifist community in Frating, Essex. He was a founder member of the Demos think-tank and of openDemocracy, and has served on the Expert Panel of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the UK government’s Green Spaces Task Force, and as an adviser to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

Barbara Yorke is Professor Emeritus of Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester and Honorary Professor of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Major publications include Kings and Kingdoms in Early Anglo-Saxon England (1990), Wessex in the Early Middle Ages (1995), Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (2003), The Conversion of Britain, 600–800 (2006) and Power and Place in Early Medieval Europe (edited with Jayne Carroll and Andrew Reynolds, 2019). She is currently historical adviser to the Winchester Cathedral Mortuary Chest project and to the Leverhulme-funded ‘Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD 400–800’.

Acknowledgements

This book is a response to the public consultation launched by BRB in early 2020. Although Bradwell had long been designated a potential site for nuclear development, many local people, me included, were shocked by the plans that came through our letterboxes, as they significantly exceed, indeed practically double, the scale of development envisaged in the government’s appraisal of sustainability site report (2010). BRB also intend to extend the proposed development site eastwards so that it would come to within 150m of the seventh-century chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, which, as the front cover shows, currently sits in splendid isolation close to the shore. As a medieval historian living in the area, I felt a responsibility to highlight the inevitable detrimental impact such an enormous development would have on this wonderfully atmospheric early medieval survival.

My greatest thanks go to the contributors to this volume, who answered my pleas for help and produced outstanding essays in the challenging conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the early months of the pandemic, as I began to think about putting together a book, I sent lots of unsolicited emails, many to people I did not yet know. All were met with supportive and positive responses. It should be mentioned that while all contributors agree on the academic interest and importance of the Roman fort and chapel at Bradwell, the inclusion of their work in this volume does not imply an opinion on the merits of nuclear power in general, or the Bradwell B plans in particular. I am also very grateful to those who reviewed essays for me, including Tim Howson, Eric Cambridge, Andrew Gardner, Maria Medlycott, Adam Chapman, Bob Mills, Clare Price, Rebecca Pinner, Len Scales, Katrina Navickas, Linda Ross and Catherine Clarke. My own chapter on the St Peter’s Way would have been much less enjoyable to research without the company of my friend Chesca Douglas, who uncomplainingly tramped through the autumnal mud with me as I droned on about medieval landscapes. Many thanks are also due to Jane Wadham, who kindly agreed that the previously unpublished drawings from her 1978 thesis on the chapel could be included in the volume. The wonderful cover image was supplied by Jim Pullen of Mersea Island, just across the Blackwater from Bradwell.

Many thanks are also due to Chris Penfold and all the team at UCL Press and Bourchier for guiding this book from its conception to its birth. The Essex Heritage Trust generously provided a grant to cover the cost of indexing. I thank them for supporting this volume and also all the excellent local history and heritage projects their funding makes possible across the county every year.

Essex is a hugely underrated county, which doubtless contributes to its unselfconscious and unpretentious charm. Its rural coast is bewitching. It has certainly bewitched me. We came to Essex purely for the pragmatic reason that it was a cheap place to keep a sailing boat, never expecting to stay long. That was 13½ years ago. I am still amazed by what we found here. The understated beauty of the vast expanses of grazing marsh, saltmarsh, mud, sea and sky, ever shifting with the weather and the rhythm of the tide. The sense of timelessness that obscures a complex historic environment that continually intrigues. The outstanding natural environment, in which it is routine to encounter curlew, avocet, kestrel, marsh harrier, owl, hare, stoat and seal, amongst many other wonders. I have spent so much time on muddy sea walls and up muddy creeks that I have come, to borrow the words of J. A. Baker, to feel ‘like a wading bird, happy only at the edges of the world where land and water meet’. For all that I really could have done without the extra pressure of taking on an additional project during the pandemic, my work on this book has been done in gratitude for the happiness, release and friendship we have found on this coast, on land, in the mud and on the water. It is dedicated to my fledgling wading bird, Sebastian, and to all the other children of the Dengie Peninsula, in hope for their futures on this edge of the world.

North Fambridge

December 2022

Introduction

A contested landscape

Johanna Dale

In spring 2020 a Stage One public consultation was held by the Bradwell Power Generation Company Limited (BRB), a partnership between China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) and Électricité de France (EDF), about their plans for the development of a new nuclear power station at Bradwell on Sea on the Essex coast. In the foreword of the consultation summary document, CEO Alan Raymant wrote that the proposed power station ‘would build on the long-established history of nuclear power in the area’.¹ As part of their public-facing work BRB have created a local history website called ‘My Bradwell’, charting the history of the area from 1901 until 2002.² While it is reasonable for a history project to be chronologically limited, it seems clear that these terminal dates have been chosen for particular reasons, to present a positive narrative of the history of nuclear power at Bradwell and to justify future development. The first entry in the ‘My Bradwell’ timeline is 1901, with this start date chosen because it was apparently in 1901 that ‘plans for a power station in the area were hatched’.³ It is clear that this is being presented as the precedent for the later development of Bradwell A, but in reality, a small ‘generation station’ for a proposed light railway hardly ‘shows the ambition for a power plant in Essex’ at the opening of the twentieth century, as the website goes on to claim.⁴ The chronological end of the project is 2002, when Bradwell A ceased to produce electricity, thereby conveniently avoiding the complications of the decommissioning period.

While one might expect a corporate history project to emphasise positive aspects of history that support the corporation’s aims and objectives, it is also necessary to challenge such a one-dimensional presentation of history to the public. The aim of this book is to place the 65 years of nuclear activity at Bradwell in the context of much longer-established histories of human activity in the area. It has as its focus the seventh-century chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, a unique and atmospheric early medieval survival, which would be significantly impacted by both the construction and the operation of a power station of the magnitude proposed.⁵ The book aims to establish an academic baseline around the monument and the landscape surrounding it and to inform debate and policy around Bradwell B. While geopolitical considerations have injected a degree of uncertainty into the nuclear permissions process, even if deteriorating Anglo-Sino relations were to spell the end of plans for Bradwell B in its current incarnation, the site remains designated for possible future nuclear development, meaning this book can also inform possible future policy debates. The chapters in this book highlight the multiple ways in which the chapel and landscape around Bradwell are historically and archaeologically significant, while also drawing attention to the modern importance of Bradwell as a place of Christian worship, of sanctuary and of cultural production. As the chapters have been written under time pressure, due to the nuclear permissions process, and also during a period when the pandemic led to libraries and archives being closed for extended periods, this book is not intended to be the last word on the chapel. Instead, its contributors seek to draw attention to the manifest historical and archaeological importance of the building and surrounding landscape and, it is hoped, to be the catalyst for subsequent research leading to a more comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the chapel and its setting.

St Peter-on-the-Wall stands at the eastern end of a narrow strip of higher ground at the north-eastern corner of the Dengie Peninsula, which is bounded to the north by the River Blackwater, to the south by the River Crouch and to the east by the Greater Thames Estuary, into which the Crouch and Blackwater both flow. This stretch of the Essex coast evokes a sense of timelessness; however, this is an illusion and belies the changes, both natural and man-made, that have formed and transformed the landscape.⁶ The boundary between land and sea has historically been rather more fluid and blurred than the sharp rigid lines of sea walls on modern maps suggest. The area has seen Roman colonisers, Christian missionaries and Viking incursions, and has been defended against possible Dutch, French and German invasions. Since the mid-nineteenth century this stretch of the Essex coast has also been subject to a number of large-scale external interventions, some of which have come to pass and others of which have failed to make the leap from plan to reality. From the stalled land reclamation works, during which the walls of the Roman fort were rediscovered in 1864, through the use of the extensive mudflats by the military and the purchase of nearby Foulness Island by the War Office, a planned light railway from Southend to Colchester, the development of an airfield at the start of the Second World War and the building of Bradwell A, to the plans for a major new airport on the Maplin Sands in the 1970s, the low-lying and rural coast around Bradwell has been seen as ripe for major developments. The lower reaches of the Thames Estuary, in which Bradwell lies, have often been treated as marginal.⁷ A place for unwanted things, for London’s sewage and aeroplane noise, for nuclear power and for weapons testing.⁸ Whereas the countryside, villages and towns on the Thames above London have long been appreciated and preserved for their historic significance and for the story they tell of England’s past, the tidal Thames Estuary has, since the demise of the excursion industry, following the sinking of the Princess Alice in 1878, seldom been valued for its past.⁹ Instead the lower reaches of the Thames have come to stand for present and future, a place of industry, trade and commerce, for the benefit of the metropolis and the nation. The proposed Bradwell B nuclear power station should thus be considered in this wider context of planned large-scale external intervention and exploitation of the outer reaches of the estuary, which raises all sorts of questions about place, spatial conflicts and ‘power geometries’.¹⁰

The failure of the land reclamation works, the demise of the proposed light railway and the abandonment of plans to build an airport on the Maplin Sands are indicative of the fact that taming this stretch of coast has not always been as straightforward a proposition as it seems from London and elsewhere. While on modern maps the Dengie Peninsula appears to have hard boundaries, defined by the straight lines of its sea walls, the reality is that these barriers have always been and remain permeable. Since the initial moves to ‘in’ the marsh during the Middle Ages, high tides have on occasion overwhelmed sea walls and set back the process of land reclamation.¹¹ In recent years, a number of managed realignment schemes have begun to reverse the ‘inning’ process, returning reclaimed land to salt marsh, and the South Suffolk and Essex Shoreline Management Plan envisages further managed realignment around the peninsula.¹² The underlying topography continues to characterise the landscape; it has been obscured but not erased through the establishment of coastal grazing marsh. The ghostly tendrils of former tidal creeks lie dormant but ready to reassert themselves, should the sea walls fail or be deliberately breached.¹³

The physical reality of the peninsula, bounded by tidal rivers and fringed by coastal grazing marsh, much of which lies below mean high-water level, helps to explain the failure of some of the more grandiose plans, such as the planned light railway from Southend to Colchester, which included the small ‘generation station’ at Bradwell. An application was made in November 1901 for permission to construct the Southend (and District), Bradwell on Sea and Colchester Light Railways. The proposed route of the railways crossed three bodies of water: the Crouch between Wallasea Island and Creeksea, the Blackwater between Bradwell and Mersea, and the Strood channel, which separates Mersea Island from the mainland.¹⁴ While a railway bridge was a viable option for crossing the Strood, bridges were not suitable on the Crouch, where one would have prevented navigation upstream, or on the Blackwater, which additionally was far too wide and deep, so the railways terminated at the riverbanks and alternative intermediate onward transport was proposed. An early iteration of the plan from May 1901 included a cable car crossing of the Crouch, at an estimated cost of £16,000.¹⁵ By August 1902 this had been replaced by a ferry, presumably a money-saving modification, at £8,000 being half the estimated cost of the cable car.¹⁶ At both Bradwell and West Mersea the railway was planned to run out on substantial piers, extending to below the line of low-water springs so that the connecting ferry could run at all states of the tide. The sum of £20,000 was earmarked for a pier at Bradwell, where the deep-water channel to Maldon lies relatively close to the shore. Double that amount was estimated for West Mersea, where shallow mudflats extend far out into the Blackwater. Of a total cost estimate of £294,282 in August 1902, over £80,000 was earmarked to enable the crossing of the Crouch and Blackwater rivers by ferry and for works on the Strood channel.¹⁷ The expense and complexity of the scheme meant that it never got off the drawing board, but even if it had, it seems unlikely that demand would have justified it. Only a few years earlier, in 1895, a through route from Southend to Colchester via Wickford, Maldon and Witham had closed to passengers due to low usage after only five years of operation.¹⁸ Far from demonstrating the ‘ambition for a power plant’, plans for the light railway exhibited a distinct lack of understanding of the realities of the area’s geographical and economic topography.

The extent of the mudflats on the Dengie Peninsula coast has made it attractive to speculative large-scale attempts at land reclamation, often in the face of significant opposition from local landowners.¹⁹ The South Essex Estuary and Reclamation Act was passed on 17 June 1852 to enable the reclaiming of ‘marshes, mud banks, and waste lands of considerable extent’; however, this ambitious plan had already met with some scepticism.²⁰ Lewis D. B. Gordon, who inspected the scheme for the Admiralty and authored a report that was presented to parliament in March 1852, wrote that, while the proposal claimed it would bring into cultivation 30,420 acres of land, his view was that there was ‘not 1,000 acres along the whole foreshore’ that were fit for reclamation, especially within the 21-year time frame envisaged by the Act, given the slow rate of accretion along the coast.²¹ The Admiralty were understandably particularly concerned about the impact the scheme would have on navigation, given that what was proposed would profoundly alter approaches to the Colne, Blackwater and Crouch rivers. Gordon’s conclusion was that, once what was prejudicial to the public from a navigational perspective had been removed from the plans, the project would probably not be viable. The Admiralty’s warnings were not heeded, yet they were shown to be prescient: by 1868 the South Essex Estuary and Reclamation Company had been wound up, precipitating a legal case in Chancery.²² By then, of course, the initial work on the project had led to the discovery of Roman walls near St Peter’s Chapel, precipitating a flurry of antiquarian archaeological activity, as James Bettley’s chapter in this volume describes.

Interest in reclaiming large areas of land on the Essex coast did not disappear with the winding up of the South Essex Estuary and Reclamation Company. The Metropolis Sewage and Essex Reclamation Company aimed to reclaim the flats around Foulness Island and along the coast of the Dengie Peninsula by constructing pipelines from London to carry the capital’s sewage on to the areas to be reclaimed.²³ This too came to nothing, and after 1880 the agricultural depression meant that plans for large-scale land reclamation faded away until the 1960s, when the Thames Estuary Development Company proposed a joint airport–seaport on the Maplin Sands south of Foulness Island, involving the reclamation of 18,000 acres.²⁴ The Foulness airport proposal was accepted by the Roskill Commission as one of four plausible sites for a third airport serving London, from an initial longlist of 78 sites, the other three being Thurleigh near Bedford, Cublington in Buckinghamshire and Nuthampstead in Hertfordshire.²⁵ In January 1971 the Commission revealed Cublington as the preferred option of all but one commissioner, but when the government formally responded to the Roskill report in April, it announced that the site of the airport would be Foulness rather than Cublington.²⁶ In this decision they followed the view of the dissenting commissioner, Professor Colin Buchanan, who had refused to endorse most of the report and instead had produced his own 11-page note of dissent, in which he rejected the cost-benefit approach taken by the commission and invoked what he saw as central planning principles, the protection of the rural background around London and the preservation of national heritage. Buchanan had no doubt that ‘the things I find of interest in the open background of London are things that will interest many generations to come. I am profoundly certain they are good things.’²⁷ In his assertion that Foulness was therefore the only acceptable site, he stood in a long tradition that viewed the Thames Estuary and the Essex coast as being of less interest and value than the Thames Valley and the Chilterns.²⁸ As Derrick Wood, of opposition group Defenders of Essex, put it, ‘It was clear where political pressures were driving the Government. Environment, defined as the preservation at all costs of one’s own present way of life, was the great god and all things inland were beautiful, anything to do with the coastal regions ugly and expendable.’²⁹ The fact that in 1971 some 25 MPs from constituencies representing inland sites had come together to form an ‘Inland Group’ to promote Foulness, demonstrates the truth of Wood’s assertion.³⁰

The oil crisis of 1973–4 precipitated by the Arab–Israeli War and a change to a Labour government saw the cancellation of the project in July 1974. By then projected costs had spiralled, weakening the economic case, and the idea that an airport at Foulness would have minimal environmental impact had been exposed as an illusion, once the ancillary development of transport links and a new town housing 600,000 people was taken into account.³¹ Alongside local grassroots organisation the Defenders of Essex, the RSPB had emerged as an opponent. In an impassioned essay published in the RSPB’s autumn 1971 magazine, Essex-based naturalist J. A. Baker argued for the importance of the Essex coast while alluding to outsiders’ dismissal of its value:

An austere place perhaps, withdrawn, some might say desolate … When strangers come here, many will say, ‘Its flat. There is nothing here’. And they will go away again. But there is something here, something more than the thousands of birds and insects, than the millions of marine creatures. The wilderness is here ... Man is killing the wilderness, hunting it down. On the east coast of England, this is perhaps its last home.³²

In Baker’s view, when the airport went ahead, ‘this last home of the wilderness will be imprisoned in a cage of insensate noise. Cordoned by motorways, overshadowed by the huge airport city, the uniqueness of this place will be destroyed as completely as though it has been blown to pieces by bombs.’³³

Baker’s invocation of military destruction referenced another type of large-scale government intervention in his coastal birdwatching territory: military use. The Shoeburyness firing range and Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) on Foulness Island had been added complications to the airport plans, and both were part of a longer history of military involvement on the Essex coast.³⁴ Taking an extended perspective, this includes the Saxon Shore Fort of Othona, on whose walls St Peter’s Chapel was built. Although, as Andrew Pearson’s chapter makes explicit, the exact functions of the Shore Forts remain disputed, Othona can be seen as the first major infrastructure project on this stretch of coast. Following the departure of Roman forces, the dilapidated fort then became the base for a new wave of Christian colonisation from the mid-seventh century, before the advent of the Vikings brought violence to coastal communities across northern Europe, including along the Greater Thames Estuary. The defeat of Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, at the hands of Vikings at the Battle of Maldon in August 991 was commemorated in an Old English poem, which still influences the culture of the Blackwater Estuary, as Beth Whalley’s chapter in this volume makes clear. Another pivotal battle between Danish and English forces was probably fought at Ashingdon, on the south bank of the River Crouch, in 1016, at which Canute triumphed over Edmund Ironside.³⁵ The low-lying, marshy Essex coast with its myriad tidal creeks, was vulnerable to attack from the sea, and in the late eighteenth century plans were made to defend the coast against the French. In April 1798 a naval signal station was set up by St Peter’s Chapel as part of a chain of stations stretching from the Nore up to Yarmouth; Linnets Cottage, planned as a temporary building, but which still stands to the south-east of the chapel, was constructed at this time to house the signal station personnel. Shortly after the threat of invasion rose again with the resumption of hostilities in 1803, plans were put forward for a chain of Martello towers along the Essex coast.³⁶ Three were proposed for Bradwell at Sales Point, Wymarks and New Wick, and two either side of the Crouch Estuary. The huge cost of the whole scheme caused the withdrawal of the first ten proposed towers, with the chain instead beginning across the Blackwater Estuary at St Osyth.³⁷

From the mid-nineteenth century military use of the Essex coast intensified. In 1855 the War Department had established an artillery practice and testing range at South Shoebury, overlooking the Shoebury Sands (a continuation of the Maplin Sands).³⁸ By the end of the century the government had determined that Foulness and the Maplin Sands should be used as a weapons research and development centre, and thus began the slow acquisition of the island by the War Department. Starting in 1900, the War Department bought up land farm by farm on the island, but the lord of the manor of Foulness, Alan G. Finch, refused to sell, and as he leased large portions of the sands to copyhold tenants for fishing kiddles, negotiations in 1912 to secure shooting rights over the sands failed.³⁹ Following Finch’s death in 1914, the department was able to purchase the lordship and its ancient demesne lands, which comprised about two-thirds of the island.⁴⁰ In his history of Foulness Island, published in 1970 in the context of the airport plans, J. R. Smith speculated on the possibility of the kiddle fishing industry being resurrected ‘when the Ministry leaves Foulness and firing across the sands ceases’.⁴¹ Fifty years later the Ministry itself has left Foulness, but the weapons development industry has not. Qinetiq, a public limited company created out of the now-defunct government organisation Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), which floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2006, now manages the site for the MOD and regularly tests weapons on the island and sands, precluding kiddle fishing for the foreseeable future.⁴²

The twentieth century also saw the intensification of military activity on the other side of the Crouch on the Dengie Peninsula. During the First World War troops camped around the peninsula for training and St Peter’s Chapel was commandeered as a base for members of the signal corps.⁴³ Some of the sailing barges operating out of Bradwell Creek were employed in transporting coke over to France for use by troops, in addition to their usual crop-carrying work. Between the wars the area became increasingly popular for recreation, but most recreational features were swept away in the run-up to the Second World War. In 1937 ‘hundred acre’ field on Down Hall Farm was commandeered for the laying out of a grass airstrip and a bombing range was constructed on the Dengie Flats.⁴⁴ Targets were built off Sandbeach Farm and three towers were built to monitor bombing activity. The northern tower still just about stands to the east of the chapel and some of the targets partially survive on the mudflats, where navigational markers warn sailors taking the short route between the Crouch and Blackwater of their existence. As elsewhere in England, pillboxes were constructed around the peninsula, with a particular concentration of boxes (11 in total) between the chapel and Bradwell Waterside. In 1941 the Air Ministry expanded the grass airstrip of the bombing range to create a full-scale airfield, known as Bradwell Bay. With a main runway aligned roughly east–west, two secondary runways and the full suite of ancillary buildings, the construction of Bradwell Bay, covering much of Down Hall, New Wick and Wymarks farms, transformed the landscape of Bradwell on Sea, which became a military zone.⁴⁵ With the end of the war, the zone was scaled back, but the bombing range continued to be used by the United States Air Force.

Figure 0.1 Aerial view of Bradwell Bay Airfield. Kevin Bruce Collection.

The history of all these plans, hatched predominantly by outsiders, for large-scale land reclamation and infrastructure projects, both civil and military, culminating with the proposed Bradwell B nuclear power station, raises all sorts of questions about place, space and power relations.⁴⁶ While answering all these questions is beyond the scope of this book, by championing the importance of Bradwell’s historic environment it aims to draw attention to some of the issues at stake. The planning system is, as Kirby put it, ‘responsible for locating on the landscape major negative externalities’.⁴⁷ There can be no doubt that a development of the size and kind proposed would be a major negative externality, and it is important to recognise the level of damage that would be done to Bradwell’s historic environment should it go ahead. It is possible to see the South Essex Estuary and Reclamation Company as being part of a longer lineage of reclaiming land in the area for agricultural use, as outlined in Kevin Bruce, Chris Thornton and Neil Wiffen’s contribution to this book, albeit on a far larger scale and initiated by outsiders rather than local landowners. Some of the military activities can also be understood as part of an extended history of defending a coastline that could provide an enemy with easy access to the capital. The establishment of a military complex based around Foulness Island and the siting of a nuclear power station at Bradwell, however, were both radical breaks from past human activities in the area and wider region. The requirements of military weapons