A breach too far? East Norfolk's place in William Smith's search for success.

Abstract

William Smith (1769–1839) played an important role in the defence of the fourteen kilometers of coast between Winterton and Eccles, in East Norfolk, UK between 1803 and 1809. Although now known as a geologist, he earned much of his income as an engineer. Smith's main job was to repair the breaches in the Sandhills (sand dunes) that protected farmed lowland behind from sea flooding. At the same time, Smith became involved in several drainage projects in marshes behind the sand dunes which were instigated by ambitious and acquisitive landowners. Smith's nephew, John Phillips (1800–1874), gave a glowing but incomplete account of Smith's East Norfolk work in his Memoir. However, an analysis of the extensive archives in: the Norfolk Record Office, the William Smith Collection in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and contemporary local newspapers has revealed that after apparent initial success, Smith's work on the Sandhills became more problematical, both technically and financially, and his relationships with local landowners, for whom he worked, became increasingly fractured. The Sandhills work was Smith's first coastal engineering project and, through a combination of his own inexperience and his oversimplification of the coastal processes, his designs did not provide a permanent solution to the erosion of the Sandhills by sea surges nor were his designs retained in subsequent years. Comparison of Smith's design concepts with those used by other contemporary engineers reveal that Smith's limited technical success came from a major earthmoving program to infill the Gaps (breaches) in the Sandhills and the adoption of care and maintenance programs to sustain the sea defences, rather than from any innovative engineering.