This Luminous Coast, by Jules Pretty, Full Circle Editions RRP£25, 272 pages
"This is a coast about to be lost,” warns Jules Pretty in his clear-eyed account of a year spent walking along England’s East Anglian shores. “Not yet, but it will happen soon.”
A professor in environment and society at the University of Essex, Pretty set out to “remap” the coastal zone shared by the counties of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. His guiding spirit, we learn, was American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who wrote that walking “is not about getting somewhere, but being somewhere”.
This Luminous Coast begins, unpromisingly, under the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge straddling Essex and Kent. “It is difficult to know whether to be uplifted or entirely crushed by the surroundings,” Pretty confesses. But even amid the bleakness he stumbles across the sacred: a memorial to two graffiti artists killed by a train.
At Tilbury, he crosses a beach made up of pieces of Victorian porcelain, pottery, bottles and bricks. “You cannot feel entirely wild down here on the Tilbury shore, but it soon feels far from the known places.” This feeling of separateness despite proximity to civilisation is a recurrent theme of the book.
One of the most memorable chapters describes the “Great Tide” of January 1953, which breached the region’s seawalls in over a thousand places. Canvey Island was hit hardest by the floods. “In the whole of the second world war, 81,000 men, women and children were made homeless in Essex by enemy air attack. These floods made 21,000 homeless in one night.” Despite much higher seawalls, he believes, such a tragedy is not unthinkable today.
Pretty keeps good company – both real and imagined – during his coastal journeys. The nature writing of the late Roger Deakin is constantly evoked.
There are echoes of Iain Sinclair’s darkly mellifluous musings and of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’s recent Edgelands. At other times, he is joined for sections of the walk by the writers Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane.
For all this companionable approach, melancholy breaks through. Anyone who has rambled along this part of the English coast will recognise that feeling – the sense of places lost, of brighter times left behind.
Handsomely produced, and illustrated with the author’s own photographs, This Luminous Coast is an elegiac meditation on a constantly changing landscape. “These walks changed me,” says Pretty. Readers might find themselves feeling the same.