Disappearing beaches? Examples of their increasing replacement in Great Britain by hard structures and Non-Cohesive Sediment Accumulations

In the early 1990s beach creation and management was seen as the most exciting and promising area of coastal engineering (Riddell and Young, 1992). Since then, R&D into beach management and coastal engineering has increased manifold, data collection has exploded and coastal numerical models have been improved and developed further. Nevertheless, a steady stream of schemes has replaced beaches with hard structures with a dramatic increase in the last decade. The reasons for this are a combination of the still high uncertainty of anticipating the behaviour of beach sediment in any quantitative way, the associated uncertainty of cost, the uncertainty of funding in the future and the decline of coastal managers’ skills and capacity which all make the ‘build and forget’ approach associated with hard structures more appealing. As the original beaches often had an amenity function, replacement increasingly includes the conversion of beaches into inert Non-Cohesive Sediment Accumulations (N-CSA) with little or no future maintenance expected. If this trend continues, the utopia, associated with ‘urban-beaches’ à la Paris-plage, that a ‘beach’ can be everywhere, even by the sea, will be brought back to the coast.