Chesil Beach at Portland, Dorset: Recovering from the winter 2013/14 storms

Chesil Beach in Dorset, UK, is a linear, swash-aligned, 18 mile long shingle barrier beach extending from Portland in the east to West Bay in the west, and is one of the iconic features of the Dorset and East Devon Coast UNESCO World Heritage Site (the ‘Jurassic Coast’). The focus of this paper is the impacts of a series of large storm events over the winter of 2013/2014 on the beach, coastal defences and community of Portland at the south-eastern end of Chesil Beach. The impacts of this series of storms is set in the context of the long history of flooding, erosion and landslides that have led to the development of a unique system of coastal defences in this location. The paper concludes with the recovery efforts of the coastal risk management authorities to restore the defences that were compromised during the storms, and present new quantitative data on the rate of post-storm recovery of the beach at a level that has never been undertaken before.