the borg at bosham

Bosham was where King Canute showed his courtiers that even he didn't have the power to stop the tide. Today's Bosham residents are sanguine enough to accept that with sea levels rising and the land sinking flooding will become more and more familiar. To this end they have adapted and built the above flood defences, needed when the tide creeps up the High Street. Twice a day the road around the bay floods, many times a year the odd Londoner parks their car at the side of the road and returns a few hours later to find their car underwater.

I lived at Bosham for a couple of years, and it is a fantastic place. But it now has an air of resigned fatalism. For one day, and not that far off, it will disappear under the waves forever, as have so many other Sussex towns and villages.

But hopefully the process will be a gradual one, and the villagers will be free to move to higher ground. But the real threat of course is a sudden disaster, a huge storm coinciding with a spring tide, a Channel storm surge, another 1987 style 'hurricane'. High ground appeals more each year, and the good folk of Sussex and all of our other coastal counties will be in the front line of climate change in the UK. So visit Bosham whilst you still can, visit the Selsey peninsular, or those odd bits of Essex that jut out into the sea. Visit North Norfolk and the Lincolnshire coast. Like Canute I believe that none of us will be able to stop this new natural phenomena that is now so surely upon us. Adapt, or ... well, you know.

Resistance is Futile.