This watercolour on display at Cromer Museum is titled West Cliff and the Beach and was painted by an unknown artist in 1845. It shows Cromer before the cliff was properly defended, when the town’s approach to coastal erosion appears to have involved driving wooden piles into the sand and hoping the North Sea would respect local initiative so that they didn’t have the sub-optimal situation of all the buildings falling into the sea. Actually, more on that in another post about Shipden, the lost village near Cromer.
The wooden posts were intended to slow the sea and prevent the cliff from being steadily eaten away, but they were not a particularly effective long-term solution. The year after this painting was completed, Cromer’s first effective sea wall was built, together with a narrow promenade. This was a significant improvement on the previous arrangement of timber and optimism which really wasn’t very sustainable as the North Sea has never really especially good at respecting boundaries.
It’s another rather charming look at old Cromer, those buildings were later replaced by hotels and lodging houses as the town became connected to the railways and the tourists flooded in. I quite like the slightly precarious nature of this scene, with the large property above looking entirely self-assured despite the fact that the geology beneath it appears to have had reservations.