Max Miechowski documents the community that lives along England’s rapidly eroding East coast
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© Max Miechowski.
Miechowski’s work contemplates why, despite the instability of the landscape, many residents continue to call the vanishing cliffs their home
The Holderness coastline in north-east England is Europe’s fastest-eroding coastline, with nearly two metres of land lost to the cold waters of the North Sea each year. The shoreline is made up of soft clay, unlike the durable rock in other parts of the country, and it breaks away much easier. Along with the earth itself, homes, shops and all manner of man-made structures tumble down the steep cliffs as rising sea levels eat away at their base. Documentary photographer Max Miechowski was born in Lincolnshire, not far from these disappearing sites. He spent many of his childhood holidays in seaside resorts along this stretch of land, and remembers them fondly. So much so that in 2019 they became the focus of his series A Big Fat Sky – a body of work that Miechowski hoped would present England’s east coast sincerely, away from the tongue-in-cheek depictions we have grown accustomed to through the work of some contemporary British photographers. “It’s not just people drinking cups of tea, covered in ice cream on the beach,” he says. “There is something else happening there, and I wanted to paint a slightly dreamier, more sensitive picture of that landscape.”
While making the work, Miechowski became increasingly aware of the effects that the rapid coastal erosion was having on seaside towns. He decided to return to them at a later date. When the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020, he figured it was the ideal moment to do just that. Travelling by car, Miechowski ventured to the spots along the coast that were most at risk of disappearing, from the Isle of Sheppey in Kent all the way up to Yorkshire’s Spurn Point, exploring and shooting in the day, sleeping in his car by night. The resulting body of work is Land Loss. “It was a case of visiting those places and starting to get an understanding of what they look like, what they feel like, and who lives there,” he says. “But I was also thinking about how I might respond to them.”
Studying the images in the series, it becomes clear that Miechowski’s response to the subject revolved less around documenting the coastal erosion and more about capturing the atmosphere around it. As with A Big Fat Sky, this work looks beyond the surface-level facts and seeks a deeper understanding of the situation. Though typical of Miechowski’s practice, this approach was also a result of his initial encounters with the sites of erosion, which were far less dramatic than he had anticipated. He writes in the project’s description: “I expected to find storms, rough seas, ruined houses falling into the waves. A sense of urgency from the people living on the edge of a landscape, where entire towns have been lost to the North Sea. Instead, the land felt still, the waters were calm, and time moved slowly.”
With this in mind, we begin to see Land Loss – for which Miechowski won the Photo London × Nikon Emerging Photographer Award this year – as a meditation on time itself. If Miechowski’s previous series attempted to show England’s east coast as somewhere that is “frozen in time”, then this series does the opposite – presenting it as a place that time is steadily swallowing. The project also seeks an understanding of why people are drawn to these crumbling cliffs, and are reluctant to leave them despite the risks. Of the many residents Miechowski met while making the work, one encounter that stuck with him was with a man who, after witnessing his own house fall into the murky depths below, was given a new property further inland. “In the space of five years, he said he had only spent about 10 nights [in the new house] because he just couldn’t stand to be away from the cliffs,” he explains. “Instead, he was living in a caravan on the edge – he loved it there because he felt connected to nature.”
The meeting had a large impact on Miechowski. He understood that the man’s need to connect with nature was also a desire to be sentient to the passing of time, something that we so often lack in urban settings where growth overshadows loss. Witnessing the world around us disappearing imbues us with more than just a sense of melancholy; in the right context, it can also help us to appreciate the inherent beauty in transience – as in the case of the frequently photographed cherry blossom tree, which is known and revered for its brief blooming period. Unfortunately, the bitter irony here is that the increasingly impermanent state of the land along this coastline is not merely a consequence of time; rising sea levels as a result of human activity are decimating it at a much faster pace than would ever be possible by nature. But, as attested to by many of the local residents, this accelerated rate of erosion is still too imperceptible to be an impetus for alarm. “I’d be photographing on the beach in the mornings, and see people casually come out in their dressing gowns with cups of tea to check how much damage had happened in the night,” says Miechowski.
As puzzling and concerning as this nonchalance can seem, there is something undeniably poetic about lives being lived on the brink of collapse. In Miechowski’s softly lit photographs we witness how certain landscapes, despite their precarity – or precisely because of it – can create an impenetrable bond between its inhabitants. The environment’s vulnerability serves as a reminder that the world is constantly in flux, and witnessing this change, without being threatened by it, can fill us with a conflicting mix of awe and wonder. In those settings, we are confronted by the transformative power of nature, and we feel the fragility of the land beneath our feet. In Land Loss, this fragility is mirrored everywhere we look – from a butterfly’s wings to a broken pane of glass to a deep crack in the road. “Ephemerality is the undercurrent that runs through all of this work,” says Miechowski. “People being drawn to a landscape that’s completely impermanent and witnessing that against the backdrop of an old, ancient sea and a massive sky.”
