The English countryside is paying the price for net zero

Telegraph

5 days ago

Jo Chapman lives in a two-storey red-brick semi on the edge of Leiston Common, close to Sizewell beach, Suffolk. There are vegetable beds and a polytunnel out front, and a studio in the garden where she sculpts with steel and clay.
Her long, narrow garden stretches almost to the edge of the pine-fringed common, where gorse and heather cling to dry tussocky grass and sandy soil. Beyond that, the gently undulating land dips into water meadows speckled with wild yellow irises at this time of year, and then rises again towards Kenton Hills, a wooded area scarcely more than 40ft high. But in Suffolk's coastal flats, that's enough to be considered a hill and given a name.
It's a landscape she knows intimately, one that she loves and even depends on. 'I have to go out into nature every day,' she says over a cup of coffee in her cosy kitchen.
Chapman, who is 60 with a grey-flecked dark bob and a twinkling nose stud, lived in Leiston town until a few years ago when she seized the opportunity to move closer to the woods and heathland, to a place where she can step out of her house and enjoy what she calls her 'daily observational ritual walk and meditation'.
Chapman used to go with her dog, a mixed terrier, but after he died, she mostly walks alone with her sketchbook. She often pauses to draw trees. 'I look for the structures and architecture in things,' she says. When she shows me round her artist studio, I can see echoes of their entangled branches in her abstract ceramics and sculptural models.
Until recently, the walks were restorative, a time for quiet reflection, careful observation and attentive exploration. Lately, they have become more like a funeral procession. Directly in front of her home, a barrier of 2m-tall mesh fencing snakes along a rough track. It's the type of urban industrial fence used to contain crowds or keep people out, and it separates Chapman from a section of the heath she used to walk. But that hardly seems to matter, because the field itself has been transformed into a barren wasteland. When she gets up in the morning, it's the first thing she sees.
Across a nearby road, there is more of this Heras fencing, this time replacing a 1,600ft stretch of old hedgerow that has been flailed and uprooted. The building site on the other side roars and belches with bulldozers and backhoes, their diesel engines drowning out the birdsong. It's the first thing she hears.
Half a mile in the opposite direction, beyond the common, the water meadows and Kenton Hills, another seemingly endless fence has appeared, marking the abrupt edge of the woodlands and the start of a large building site full of excavators and front loaders, scraped berms of disinterred soil and gangs of men in high-vis vests scurrying about like industrious Doozers. At least the trees on Kenton Hills still stand; the once-contiguous woods of Goose Hill and Dunwich Forest are entirely gone. The reason for it all is the building of Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station.
Chapman feels hemmed in, kettled by the new barriers, and anxious. 'It's very unsettling,' she says. She had paid attention to the plans, looked at the computer-generated imagery (CGI) and attended public meetings, so when construction began, she thought she was ready.
But, she says, 'I feel shocked by the speed and the level of destruction. There's a constant feeling of being quite vulnerable, because you just don't know where it's going to happen next. You become hyper-vigilant.'
Later, as we walk down the track that leads to Sizewell beach, with a row of pines on one side and galvanised steel on the other, Chapman tries to explain her sense of loss over the months as trees have been cut down, hedgerows ripped up and fields and heath flattened. ' It's like grieving. When you lose someone but then, as time passes, you carry on – and you realise that you can carry on – but that the world is different.'
Twenty years ago, the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht studied communities living on the edge of new open-cast coal mines in Australia's Hunter Valley, people who stayed in the same place but saw the world around them transformed in distressing ways. Albrecht coined the term 'solastalgia' to describe their feelings of anguish and grief caused by this environmental change, the pain of lost solace. He wrote, 'Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at 'home'.'
In an era of climate change – as ice melts, seas rise, floods surge, wildfires burn, rains fail and heat increases – the world everywhere is being transformed, and Albrecht's term is gaining currency.
The irony of Chapman's particular sense of loss is that the rapid environmental transformation she is witnessing is the result of UK efforts to forestall the slower environmental changes caused by climate change. The new nuclear power station is intended to help Britain achieve net zero emissions while meeting the insatiable demand for energy.
This month, the Government announced it would contribute £14.2bn towards the cost of Sizewell C, but the project, to be built by French company EDF, still lacks both secure funding and a firm start date. Nevertheless, 'enabling works' have been underway since early 2024, felling 22,000 trees, removing long stretches of hedgerow and fencing off farmland and forest to clear the way for roads, park-and-ride sites, accommodation and other infrastructure.
When full-scale construction begins, it will likely last for a decade or more. Compounding the landscape's turbulent reshaping are separate plans for substations and power cables to bring Britain's expanding North Sea wind energy ashore, along with new networks of high-voltage pylons.
Whether caused by climate change or human efforts at mitigation, dramatic environmental disruption is a price we will all have to pay in the years to come. In the absence of concerted efforts to reduce individual energy consumption, the spread of solar farms, wind farms, converter stations, pylons and nuclear power stations is an inevitable necessity, not an option. The costs borne and sacrifices made by communities around Sizewell show what will be required of everyone to secure a clean energy future and limit the worst impacts of a changing climate.
Will Jones was born on his family's 50-acre arable and dairy farm near the village of Yoxford. Lean, with the tanned skin of someone who spends more time outside than in, the 56-year-old is easy-going, with long grey hair tied up in a messy topknot and a tattoo peeking out from the sleeve of his T-shirt.
'This was our playground when we were kids,' he says, gesturing towards a patch of lawn, a series of vegetable beds, a jumble of outhouses, sheds and barns, a field of spring barley and the encircling mature hedgerows spiked with old oaks. As he grew up, his connection only deepened.
'Most of the land around here isn't our land, but I've roamed this land, it's our backyard, the wild place that we live in, and it's meant a lot to me. To see it devastated in this way…' his voice trails off, and his partner, Laura Gwynne, rests a hand gently on his chest.
'This area of Suffolk is in a state of shock,' she adds.
Five miles inland from Sizewell C and Chapman's house, the changes around Jones and Gwynne's home are less extreme but scarcely less painful. A new roundabout, big enough to handle large lorries, is being built at Yoxford, and a link road is under construction a few hundred yards from Jones's home. Bright yellow diggers and graders trundle across the cleared land, causing the walls of their bungalow to vibrate. Jones confronts the shock head-on with regular walks to and along the building site. 'It's helpful for me to see the process, even if it's devastating to watch, because it's still a part of me, even if it's changing.' Gwynne finds it hard to look directly at the destruction.
During a recent walk – picking his way along the absence of a ghost hedgerow – Jones found a delicate muntjac skull and brought it home, where it sits on a log alongside pieces of wood and stones he has foraged, creating a diorama of what is being lost. Jones says the labourers 'leave bits and pieces after they've cut and chipped everything, so now and then I'll bring back what I find, little bits of my life'.
One night he woke from a nightmare that seemed to express the helplessness of enduring change on a scale beyond an individual's control: construction workers were methodically hacking down one of his hedgerows and setting it on fire, and the very fact of their actions seemed to justify what they were doing, so he just watched.
Jones says he has 'toyed with the idea' of moving, but it would require an inconceivable emotional uprooting. Instead, he and Gwynne are focusing their attention on what they can control. On the margin of one of their fields, close to a meadow of grasses and wildflowers they have reclaimed from crops, dozens of oak saplings, elder, sycamore and Scots pine are taking root.
The acorns came from different places, including one that Gwynne collected from the church graveyard where her father is buried, in the nearby village of Theberton. 'Each means something to us,' she says. The young trees are now as tall as she is and, in years to come, will form a new fragment of mixed woodland.
For Gwynne and Jones, it's about creating some space for nature and doing 'a small bit' to compensate for the destruction caused by Sizewell C. It's also about restoring meaning to the landscape, declaring their attachment and committing to the future. 'We're lucky to have all this, really lucky,' Jones says.
EDF has its own plans to mitigate the impact of its construction, compensate for the damage, and repair the land. It has built a new nature reserve, named Wild Aldhurst, and says it will restore heathland, plant trees and recover wetlands. Residents remain sceptical, however.
Gus Farnes has lived all his life in his family's 13th-century Suffolk pink longhouse next to the river Fromus. A figurative sculptor wearing a trucker hat and a chore jacket with 'Gus' on the pocket, Farnes has a foundry that looks out across the garden to what was once a medieval water meadow. 'My point of inspiration is how human activity over millennia influences the environment we live in and the landscapes we inhabit,' says the 41-year-old.
With the coming of Sizewell C, Farnes has seen the velocity of human activity accelerate, and over the last two years, the water meadow of his childhood has been replaced by a Disneyland version, sculpted by the developers to compensate for the removal of marshes elsewhere.
'When I was a child, the fields were grazed in rotation by a dairy herd, the drainage ditches were all free-flowing, full of watercress, and we'd go dipping for stickleback, mucking about, doing the things kids do. All of that's gone,' Farnes says.
We walk along a truck-wide road of compacted grey rubble, past neat fences and bright orange life rings installed next to 1ft-deep ponds, and reach a large plastic culvert through which the old stream now flows. Farnes calls it 'a municipal interpretation of what the countryside is,' replacing the 'bucolic, English, [John] Constable scene' of his memory.
Farnes finds the removal of one environment to create a new one baffling, and describes his feelings as 'curiosity, anger, frustration, confusion, loss, and a feeling of contempt from the powers that be, directed at the landscape and those who live in it'. He acknowledges that the disruption he has suffered is 'quite minimal' and the new fen, in time, might even achieve the promise of greater biodiversity, but he can't help seeing the work as a form of mutilation and 'a sorry apology' for what came before.
'I try to be pragmatic – to stave off the anger – I'm not anti-progress, but it's at what cost?' says Farnes.
For Chapman, Jones, Gwynne, Farnes and many others, the suddenness and scale of the environmental changes unfolding around them are an assault on the imagination as much as on the landscape; the bulldozing of places that inspire, offer comfort and calm, and where memories reside. It creates sadness, anxiety and confusion. But these are places of ecological as well as emotional importance.
The Suffolk 'Sandlings' – named for the sandy, acidic soil and the purple-flowering 'ling' heather that grows there – is a rare ecosystem shaped by natural evolution and millennia of human intervention. A dry, rolling lowland heath of gorse, heather and grass, the Sandlings reaches its eastern edge at the low sandstone cliffs that crumble onto Suffolk's shingle beaches and are washed away by the encroaching silt-brown waves of the North Sea.
Interspersed with mixed woodland and conifer forest, it bursts with biodiversity: birds, butterflies, moths, snakes, lizards, bees and beetles. On dusk walks, it is not uncommon to spot glowworms illuminating the bracken or hear the high-pitched drill of the nightjar's call.
It is a place of startling variety and 'very soft edges', Chapman tells me, which makes the contrast with the new metal fences and denuded land all the more stark and jarring.
Not everyone loves this landscape; to some, it appears desolate. The German writer WG Sebald found himself lost – geographically and psychologically – in the 'labyrinth' of the Sandlings in his discursive travelogue, The Rings of Saturn. There, he observed with a rising sense of panic the 'low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell; the flies buzzing about'.
Sebald discerned entropy and decline here 30 years ago, and now, as building sites replace woods, fields and heath, his view seems prophetic.
Sizewell C will be built alongside its predecessors, Sizewell A (1966-2006) and B (1995-present). What remains of A is a hulking, 100ft-high grey concrete and corrugated metal structure encasing two decommissioned gas-cooled Magnox reactors that had a combined output of 420 megawatts.
Next door is the mosque-like Sizewell B, with its white reactor dome arcing over a sky-blue hangar containing a single pressurised water reactor that produces 1.2 gigawatts of energy – almost three times as much as A.
Sizewell C will be bigger still in every way: taller, occupying more land and producing 3.2 gigawatts from its twin reactors – enough to power six million homes, according to EDF, which operates B and will build C.
Construction is anticipated to take about 10 years and cost £38bn, but EDF's Hinkley Point C power station – which is the same design and model – has been under construction since 2017, has doubled in price, and is not likely to be completed until the end of the decade.
It is easy to imagine the visual impact of Sizewell C's construction, partly because EDF has produced visualisations showing a thick forest of cranes and piercing floodlights illuminating the dark skies over Sizewell, and partly because the building site at Hinkley Point is a corollary.
Harder to resolve is the impact construction will have on the soundscape of Suffolk's coastal heath. How will the rushing of wind through leaves, the call of owls and nightingales, or the rhythmic wash of the sea on shingle compete with the machines?
A leading authority on the Sandlings was Lee Chadwick, who lived on the heath in a bungalow she built with her husband, Paxton, an artist who provided an intricate gatefold illustration of local reptiles for her 1982 book, In Search of Heathland.
Communist Party members and local councillors, the Chadwicks are still renowned in Leiston, and their son Peter, 77, lives in the family bungalow with his wife, Bridget.
Six months ago, Peter suffered a breakdown that the couple attribute partly to the stress and anxiety of the spoliation around them, and Peter struggles to get his sentences out, so when we meet, Bridget does most of the talking, with Peter listening carefully at her side.
'The week that all the hedging came down, we were absolutely devastated,' says Bridget, for whom the by turns frustrating and satisfying tasks of gardening, coaxing plants from the infertile soil or wrestling the bracken and brambles back from the field of heather, keep her outdoors often. The view from the couple's house of curiosities – full of Peter and Paxton's art, Lee's books and all their own accumulated belongings – is now Heras fencing. 'The awful thing, of course, is you get used to it,' says Bridget.
They suggest I join them for their daily walk to Reckham Pits Wood. It's a warm early summer morning, cooler in the woods, with sunlight filtering through leaves and branches swaying in the light sea breeze. Bridget points out a towering spruce among the birch and oak, and a slender young pine that has threaded itself neatly up through the spreading branches of a much older oak in search of sunlight.
Peter's ill health and the environmental destruction around them have become entwined, yet an attentive walk still soothes both. 'We have been very distressed at different times, [but] Peter and I are having to learn not to look at all the negatives; we're having to learn to really appreciate all the beautiful things around us.' Theirs is a purposeful striving towards acceptance when faced with the shock of a loved landscape disfigured.
On the long path between sadness and acceptance of a future that is different, but a future nevertheless, they are finding a way to process the grief of what has been lost by focusing on what remains. 'I'm really paying attention,' Bridget says as we walk through the woods. 'I'm appreciating what we've got.'
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