Our flagship project – ‘Towards a new coastal classification’ (ECC) funded by the ESRC and led by the Centre – is coming to an end this September
Our flagship project – ‘Towards a new coastal classification’ (ECC) funded by the ESRC and led by the Centre – is coming to an end this September, when we will be presenting our work at an event in the House of Lords hosted by the Right Honourable The Lord Bassam of Brighton. Specifically, we are presenting the coastal classification and another output from the project, the Coastal England Small Area (CESA) portal – an app which has been fine-tuned to sift through large amounts of LSOA and MSOA level data and compare it for coastal and non-coastal areas. This will be available soon, and I can send you the link once live.
For the coastal classification, we held two rounds of stakeholder consultations over the course of the project but there was no consensus about a coastal definition as the key groups define the coast in many, different ways depending on the work they are doing. We have adopted a definition of the coast that is 10km from the high water mark, informed by a statistical process, and are currently statistically producing the coastal classification. We will present the results at the House of Lords on 2nd September 2026.
In June, three members of the team, Professors Sheena Asthana and Sheela Agarwal and Dr Alex Gibson published a book: “The Challenges Facing Britain’s Coastal Communities’ based on data collected during the project. Reviews of the book have noted the following:
''Positive change is driven by evidence – and there’s plenty of that here on the plight of our coastal communities. Policymakers take note!''
Kasper de Graaf, Key Cities Innovation Network
''This is an essential, detailed overview of the significant socio-economic challenges facing our coastal communities informed by granular statistical data.''
Emily Murray, University of Essex
The project also published the following blogs:
🔗 Children and Young People – the coastal non-coastal gap versus the North-South divide, July 2026
🔗 Portal to the future? On the CESA data portal, June 2026
🔗 Making sure the coast is clear for offshore renewable energy, May 2026
🔗 Is coastal living healthy living? March 2026
🔗Life’s a beach (but not always for children living by the coast), February 2026