'You can’t do owt about it' - The Yorkshire people forced out of their homes by coastal erosion

In a few weeks’ time another slice of East Coast history will be lost when the pair of houses which made up the former coastguard station are demolished.

Annette Richards, 59, her brother Derek and mother have relocated to three static caravans in a field further away from the house she grew up in.

She remembers a large field east of the house and a boat compound, all lost to the sea over the past decades.

But she doesn’t feel nostalgic. She says: “I’m not really bothered about it going to be fair. I’ll be pleased when it’s knocked down and gone.

“The council has been really good (the demolition has been paid for by the East Riding Coastal Change Fund).

“My dad always said if they put breakers like they do at Withernsea it would have saved it a little bit.”

Bob Dry lived there when he was growing up and Seaside Lane continued round the corner - that section went into the sea years ago - to Sand Le Mere, then a tidy collection of railway carriages and steam wagons, where people spent their holidays.

Then the cliffs sloped gently down allowing holidaymakers easy access to the beach. There was an arable field to seaward and two cafes. The North Sea flood of 1953 destroyed what was Holderness’s second to last freshwater mere and chopped the dunes in half.

After seeing relentless change all his life the cottages being lost comes as no surprise. Now living in a village nearby, he says: “My dad used to say they would go in our lifetime.

“You can’t do owt about it. Holderness is a moving sheet of clay, until it goes back to the chalk cliffs you can’t do anything about it.

“They took tyres from Sand Le Mere to Hilston, tied them together with wire, and staked them. They said they’d fill with sand and form a barrier. Did they hell. A big sea came and it washed it all away.”

At Green Lane, Skipsea, homes have been teetering on the brink for years and it is looking increasingly neglected.

People are still there living behind high fences, surrounded by piles of rubbish. One young woman with a four-week old baby says she came to Leeds with her partner, mother and father-in-law to live in her house on the privately owned lane last summer.

She says she’s not worried that the sea pounds the cliffs just a matter of feet away and that it’s soothing to listen to.

And she’s well aware that it’s temporary: “When it gets too close, they’ll have to knock it down and we’ll have to move. It’s just for the time being.

“We got it last summer and it hasn’t moved since. They sent some drones over and the council sent a letter saying we were too close - then they came and measured it and said we were alright.”

Another householder will only open the door of her static caravan a little to say that she’s lived down Green Lane for 15 years and has no faith that the council can do anything to help.

Recently East Riding Council’s Cabinet approved an £800,000 contribution towards a long-awaited housing development at Church Farm in the centre of the village, around a mile inland.

The scheme, being developed by Broadacres Housing Association, is on the site of derelict farm buildings and consists of two bedroom and three bedroom houses, for social rent and shared ownership.

It’s intended to provide a roof over the heads of people like her living under the threat of losing their homes to the sea. However she says: “They say all sorts and it never happens.”