- Located in Lancaster, Lancashire, in North West England
- The coastline stretches around 8.5km
- Defences have been created due to the improvement scheme in a seven-phase programme, taking place between 1989 and 2007 – it cost around £28 million altogether
- In general, the council chooses coastal management from four options:
- Hold the line, meaning maintaining current defences or building new defence mechanisms
- Do nothing but monitor the situation, as in certain areas, it is too economically/technically difficult to create defence
- Retreat the line, so manage the rate of coastal retreat
- Advance the line, moving defence of the coast seawards of where it currently exists
- Rock armour which protects current sea wall:
- Local limestone boulders are placed along most of the promenade and sea walls
- The boulders range in weight between 0.77 to 7.00 tonnes, with an average of 3.5 tonnes
- 436,000 rocks/boulders have been put in the area as part of this strategy
- It was done in this way because local sourcing of the rock means that less transport was needed, so reducing the carbon footprint
- Breakwaters/rock groynes:
- About ten have been built at intervals in front of the town
- Fishtail breakwaters have largely been used – these are rock structures stretching out into the sea and splitting into two parts, like a fishtail
- This strategy involved using almost a million tonnes of locally sourced limestone boulders, meaning the geological origin is consistent with that of the coastline
- This sort of management has been used because it allows the build up of small bays which then encourages beach formation, so less reduction of sediment – it brings this about as a soft engineering technique, reinforcing and reducing the pressure on the hard techniques
- Traditional recurved sea wall:
- Prior to the scheme, much of the promenade was protected by a concrete sea wall, but in some areas, this was reinforced
- In 2015, further improvement begun on the wall – the project would cost around £10 million to fix 4km of the structure
- Gabions:
- These cages are of dimensions 2x1x1
- Over 500 gabions have been installed on various points along the coastline
- These force waves to break early and result in the dissipation of the wave energy, so less damage is done to the coastline/sea wall behind
- Concrete revetment and sea wall:
- These are located to the west of Heysham Head
- They were present prior to the scheme, but have been repaired since
