Wells-next-the-Sea, United Kingdom

Wells was also a fishing port: in 1337, it is recorded as having had thirteen fishing boats and nearby Holkham had nine. Its mariners brought first herring and then cod from Iceland in quantity between the 15th and 17th centuries. The regulation of the harbour in order to preserve its use was by an act of Parliament, the Wells Harbour and Quay Act 1663 (15 Cha. 2. c. 5 Pr.); harbour commissioners were appointed by the Wells Harbour and Quay Act 1769 (9 Geo. 3. c. 8) with powers over vessels entering and leaving (as they still have today). The quay was substantially rebuilt in 1845, as part of attempts to improve the town. At the same time, improvement commissioners were appointed by the Wells (Norfolk) Improvement Act 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. xciv) with the task of making the town commodious and attractive to residents and the burgeoning tourist trade. As a small port, it built ships until the late 19th century; it never transferred to building motor vessels or to steel hulls. The coming of the railway in 1857 reduced the harbour trade, but it revived briefly after the Second World War for the import of fertiliser and animal feed. In 1982, there were 258 ship movements into the harbour.

Wells relies on the tides to scour the harbour because the town does not have a river running through it. The problem of siltation had preoccupied the merchants of the town for hundreds of years and occupied the attentions of various engineers, leading eventually to disputes which came to court in the 18th century. Sir John Coode, who had been knighted for his work on the completion of Portland Harbour, was recruited to solve its siltation problems in the 1880s; no attempted solution proved permanent. The growth of faster marine traffic, whose wake washes at the banks of the marshes, has widened the channel and reduced tidal flow further.

The North Sea is now a mile from the town; the main channel which once wandered through marshes, grazed by sheep for hundreds of years, was confined by earthworks to the west in 1859 when Holkham Estate reclaimed some 800 hectares of saltmarsh north-west of Wells with the building of a mile-long bank. This reclamation was claimed to have reduced the tidal scour though the West Fleet, which provided much of the water entered the channel to its north.

In the 19th century, malting assumed an industrial character dominated by merchants rather than hands-on maltsters. Eventually, the entire estate was acquired by F. & G. Smith who had maltings in Dereham and Great Ryburgh; they latterly bought out the competition becoming one of the biggest maltsters in the country. Following the First World War, demand began to fall and new methods of production were being used. After a local dispute, they closed the Wells operation down in 1929. Other agriculture-related enterprises, such as the local flour mill and the Ipswich-based Eastern Counties Farmers Cooperative, were, over the following years, bought out or closed. The post-war revival of the harbour trade made the quay a busy place from the 1960s to the 1990s. Small coasters, mostly from across the English Channel, brought in fertiliser and animal feed, latterly mostly soya beans until 1992 when changes in government regulations and the increasing size of vessels made the port uneconomic. Wind-farm support began in 2009, with the building of the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm. The transfer of operations to Yarmouth, on the closure of the facility in Wells in 2021, repeated the long-term pattern of opportunity and reversal in the town.

Tourism, which had begun on a small scale a century before, became a major draw; it was based on the Pinewoods Caravan site much expanded post-war first by the Town Council and subsequently by Holkham Estates. As with many coastal towns, the number of second homes resultant on the tourist trade has increased dramatically over the last few years, reaching over 34% in 2019.