Sizewell


Sizewell is an English fishing hamlet in the civil parish of Leiston and the East Suffolk district of Suffolk, England. It lies on the North Sea coast just north of the larger holiday village of Thorpeness and between the coastal towns of Aldeburgh and Southwold. It is east of the town of Leiston and belongs within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB. It is the site of two nuclear power stations with tentative plans for a third station to be built at the site.

Nuclear power stations

The village is the location of two separate nuclear power stations, the Magnox Sizewell A and Pressurized Water Reactor Sizewell B, which are readily visible to the north of the village. Sizewell A is decommissioned and stopped producing electricity in 2006. The decommissioning process is expected to take until 2027 to complete, with the site not expected to be cleared until 2098. There were plans to build a third nuclear power station at the site, but by May 2013 there were significant doubts about whether an agreement would be reached with the government.
"Chernobyl twinned with Sizewell" was a slogan used by anti-nuclear campaigners.

Sizewell Marshes

Sizewell Marshes is a 105.4-hectare biological Site of Special Scientific Interest on the edge of Sizewell, in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is part of a 144-hectare nature reserve managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust as Sizewell Belts. It is noted as one of the main wetlands in East Anglia for wildflowers.

History

The hall

The village became the nucleus of the Ogilvie estate in 1859. It extended as far south as Aldeburgh. Sizewell Hall, now used as a Christian conference centre, is still owned by the Ogilvie family. From the end of the war up to 1955 it housed a mixed, semi-progressive prep school attended among others by the theatre critic and biographer Sheridan Morley.

Wartime

The beach at Sizewell was the landing site of Henri Peteri and his brother Willem in September 1941. The brothers left the Dutch town of Katwijk in a collapsible canoe on a journey that took 56 hours.
Those who escaped occupied Holland were known as Engelandvaarders. About 1700 Engelandvaarders reached England, including about 200 men who reached England across the North Sea; 32 men tried to make a canoe trip like the Peteri brothers, but only eight succeeded in reaching the English coast.
In 2005, Henri Peteri commissioned a monument to the memory of the men who made the journey across the North Sea by canoe, consisting of a pair of crossed kayak oars and a broken paddle that commemorates those who did not survive the trip. In June 2009, the monument was unveiled by his widow on Sizewell Beach, together with the original kayak.
An inscription on the broken paddle reads:
In memory of the thirty-two young Dutchmen who tried to escape to England by kayak during World War II to join the Allied Forces. Eight of them reached the English coast. Only three survived the war.
The last living survivor dedicated this memorial to his brothers in arms who were less fortunate. He reached England – and freedom – on this beach on 21 September 1941.
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Historical writings

In 1870–72, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described the hamlet as
In 1887, John Bartholomew also wrote in the Gazetteer of the British Isles a shorter description of Sizewell:

Facilities

Sizewell retains a few basic services associated with tourism, including a refreshment kiosk and a public house, the Viking Arms. A handful of fishing boats operate from the beach.