England's South East Coast

-Haul away, guys. ALL:

-Heave! Two, six, heave!

We're back at the very edge of our isles.

But now, we're on a whole new kind of adventure.

A unique Great Guide to our coast.

But this is a guide beyond anything you'll find in your average

tourist brochure - a guide crammed with local knowledge,

amazing discoveries and stunning secret spots.

Coast and our expert crew have spent over ten years navigating

this ever-changing natural wonder.

And now, we're bringing it all together and more to give you

the ultimate guide to our coast.

We've selected eight stretches of British coast.

North, south, east, west and some of the best bits in between.

Each week, we'll be taking to the sea

in a remarkable array of boats and ships.

We'll have a completely fresh perspective on the coast,

we'll seek out charismatic characters...

-Andy, fancy seeing you here!

-..momentous events...

This is Britain's most deadly shoreline.

..secret spots and surprising stories.

There's no denying that there's a charge to be had from holding

something like this.

A brand-new view of our coast with all the inside info you need

to enjoy these shorelines like a local.

Haul away, sailors! Haul away!

This time, I'm heading for the Channel.

-This is Coast...

-The Great Guide.

England's south-east coast,

Britain's front line,

where chalk cliffs have withstood invaders,

natural defences bolstered by stone and steel forts to protect

the Thames Estuary and the ultimate prize - London.

In the capital's heart, next to Tower Bridge, sits a warship.

Towering over me is HMS Belfast - some size when you see it

from the water.

She was commissioned just days before

the outbreak of the Second World War and,

after sterling service in defence of the realm, she now sits as

a reminder of a war that brought Britain to the brink of invasion.

From that conflict, the Coast experts have found

extraordinary stories for our Great Guide.

We've got flames 40 feet in the air, black noxious smoke coming up,

covering the beach, even going over the cliffs!

If it was to go "boom", how big a boom would it be?

It would be a big bang.

LOUD BANG

Once, we defended it grimly.

Now, the south-east shore reaches out to the world.

In our Great Guide,

we'll see how a mountain of goods grows night and day.

I'll be hopping on and off boats, old and new,

on a journey from the Thames to the sea.

We're exploring a coast that's both a gateway and a defence.

This is our Great Guide to the South East, our front-line shoreline.

I'll embark from the capital,

stopping to explore the mega port at London Gateway,

on to Ramsgate's historic harbour and then Dover Castle.

On my journey, I'll compile our Great Guide from

a wider canvas of stories that stretch all the way

from the heart of London to Hastings.

My voyage begins on a very wet day in London.

I'm hitching a ride towards the open sea with the Marine Policing Unit.

These guys patrol along 47 miles of Thames 24/7.

A beat that takes in HMS Belfast.

Seeing such a big ship in Central London poses

a question for our guide - is the capital really on the coast?

They say, if in doubt, ask a policeman.

-Are these guys really coastal coppers?

-Absolutely.

We police 47 miles of tidal Thames and that tidal range is

nearly seven metres every time the tide comes in and goes out.

-We've seen dolphins, we've seen seals, up into Central London.

-Really?

It's funny to think that we're on the coast here,

the Thames being a tidal river, bringing the sea to the city.

It's a dangerous piece of water and it can travel at something like eight knots, 9mph,

through some of the tight sections throughout London.

London's tidal highway once brought ships to the capital,

laden with cargo from around the globe.

Caribbean sugar.

Chinese tea.

Norwegian ice.

And we celebrate London's Dockland history in our Great Guide.

Mark Horton found a surprisingly close connection that

generations of Eastenders had to the coast,

just a pebble's throw from the Tower of London.

Amazingly, this is where London has its very own beach.

# I do like to be beside the seaside... #

It was created in the 1930s for the working classes

by dumping sand on the foreshore.

Martha Snooks and Ted Lewis remember coming to the beach

as a special treat.

My dad and grandad was dockers.

That's the sort of family I come from.

We thought it was the seaside. Our mums told us it was the seaside.

Mum, she nearly believed it herself, that it was the seaside.

Bless her. She did. Yeah, she did.

That was exciting to us.

We'd go home with a windmill or something,

or one of those paper umbrellas.

We'd put them out and we'd think, "What a lovely day we've had," you know?

# Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside

# Oops, I do like to be... #

The Lost Beach of London goes into the Great Guide

we're compiling for the south-east coast.

I'm with the Thames Police,

powering past the Tower of London toward the sea.

London's wealth was built on its docks,

carved into the capital's heart.

These quaysides were only abandoned when modern container ships

grew too big.

But the city's been left a legacy by its old dockyards - their maritime police.

These coastal coppers on the Thames can claim to be the world's oldest police force.

Established in 1798, that's 31 years before the Metropolitan Police.

The first police force - they had to be in our Great Guide.

The Thames Police used to patrol the docks in rowing boats.

Now, they outpace the squad cars.

This particular boat is a Tiger 37.

It has a speed range of up to 45 knots, nearly 50mph.

-So, much faster than London traffic.

-Absolutely.

You normally associate London police force with like sirens and vehicles.

It's very different down here on the river, I'd imagine.

It is. The Metropolitan Police are around 30,000 cops.

There's 63 of us that are able to work on the river.

It's kind of a bit abstract, really, to think of a police force floating on the water.

-It must be quite a job.

-Best job in the world.

The Thames is a working river that's worked hard to clean up its act.

# Dirty old river, must you keep rolling

# Flowing into the night... #

Water quality is the best its ever been.

For our Guide, we've picked a new riverside nature reserve at Mucking Marshes.

Remarkable because this used to be one of Europe's biggest landfill sites.

Ten years ago, it was a dump.

The green transformation of this trash heap earns it

a place in our Great Guide.

A steady stream of barges used to bring one-fifth

of London's rubbish to Mucking Marshes for landfill,

but operations manager Lucy Mancer managed to see the brighter side.

It's hostile, in terms of the environment,

but it's a nice place to work, in terms of people and things to do.

Each of our containers holds around about 12-14 tonnes

of compacted waste. We get 20-30 containers on a barge.

Working here at Mucking can be very dusty, a bit dirty,

and occasionally a bit smelly.

Ten years on, landfill has become nature reserve.

120 acres of marshes and mudflats

that are home to protected birds and rare insects.

The rubbish buried under excavated soil

from London's tunnelling projects

now a peaceful haven on the busy river.

The Thames is my highway to the sea.

This is our Coast Great Guide to the South-East.

On my voyage to compile extraordinary locations

for the Guide, familiar London landmarks like the Thames Barrier pass by.

But I'm seeking a newcomer to the coast.

A massive building project

that lies beyond the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge.

As I make my way out to Dover, my next stop is London Gateway,

where the capital now welcomes the world's biggest ships.

A whopping 95% of the UK's international trade

is carried by ship.

Around £700 billion worth and counting.

It costs tens of pence to import a pair of jeans from Asia

and about £2 for a television.

To drive costs down, container ships get larger and larger.

How can our ports cope with the new mega ships?

Need a bigger boat? Build a bigger dock.

Welcome to London Gateway.

I'm jumping ship to explore this colossal project.

In total, the site is twice the size of the city of London.

The shiny new quayside sits on 30 million cubic metres of sand

dredged up from the estuary.

It's built out the shoreline by 400m.

How did they redevelop this stretch of coast on such a massive scale?

We were there from the very beginning.

Five years ago, Nick Crane was at London Gateway.

To get the mega ships in meant digging an underwater channel.

# London calling to the faraway towns... #

This is Marieke, a dredger laying the foundations

for a brand-new port, the first of its kind for 20 years.

This ship is sucking up 12,000 cubic metres of sand and gravel

from the estuary every day.

The Marieke is a giant vacuum cleaner,

clearing a channel in the bed of the Thames.

A passage deep enough to accommodate supersized container ships.

This dredged material is being pumped on to an ever-growing

artificial island.

Eventually, it's going to be a wharf some two miles long for

loading and unloading ships.

That was the start of the dock five years ago.

Fast forward to now and a whole new stretch of coast

has been created here by man.

The monster cranes to unload the container ships,

even they arrived by sea, after a three month voyage from China.

Each 2,000 tonne crane was floated into place.

The cost for the whole site is £1.5 billion.

Because the goods from sea trade touch all our lives,

we've put this new stretch of coast in our Great Guide.

Chief executive Cameron Thorpe is thinking big for his new mega dock.

All of our berths are capable

of handling the largest container vessels afloat.

Now, ships are 400m long, they need deeper water, and for example,

on the 1st of January this year,

we handled the fullest container ship ever - 18,601 containers,

and if you stacked all of those containers on top of each other,

it would be more than five times higher than Mount Everest.

And it came in on one vessel?

One ship bringing all of those containers.

It called at five ports in China, it called at Singapore, and then straight into UK,

and that just shows how important the UK market is to world trade.

The south-east of the UK is the largest consumer market in Europe

by disposable income. We have a port that can service that need,

as well as servicing the rest of the UK as well.

I'm staying for a while to explore

how containers get from ship to shore.

I'll discover the skills needed to master a mega crane,

but before I go aloft, exploring this harbour

reminds me of a little curiosity from another dock

I can't resist adding to our Great Guide.

A brick wall like no other.

Some 200 years ago,

Sheerness harbour received unexpected, live cargo.

Stowaways on a ship full of masonry from Italy.

Now, these bricks at Sheerness house Britain's only family of scorpions.

And the offspring of those Italian scorpions

now have a British admirer.

Hi, I'm Bex and I'm a scorpaholic.

I've been fascinated by scorpions since I was

a teenager and been hooked ever since.

I'm here to see Britain's only colony of scorpions,

but I've got to wait for the sun to go down.

I'm using a UV torch cos scorpions glow under ultraviolet light

and I think I've just spotted one.

Definitely an adult.

Probably out looking for something to eat.

It is pretty cool though, having scorpions in the UK.

They are a member of the spider family.

They have got eight legs, not six. They eat woodlouse.

They're ambush predators, so they will just sit and wait.

I think I'll put this one back before it legs it.

Bye, little fella.

I'm exploring how they manage the nonstop flow of containers

at London Gateway,

a new £1.5 billion concrete stretch of shoreline.

To pay back its huge investment, London Gateway runs 24/7.

The real business end of this enterprise

are the cranes and their operators.

To see the mega port from their perspective, the only way is up.

What a place!

How many cranes have a lift?

Not a bad commute to work.

Off to visit the driver.

Ooh. I don't know where button number three takes you.

It says authorised personnel only.

I think that's when you explode out of the top of the crane!

I've been told that when the lift stops, there's going to be a jolt.

-Hi there.

-Hello.

-My name's Tess.

-I'm Ricky.

-Nice to meet you. How are you doing?

-Nice to meet you too.

That is glass, but I presume we're allowed to stand on it.

Yeah, there's a grid. Oh, my goodness!

-This is quite terrifying actually. How high up are we?

-60m.

-Do you ever get a bit nervous?

-Nah. You get used to it after a while.

OK, so what are you looking at down there?

I'm picking these containers up here

-and I'm going to load them on that ship.

-OK.

And you've got this, like a big claw is holding on to the container.

-Basically, yeah.

-And that red light - what does it say?

That tells us it's locked on.

-And then come over the ship...

-Right, OK.

-Oh, my goodness! We're right out to sea now.

-That's it, yeah.

-We're right on the end of the crane at the moment?

-No, we can go a little bit further.

-Can you?

-We're not going to fall off the end?

-No, we're not going to fall off the end.

-OK.

-It's like some weird computer game, isn't it, really?

-A big computer game, yeah.

You've even got the levers with the coloured buttons.

The cranes are the biggest in Europe.

Your depth perception's got to be that bit better,

-so you don't make mistakes.

-And now, you're going to plop it back down?

-Plop it back down.

-Makes me feel a bit sick. Do you feel a bit sick, looking down there?

-No, like I say, you do get used to it.

-What's it got in it?

Oh, you don't know. But they can come up to 30 tonne.

Obviously, where we've got the tandem spreader,

we can pick two of these up at the same time.

Ricky, I was really looking forward to the view today and I know

the weather's against us, but I think you also need

-to get a window cleaner in.

-I'd say so, too.

-Can't see much out of them, can you?

-No!

Ricky's got his work cut out, with the largest ships

each as long as four football fields,

delivering over 18,000 containers for unloading.

Big numbers count here at Gateway.

It's plain to see the prosperity the sea can deliver,

but as we bring you the Great Guide to the south-east coast,

there's another story.

This shore's also been at the front line of fighting off invasion.

To explore that history of conflict,

my Thames journey will take me onward from London Gateway to Dover.

Just off my route is a wartime relic impossible to ignore - a shipwreck.

Three mast tops poking up in the water give away the wreck below.

A sunken ship surrounded by warning signs for a very good reason.

This wreck is a potential time bomb,

full of munitions from the Second World War.

In 1944, an American cargo ship packed with bombs

sank off the south coast during a storm.

Now, more than 70 years later, hidden below the water,

the hold of the wrecked vessel is still packed with 1,400 tonnes

of high explosives.

Too risky to move, the USS Richard Montgomery

is Britain's most dangerous shipwreck,

sitting in Britain's busiest estuary.

And she's in our Great Guide.

Neil went to discover what would happen

if the Richard Montgomery were to blow.

The wreck's just there.

You can see her masts, sticking out of the water just there.

-And she was fully laden with...

-Fully laden with explosives.

-All sorts of spectacular fireworks.

-Lots of things that go bang, yes.

-Right.

Stevedores were able to unload the rear holds of the wreck,

but the front still contains a bewildering array of corroding bombs.

If you look at, say, a 1,000 pound bomb,

which was their standard big bomb

dropped from a heavy bomber, she's got thousands of them on board.

500 pound bombs, thousands. If you leave them there, they're fine.

The water keeps them cool, keeps them happy.

There are some more dangerous things on board.

There's cluster bombs,

which were actually loaded with fuses inside them.

Because of the difficulty in clearing the wreck,

it's been left where it sank.

If it was to go boom, how big a boom would it be?

It would be a big bang.

It's a big if, but if the worst were to happen...

EXPLOSION

..the explosion would equal the force of a small atomic bomb.

Government experts estimate that the blast would throw debris

3,000m into the air and a subterranean shockwave

could damage buildings up to 3km inland.

The seismic jolt would be measurable around the globe.

Any explosion is extremely unlikely.

Whilst the wreck sits securely on the seabed,

the safest thing to do is leave it there.

Regular scans by the Maritime And Coastguard Agency

reveal the Richard Montgomery is still largely intact.

The south-east coast keeps more wartime secrets

than any other stretch of our shoreline.

We hunted for an enemy submarine 100 years old.

In the First World War, 3,000 Allied ships were sunk by U-boats.

After 1918, most U-boats were scrapped.

We found an amazing survivor of the Great War for our Great Guide.

On the River Medway,

naval historian Nick Hewitt went to discover what remains.

That is absolutely amazing.

Sitting here for 100 years.

So I never thought I'd get the chance to touch a U-boat,

and that's still pretty impressively intact steel plate.

It's hard to imagine, now, because it's just sitting here and

it looks so decayed and quiet and peaceful, in a funny sort of way.

When these submarines were handed over to civilian scrap merchants,

the deal was that they had to be demilitarised,

which involved removing the conning towers,

removing the torpedo tubes, obviously,

so that it was completely harmless.

I'm standing on a U-boat!

HE LAUGHS

Here in the Medway, just about 40 miles from London,

the only wrecked U-boat you can see from British shores.

This is Coast Great Guide to the South-East.

To discover hidden stories,

our expert team have scoured this shore for over ten years.

But if you were on a whistle-stop tour,

what are the unmissable, must-see sights

to say you've seen this coast?

This is our flying visit to the south-east.

This is where I've come from.

The coast in central London.

It might be Britain's most expensive real estate,

but the dramatic skyline is there for anyone to enjoy.

Not far downstream is Canary Wharf

and the O2 Arena,

originally built for the millennium celebrations in 2000,

now served by boats from central London.

The Thames meanders its way to the sea.

Commuters crossing at the QE II Bridge,

where two road tunnels also run under the water.

Combined, they make up Britain's busiest estuary crossing,

with around 50 million vehicles a year.

Further down the river is London Gateway.

This is where the Thames estuary really begins to open up,

and seaside resorts start to take precedence.

On the north coast, you find Southend-On-Sea,

which sports the world's longest pleasure pier.

It stretches for nearly a mile and a half,

with its own train line.

Why build such a whopping pier at Southend?

Nick Crane's kind of question.

The answer lies in Southend's geology.

More than a mile of this slippery stuff

lies between the water's edge and dry land.

Until the pier was built, large passenger boats

carrying Londoners out of the city simply sailed straight past.

John Betjeman describes it perfectly.

"The pier is Southend, and Southend is the pier."

And on the southern shore, here's Whitstable,

where Neil discovered an odd competition with oyster shells.

Oh, my goodness. It's Moby Dick in there.

OK, down the hatch.

Hereabouts, the children don't make sandcastles.

They build something called a Grotter,

tottering towers made from oyster shells.

No-one's quite sure how it started, but their construction

usually coincides with the ancient feast day of St James in July.

At the end of it, these miniature shrines are offered up to the sea

to be washed away by the tide.

And further along, almost on the tip of the south-east, is Margate.

At the end of the beach is the Turner Contemporary,

a modern art gallery,

on the site where artist William Turner used to visit

in the 19th century.

Heading south from Margate,

a chalk line starts to draw along the shoreline.

If you carry on, there's a must-see sight,

a favourite of the Coast Great Guide.

Dungeness.

A pebble heaven that's decidedly otherworldly and odd,

where a lighthouse sits next to a nuclear power station

and visitors come by train.

Miniature train.

When they arrive, there is a rather weird world to explore.

Little fishing shacks sit next to abandoned railway carriages.

Looks like this one's had a few mod cons attached.

So here we are in the railway carriage.

All aboard the train now leaving Platform Dungeness. It's fantastic.

That's correct, yes.

How much do you know about this original railway carriage?

It's an 1880s non-smoking first-class Pullman

from the New Cross line.

So once upon a time, this was chuntering through suburban London?

Absolutely.

At the end of our front-line coast is a site

that's synonymous with invasion.

Hastings. 1066 and all that.

Just beyond is the final stop for our flying visit.

The De La Warr Pavilion,

a modernist masterpiece from 1935, now an arts centre

and one of the largest galleries on the south-east coast.

But if you only do the unmissable sights,

then you're missing so much.

On my journey to Dover, the next port of call will be Ramsgate

for a tale of desperate rescue in the Second World War.

A conflict that's left other remarkable sites dotted around

the south-east shore, as the Coast team discovered.

When Hitler occupied the French coast,

he eyed his chance to invade across the Channel.

But some inventive minds were busy devising secret plans

for our defence.

Going into our Great Guide are three visionary men.

Each pioneered a remarkable scheme to combat invasion.

Three Coast experts investigated.

First, from the 1930s, the sound mirrors at Denge.

Massive concrete walls to reflect the sound

of approaching enemy bombers, built before radar.

An early warning system to hear the enemy planes before you saw them.

Nick Crane led a team with listening gear.

I'm getting something! I can hear it!

And some spikes.

I can't hear a thing without them on.

Definitely the Tiger Moth.

PLANE ENGINE

There it is! Right above us, at last.

-Tucker's machine beat the human ear by a long way.

-Yeah, it did.

That was fantastic.

William Tucker worked for over 20 years perfecting the sound mirrors.

But virtually overnight,

the invention of radar made them obsolete.

You can visit these elegant structures.

They sit on a nature reserve,

and the RSPB have arranged guided tours to this protected site.

The next site for our Great Guide?

Another innovation to defend against air attacks.

Six miles off the coast near Whitstable,

the Red Sands forts from the Second World War.

Anti-aircraft guns positioned on the towers

shot down enemy planes over the sea.

The forts were the brainchild of this man, Guy Maunsell.

Assembled on land,

each 750 tonne tower was floated out and dropped onto the seabed.

An ingenious design that Neal experienced.

Every now and again, you can feel the whole thing move,

and that's because 750 tonnes or not,

the strength of the fort comes from the fact that the legs can move,

they can settle into the constantly shifting sand,

and they can roll with the waves and the wind, much like a tree does.

They say that even if one of the legs was blown out,

the individual tower would still remain standing.

I don't really fancy trying that, myself.

You can see the forts from the sea.

Although there's no public access,

plans have been "floated" to turn them into a luxury hotel.

Our final invention was tested in 1940 at the White Cliffs,

a desperate Second World War plan to fight a German invasion.

Lord Hankey led the top-secret Petroleum Warfare Department.

His idea?

Set the Channel on fire

and engulf the enemy landing craft in flames.

Scientists set about testing the scheme.

Engineer Dick Strawbridge saw how they planned to make the sea burn

with a mix of petrol and oil.

-So it's a cocktail?

-Yes.

-Right, OK.

What's happening now is this petrol, as it burns, it generates heat,

and that heat is absorbed by the oils,

and they will start to vaporise and burn as well.

-The water is bubbling.

-Yep.

Wow.

That's the actual water turning into steam and bubbling out.

Yeah. The sea on fire.

The tests worked.

They were even filmed,

so scientists could study the weapon and make adjustments.

This was fire on an unprecedented scale.

Just imagine it.

We've got flames 40 feet in the air,

black noxious smoke coming up, covering the beach,

even going over the cliffs.

Lord Hankey, master of fire, made his flaming sea scheme work.

But fortunately, the Channel never did burn in anger.

The invasion never came.

Yet stories of wartime struggle still swirl around this shore,

as I'm about to discover.

This is the Coast Great Guide to the South-East.

On my journey from London down to Dover Castle,

I've arrived at Ramsgate.

I'm here to meet an improbable hero of our front-line shore.

Not a person,

but a boat.

This small port played a pivotal part in saving Britain

in her darkest hour.

On 27 May 1940, the Admiralty contacted boat builders

around the south-east coast.

It was a frantic search for small craft

to rescue the British Army at Dunkirk.

Operation Dynamo had begun.

A struggle so vital to the fate of a free Britain,

it must feature in our Coast Great Guide.

Some 700 private boats were pressed into military service.

They became known as the little ships.

How did the little ships help save

the British Army and Britain at Dunkirk?

Here's one of those heroic craft.

-Hello!

-Good morning.

-Permission to come aboard, Vice Commodore?

-Absolutely.

Simon Palmer is Vice Commodore

of the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships,

and owner of this motor yacht, Hilfranor.

How did this pleasure cruiser become a battle cruiser?

Douglas Tough, who had a boat yard in Teddington on the Thames,

he was instructed to gather little boats to take them down the Thames.

And the Hilfranor was picked up there. They were given maps,

and each of the boats was issued with an Admiralty compass.

I do know, however, that one of the boats

was issued with the Daily Telegraph road map of Europe,

so that they could find Dunkirk.

The little ships assembled in Ramsgate...

..whilst at Dunkirk on the beaches, the British Army were trapped,

surrounded by overwhelming German forces.

The Allies fought valiantly,

but their only hope was rescue from the sea.

But why did the mighty Royal Navy need little ships like Hilfranor?

Because these troops were being taken off the beach,

the little ships could get right in,

so that the troops could clamber aboard straight from the beach

and they would then ferry them out to the larger vessels.

The little ships took Allied troops a few at a time

to bigger craft offshore,

a seemingly impossible rescue.

Saving the army would take days.

The Luftwaffe's air attacks were relentless.

Eventually, Hilfranor's luck ran out.

She was attacked by a German Stuka dive bomber.

A couple of bombs came either side of her,

and they cracked her ribs and she began sinking.

So she was then abandoned on the beach.

And the story goes that some really desperate troops bailed her out,

got the engines going, got her floated and,

bailing all the way, came back to Ramsgate

only to sink about two miles over there on the Goodwin Sands.

And then she was rescued and pulled in by a minesweeper.

-So a real struggle in the face of adversity.

-That's right.

Against all odds, in just eight days, in total,

an astonishing 338,000 Allied troops were rescued.

A third of a million men.

Winston Churchill hailed it as a "miracle of deliverance."

Well, Churchill spoke on the day after the operation came to an end,

on the fourth of June, one of his most famous speeches.

And that was only a few hours after the last vessel

had come back from Dunkirk.

We shall fight on the beaches,

we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

we shall fight in the hills.

We shall never surrender.

Most of the life-saving little ships came from the south-east coast.

Many were fishing boats, traditional craft like those at Hastings.

Today, you'll still find small boats holed up on the shingle.

This is home to Europe's largest beach-launched fishing fleet,

which lands Hastings a place in our Great Guide.

In summer, the fishermen target a sustainable catch of Dover sole.

To snare the flatfish, they use special nets,

as Miranda Krestovnikoff discovered.

-This is one of your trammel nets, then?

-Yes, this is a trammel net.

How exactly does it work?

Fish comes swimming along near the bottom,

goes through the larger outer mesh,

hits the inner mesh, and then that forms a pocket behind the fish.

It's like a system of traps.

Flatfish are most active when it's dark,

so the trammel nets have to be left out overnight.

We're off to check the nets for Dover sole,

and it takes a while.

Each boat is painstakingly launched using ropes,

winches and bulldozers.

It looks as if they've hardly caught anything.

In fact, with their trammel nets,

they've managed to target exactly what they were after.

Flatfish.

Working with the rhythms of nature in small boats with specialist nets

doesn't bring in a huge catch.

But it has brought other benefits.

Fish stocks here have remained healthy,

in some cases increasing.

Which means the ancient beach fleet of Hastings could be here

for the long haul.

I'm on a journey to Dover for our Coast Great Guide.

I've boarded Hilfranor,

one of the little ships that helped rescue the British Army at Dunkirk.

Nearly eight decades on,

Simon Palmer treasures this historic craft.

It's a real honour to be an owner of a Dunkirk ship.

The hero is the ship, we are merely the custodians.

And we try to remind people of the Dunkirk spirit,

and everything that happened in 1940.

To honour the sacrifice of those at Dunkirk,

the owners of the little ships gather their craft for reunions,

poignant events that have a special place in our Great Guide.

We go back to commemorate every five years,

so the last time was in 2015,

and we meet up every year at the time of Dunkirk,

and the vessels will come from all over the country

and we'll spend some time and we have a service to commemorate

those brave men who gave their lives.

How many vessels still exist?

Do you know what the survival rate is?

We think about 700 little ships went across,

and we think there's about 120 ships left.

But not all of them are seaworthy.

When we go across to Dunkirk, we have about 50.

I think it's so apt that the little ships like the Hilfranor

still brave the seas in all weathers,

and are not kept as dusty museum pieces.

My voyage on Hilfranor has brought home the mighty wartime achievement

of these tiny boats.

But now, as she returns to Ramsgate,

the final leg of my journey is on foot.

Our guide to the south-east wouldn't be complete

without a walk on the chalk.

The high spot of this coast, from land or sea.

Even on a day like today, no mariner could miss or mistake

this outstanding white line drawn in chalk.

These cliffs contain secrets to explore.

We dug deep into the chalk for the Coast Great Guide.

It's a surprise that England and France were once linked by land.

To begin when the water rushed in and the white cliffs were born,

you've got to go back over half a million years

to when an ice age was ending.

Nick Crane and geologist Rory Mortimore

did some time travelling back to the birth of the English Channel.

If you were here, say, 600,000 years ago,

you'd have been able to walk on chalk downland...

-All the way across there.

-..all the way across the Channel.

And how was the Channel formed?

By a cataclysmic geological event, Nick.

A very spectacular event,

what we call a mega-flood.

That mega-flood started as a trickle through a chalk ridge

that spanned the Channel.

This ridge was holding back a colossal lake,

fed by meltwater from glaciers across northern Europe,

and soon to become the North Sea.

When the chalk gave way, it was catastrophic.

It must have been a very extraordinary event,

a very dramatic event,

and would have happened in a very short space of time.

That would have isolated Britain from Europe for the very first time.

In that geological divorce, we shared the chalk with France.

Across the Channel are the white cliffs of Normandy.

Just as on our chalk coast,

the sea constantly nibbles away at the crumbling French cliffs.

At La Porte d'Aval,

the waves have worn away a wonderful arch.

You can see why it's described as an elephant

dunking its trunk in the sea.

On both sides of the Channel,

the chalk puts on a spectacular show.

It's such an outstanding feature,

it begs a basic question for our guide to this coast.

The White Cliffs stand out along our southern shore,

but what exactly is chalk?

Funny to think these crumbling cliffs

are actually made up of microscopic sea creatures,

countless tiny chalk shells compressed together.

The cliffs built up over millennia, but they're eroding fast.

What's eating away at them?

To assess the threats to this national treasure for our guide,

Nick dropped down to the chalkface, braving the elements.

Too late to go to the loo now.

OK.

Well, once you go over the top, Rory,

you get a completely different idea of what chalk looks like,

cos above, all you're doing is walking on grass.

You've got no idea of the complexity and wonder of soft rock.

-Of the beautiful white chalk, absolutely right.

-It's fantastic.

So what type of chalk is this?

Round here, we call it Seaford chalk.

It's about 70, 75 million years old.

And the sea's a white surf bashing against that seaworn chalk.

-Yes, indeed.

-Very beautiful.

But also very destructive.

From here, it's easy to see how the waves and weather

eat away at the soft chalk.

But these cliffs have another, much more surprising enemy.

These limpets graze on the algae that's on the rock

when the tide is up. But when the tide goes down,

they go back to their original resting places, and they secrete

an acid so they can create a space and attach themselves to the rock.

And that is actually dissolving away the chalk.

So these little critters

are actually sabotaging the White Cliffs of the English Channel?

I'm afraid they are, yes.

Eaten by limpets, battered by waves,

cracked by ice.

The chalk is on the front line of a constant battle against erosion.

But it keeps the surface fresh, clean and sparkling white.

My cliff journey's coming to an end.

I'm closing in on my destination

that, for most, marks the beginning of a voyage.

Dover.

With 13 million passengers a year,

and 9,000 freight vehicles a day,

Dover's the world's busiest harbour.

And since 1994, you can travel under the sea.

But the idea of a tunnel goes back much further.

It's the forgotten remains of the Victorian Channel Tunnel

that are in our Great Guide.

-Very forensic.

-Yeah.

-Like a crime scene.

Civil engineer Richard Storer showed Neil

how far the Victorian tunnelers got.

All right.

It's hidden away at the end of a ventilation shaft, and apparently

we need all this protective gear just to get in there.

Mind the floor. All right, so this is it.

-Oh, look at that!

-This is absolutely amazing, isn't it?

Unbelievable.

It's been here for about 130 years.

It's perfect. It looks like a modern job.

For some reason, I was expecting it to look hand cut.

Oh, no, no, it was cut with a machine. Like a big drill.

And the beauty of it is it's unlined, it's just the bare rock

that you can see.

It just shows the strength of the chalk,

the integrity of the chalk.

Have a look at this. A bit of original graffiti.

Oh, that's fantastic.

This tunnel was...

-Was begun...

-I think he had difficulty spelling "begun", because...

-Spelling's not his strong suit.

-No. In 1880.

-A date!

And a name, William Sharp.

And a name... How much better is that than a brass plaque?

It's wonderful. Absolutely amazing.

But in 1882, the government closed the tunnel,

worried an underground link to Europe would weaken

the defence of our front-line coast.

The shortest sea crossing to France has always been closely guarded.

Dover's defences are known as the key to England,

and this is the country's largest castle.

A stone fortress has stood here for nine centuries.

But there's a much older historic treasure,

from an age when Britain was the outpost of a foreign empire.

Sitting next to Dover Castle is this,

the Roman Pharos,

or lighthouse to you and me.

It's a towering achievement,

and well worth a place in the Coast Great Guide.

Built almost 2,000 years ago following the Roman invasion,

Roy Porter from English Heritage is now keeper of the light.

-Roy, this is staggering.

-Indeed, it really is, isn't it? Yeah.

-Yeah. Lovely to meet you, by the way.

-And you.

-I was so distracted.

-Is it really original Roman?

-It really is.

I mean, we're so used to seeing Roman remains in this country

which are about, you know, four foot off the ground, aren't we?

And here we are, standing in front of this huge,

12 metre high Roman structure.

And most of it really is Roman.

I mean, this must be one of the tallest Roman structures in Britain.

It's the tallest Roman structure in Britain.

Topped with a little bit of 15th century masonry,

which was part of the belfry for the church next door.

We commonly associate Dover with its castle,

but not so much with the lighthouse.

Well, the lighthouse was one of two at Dover, and they appear to

have been located on either side of the entrance to the Roman harbour.

You have to recall that this area was as strategically important then

as it was in subsequent centuries.

It would have been a place for trade, and so the lighthouses here

were there, basically, to guide ships into the harbour.

So it's the tallest Roman structure in Britain,

and it's the only surviving Roman lighthouse?

Yes, that's right.

Gosh, that is a strikingly fresh colour, that rust brick, isn't it?

It really is. You can see the pink,

there's some pink mortar next to that.

Looks positively 1960s, doesn't it?

It does. I can assure you it's not.

It really is Roman brick.

And you'll find that there are Roman bricks used in all the arches

of the openings, and there are layers of brick interlacing

the masonry, as you go up the building, sort of tying it together.

It's just an exquisite little number, isn't it?

It really is, yes.

-It's like walking back in time. Can we go inside?

-Yes.

Gosh, this really is something else, isn't it?

Pretty spectacular, isn't it, really?

You get a real sense of the scale from inside.

That's partly because what you're seeing

is this big empty vessel, today.

But what I want you to imagine

is you're standing underneath a series of timber decks.

If you imagine climbing a series of ladders

-to get to the top of this building...

-Yes.

..at the very top there would have been a platform,

where there would have been a brazier,

and it was that burning brazier which provided the lights

which guided the shipping into the harbour.

And it must have been a big fire.

Cos if you want to make an impression out at sea,

and you're wanting to penetrate fog or something,

you need quite a blaze.

You need quite a blaze, and you need it to be fairly high as well,

so that people can see it from some distance out in the English Channel.

So, we're very lucky, in fact, to have a structure like this.

Phenomenally lucky.

And I think it fully justifies the statement made by

the famous archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who said

this was the most impressive Roman building north of the Alps.

-Did he really?

-He did.

Our Roman invaders who built this lighthouse

went on to establish Londinium,

where I started my journey.

The tidal Thames brought in their trading boats.

Now, the world's biggest container ships dock

within striking distance of the capital.

On this shore, it's been a story of commerce and conflict,

where sites of desperate defence are preserved...

..and there's a precious reminder of Roman conquest.

This Roman lighthouse has stood proud for two millennia,

an ancient beacon that brought ships safely to shore

and now an outstanding sight in our Great Guide to the South-East.