Where next for our coastal research?

Academics will generally jump at the chance to share their knowledge and research findings with politicians and policymakers and those of us working at the Centre for Coastal Communities are no exception!

In early September, the coastal classification research team travelled to Westminster, the heart of policymaking in the UK, to co-host an event with Lord Bassam of Brighton at the House of Lords. The event provided an opportunity to share the initial findings of our research project exploring the challenges facing England’s coastal communities. The research team was encouraged to see so many representatives from local authorities, the VCSE sector, think tanks and academic researchers present as well as some peers and MPs.

The event marked the culmination of more than three years’ research to create a policy-orientated classification of coastal towns and cities across England and launch a new open repository of data on the Coastal England Small Area (CESA) data portal, both of which were showcased at the event.

The question, now, is where next?

Firstly, this research contributes to the growing recognition that coastal communities face unique challenges. More than 10 million people live in England’s coastal communities and the 2025 Indices of Deprivation show that there is a shift in deprivation towards coastal areas. For decades, governments and policymakers have had a mental map of a country split between the north/south divide but evidence increasingly points to a centre/periphery divide: the 2019 House of Lords report on The Future of Seaside Towns, the Chief Medical Officer’s Annual Report 2021 and On the Waterfront, a report commissioned by the Key Cities network in 2025.

Secondly, as more attention is paid to the rise in inequality along the coast, the factors behind this inequality and how it can be tackled, we have argued for some time that a new geodemographic classification for the coast is required. Hopefully, the new coastal classification we have developed will – over time – become a tool that can help tackle the deep-rooted, structural issues coastal communities face: low productivity and wages, poorer population health outcomes, lower educational outcomes, low provision of social housing and issues with housing affordability.

Creating the new coastal classification meant engaging with a diverse range of stakeholders in local and central government as well as the NHS, VCSE sector, and the Office of National Statistics (ONS). This helped guide our selection of variables that could help identify the impact of factors on coastal communities. Some examples of these variables include: second home ownership, educational outcomes and public health data. The research team then analysed and classified the particular economic, social, cultural, historical, and geographic characteristics that define each coastal community, which datasets to use and what the classification methodology would be.

This new coastal classification methodology was based on 2021 LSOAs and the team evaluated cluster solutions using statistical measures and substantive interpretation of the resulting groups. We selected five super clusters for the classification and then split the super clusters into sub-clusters:

Higher status professional communities:
Higher income and highly skilled, employment in education, public administration or defence, lower levels of social and private renting (n=2342 LSOAs).

Challenged family communities:
Young families and child carers, child and youth educational disadvantage, growing ethnic diversity, social renting, employment in admin support services (n=2012 LSOAs).

Communities facing socioeconomic hardship:
Poorer health, long-term unemployment, employment in manufacturing, affordable housing, poor community and civic infrastructure and poor digital connectivity (n=2256 LSOAs).

Urban diverse communities:
Ethnic diversity, recent migrants, students, private renting, flats, employment in food and accommodation services, NTE, crime and active travel (n=1089 LSOAs).

Rural tourist and agricultural communities:
Second homes, holiday lets, visitor economies, SMEs/self-employment, p-t work, unequal housing, higher risk of flooding, and accessibility challenges (n=1512 LSOAs).

Crucially, the data used in the creation of the new coastal classification methodology can now be accessed on a new, openly available and geographically granular repository of data, the Coastal England Small Area (CESA) data portal. The portal also hosts a wide range of data at sub-local authority level; this data has not previously been available for coastal areas.

Our hope is that the classification and CESA portal could be a gamechanger for coastal communities. We have sought to give policymakers insights into the nature of coastal inequality, as well as the tools to understand and explore the extent of the issues facing coastal communities. Hopefully, it should help national, regional and local policymakers strategically address coastal inequalities and help make the case for a better allocation of policy and resources to our seaside communities.

It should also be helpful to local organisations and community groups in identifying and sharing best practice and targeting resources for interventions. For academic researchers, it is hoped that both the classification and portal will help make studies actionable and more consistent as they reduce the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and develop a new classification for every research project.

For now, the research team will continue testing the new classification, in conjunction with local and national stakeholders, including the ONS, but anyone interested in finding out more about the project can register their interest on the Centre for Coastal Communities website (https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/coastal-communities).