Peter Barber Architects

8000 Mile Island

I’ve been thinking about an idea, still brewing , not yet fully formed, called 8,000 Mile Island…. The idea encompasses the notion of a countrywide  aquacultural and maritime industrial revolution that would see a ribbon of tidal barrages, off-shore wind farms, giant floating tidal turbines, deep sea fish and seaweed  farms…. tracing our coastline from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight and back. Such a project would bring renewed prosperity to our decaying, depopulated coastal towns and cities. It also offers a vision of a food and energy self sufficient UK  and an end to the housing crisis.

8,000 Mile island arises out of a number of questions and observations.

1. Could we be energy self-sufficient? We currently import half of our energy, most of it in the form of gas and oil from tin-pot dictators in the Middle East for generating clean green energy. It is the windiest country in Europe and it has the most powerful tides in the world - (a giant 15 metres tidal range off the Welsh coast).

2. Could we be food self-sufficient? Over half of our food is currently transported from overseas. Half of that comes from beyond the EU. The globalised food industry has the UK firmly in its grasp -food mile madness, collapsing biodiversity, small farmers displaced, pesticide run off, deforestation. This is a global industry sweeping aside local, even national interests for maximum profit and one which is blind to the climate crisis. The UK has an 8,000 mile coastline. Our land area is 95,000 square miles but  our territorial waters extend to 3 times that. Imagine a revolution in maritime food production.

3. The extraordinary Rampion Offshore Wind Farm located off the south coast and visible from the beaches of  Brighton and Hove currently generates energy for 350,000 homes. It cost 1 billion pounds to build. One hundred wind farms of a similar scale could satisfy the domestic energy requirements of the UK’s 35 million homes. The cost of all these? 100 billion pounds- or the same as HS2. Wind power currently satisfies 50% of our domestic energy consumption. Lets finish the job.

4. Lets end the housing crisis once and for all. It’s easy. Refurbish 400,000 empty Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses in the midlands, in the north and in our coastal towns, as homes  for these new industries’ incoming workforce. Let’s redeploy the million people needlessly employed in housing construction in the south east to the making of 8,000 Mile Island. 

Picture this: build one hundred 400 megawatt off-shore wind farms and range them around our shores. Interlace them with thousands of floating tidal energy turbines out at sea. Construct enormous tidal lagoons in our estuaries. Put miniature community-run cottage-industry wave power machines and little barrages on rocky out crops and inlets on our shoreline in  Cornwall, the Hebrides and Cumbria.

Let’s intersperse these offshore energy industries with enormous seaweed farms. These are already under construction off the coast of Norfolk, North Yorkshire and in the South West. Seaweed carbon sinks Amazonian in their scale producing food, a source of energy and munching carbon as they go. Give us hundreds of deep sea coastal oyster beds, mussel farms, fish and lobster hatcheries, floating fish farms in the deep ocean producing hundreds of the thousands of tonnes of food and millions of gallons of fish shit fertilizer for supply to aquaponic farms.

Construct maritime research stations in a necklace around these islands. Link them to our coastal universities adding to and sharing knowledge of these nascent technologies and processes for the benefit of everyone.

Imagine existing fishing fleets - their local knowledge, their knowhow and equipment co-opted in to these burgeoning industries. Employ the infrastructure already existing in the UK’s declining off-shore oil and ship-building industries in Hull, Inverness and on the Clyde and think of thousands of new jobs in tired old Blackpool, Margate, St Leonards, Southend-on Sea, Newhaven. Think of the Housing ‘industry’ redeployed away from the south east and charged with  saving and restoring hundreds of thousands of empty homes, whole streets and neighbourhoods currently abandoned, in decay, now buzzing with new life, activity and prosperity from the incoming workforce.

Let’s think carefully about how these nationalised industries might make the best of top-down strategic planning, organisation and funding by Central Government combined with devolved management, bottom up, employing local knowledge, practically, usefully and efficiently applied. Picture this: build one hundred 400 megawatt off-shore wind farms and range them around our shores. Interlace them with thousands of floating tidal energy turbines out at sea. Construct enormous tidal lagoons in our estuaries. Put miniature community-run cottage-industry wave power machines and little barrages on rocky out crops and inlets on our shoreline in  Cornwall, the Hebrides and Cumbria.