BEFORE the growth of the great cities of the Solent our coastal landscape was very different. On the coast of the Solent were industries such as iron works, salt manufacturing and shipyards. These industrial enterprises were set amongst woods and rich grazing pastures.

The daily flow of the tides brings natural fertility to the pastures of the waters edge and the warmth of the sea encourages early growth of grass. Coastal pastures were valuable in fattening livestock to supply meat to the expanding cities and the Royal Navy. The value of the land was such that it was profitable to build sea walls around the larger pastures. This not only held back the floods but also was a way to convert land grazed in common by many people into a single centralised farm.

In the late eighteenth century, at the same time that Nelson’s fleet was being built, the Lord of the Manor of Farlington built sea walls around what we now know as Farlington Marshes. At the time this was just one of many such walls and the landscape was quite unremarkable.

Today Farlington is the last of the great grazing marshes of the eastern Solent. The others have been fully drained and built over.

Much of the growth of Portsmouth over the 19th and the 20th century was across such marshes.

You get a glimpse of this historic landscape when driving towards Sussex on the A27. The marshes are a popular place for walking with many footpaths and the cycleway running from Portsmouth to Havant. Farlington Marshes are the green lungs of the City of Portsmouth.

The building of sea walls around grazing marshes is eventually self defeating. By keeping out the floods the mud of the harbour no longer flows across the marshes.

Bit by bit the land inside the sea walls become gradually lower than the marshes covered by the tide.

Walking along the sea wall today at high tide you can look across to the tidal waters, and down to the marshes in their dry well.

The wildlife that use these marshes is astonishing. Living on the edge of the land and the sea is a highly specialised way of life.

For those with the patience, and the magnifying glass, there is a huge range of rarities.

The future of our coastline is the subject of many detailed studies.

The Wildlife Trust is looking at how we can secure the spectacular wildlife of the Solent within a pressurised urban area. This is not just a problem for wildlife, it is also a big issue for us all. Should we really continue to build on land below sea level? Is it sensible, or even affordable, to ask people to live and work behind engineered sea defences, our cities growing within their own dry wells. We have access to some of the best coastal engineering in the world, yet we know that it is not be infallible.

The flooding of New Orleans in 2005 demonstrated the cost in human lives of a failure of engineering.

In finding a space for nature we can also explore a safe and sustainable future for us all.