State of the Industry · History
The North Norfolk Holiday Let Market — Past & Present
The coast's story starts a long way back. North Norfolk District Council's tourism site calls this the Deep History Coast, home to the earliest evidence of humans in Britain, including the footprints found on the beach at Happisburgh, east of this page's area. The find that started the modern story came in 1990, when a local couple noticed a large bone at the foot of the cliffs at West Runton. Norfolk Museums Service confirmed it as the pelvic bone of a Steppe mammoth, and digs in 1991 and 1995 recovered 85% of the skeleton, the largest nearly complete mammoth skeleton known in Britain and the oldest found in the UK. A Discovery Trail with eleven discovery points now runs about 22 miles (36 km) along the clifftops from Weybourne to Cart Gap. Offshore lies the Cromer Shoal Chalk Bed, which the same site calls the longest chalk reef in the world at about 20 miles, and the feeding ground behind the Cromer crab and the Sheringham lobster.
The harbours came next. Blakeney Haven, the sheltered inlet behind Blakeney Point where the River Glaven reaches the sea, was a major shipping area in the Middle Ages, with ports at Wiveton, Cley and Blakeney itself. Cley and Wiveton silted up in the 17th century, but Blakeney prospered, especially after its channel was deepened in 1817, and packet ships ran from there to Hull and London from 1840. Wells-next-the-Sea, with Blakeney, ranked highly as a port on Waghenaer's map of 1586, and in the 18th century its harbour exported a third of England's malt to the continent; together with Great Yarmouth it sent more than 250,000 quarters across the Channel in 1750, the century in which the town's great houses were built. The granary that still overlooks the quay dates from 1904, and the harbour now serves sailing and crabbing boats, a fishing fleet, the RNLI station and the Sheringham Shoal offshore wind farm.
Holkham shaped the western half of the coast. Sir Edward Coke, the lawyer who served as Speaker of the House of Commons, Attorney General and Lord Chief Justice, bought Neales Manor in Holkham parish and founded what became the Holkham Estate. Thomas Coke, orphaned at ten, inherited the estate when he came of age; sent on a six-year Grand Tour at 15, he met William Kent on the way, and work on his Palladian house on the coast began in 1734. Thomas was made Earl of Leicester and died in 1759 before it was finished, and his widow, Lady Margaret, saw the hall completed; the housekeeper gave public tours on Tuesday afternoons, and the first guidebook followed in 1775. His great-nephew Thomas William Coke, known as Coke of Norfolk, pioneered four-course crop rotation, and his sheep shearings at Holkham drew hundreds of farmers and dignitaries every year. Humphry Repton finished his very first Red Book, with designs for Holkham's pleasure grounds, in 1789. Today the Holkham National Nature Reserve covers 10,000 acres of coast between Stiffkey and Burnham Norton.
The villages carry the rest of the history. Burnham Thorpe, a short drive inland from Burnham Market, is the birthplace of Horatio Nelson, whose father was rector of All Saints Church; when the church was restored in 1890, the Admiralty gave it wood from HMS Victory, from which the lectern, altar and rood screen were made. Burnham Market itself is a Georgian village around a green, and The Hoste, its coaching inn, has stood at the heart of the village since the 17th century. Holt, a Georgian town of 18th-century buildings around a market place, has Gresham's, the school founded there in 1555, and the 13th-century church of St Andrew. Blakeney's flint cottages were once fishermen's homes, its Guildhall keeps a 15th-century brick-vaulted undercroft, and St Nicholas church, built between the 13th and 15th centuries, unusually has two towers.
The Victorians turned the fishing towns into resorts. Cromer was developed into a seaside resort by the late Victorians, and its pier, which holds the lifeboat station and the Pavilion Theatre, has survived storms, tidal surges and even a Second World War attempt by the government to blow it up. The theatre stages what Visit North Norfolk calls the UK's only remaining traditional end-of-the-pier variety show, every summer and every winter. Cromer's lifeboat crew is the most decorated in RNLI history, and Henry Blogg is its best-known coxswain: the RNLI says that in 38 years as coxswain he helped save 873 lives in 387 rescues, winning three gold and four silver RNLI medals as well as the George Cross and the British Empire Medal. Sheringham, a few miles west and once a fishing village, sits at one end of the Poppy Line, the heritage railway that runs to Holt, where the station is a recreation of a Midland and Great Northern country station. The original Norfolk Coast Path ran from Hunstanton to Cromer; extensions in both directions, created as stretches of the King Charles III England Coast Path, now take it 112 miles along the whole Norfolk coast.
Conservation is part of what guests come for. The Norfolk Wildlife Trust bought Cley Marshes in 1926 to be held in perpetuity as a breeding bird sanctuary, and an appeal in 2012 bought 57 more hectares to join Cley and Salthouse into one reserve of more than 300 hectares, which now draws more than 110,000 visitors a year. Spoonbills, which began breeding regularly in the UK again in 2010 after an absence of more than 300 years, feed on its pools. Along the coast, the National Trust's Blakeney Point, a four-mile shingle spit, holds England's largest grey seal colony, with around 9,000 pups born each winter. The Morston boatmen were carrying passengers long before seal watching began: Beans Boats was founded in the mid-1930s, came back in 1946 after the war, and took its first seal trips once the seals were protected in 1976 and grew used to the boats.
The holiday let market has grown on those foundations, and whole homes dominate it: 94% of AirROI's listings are entire homes, 75% are houses, two-bedroom homes are the most common size and four guests the most common capacity. Cottage agencies are a big part of it. AirROI names Holidaycottages.co.uk as the largest company host, with 274 listings, about 13% of the market, followed by Norfolk Hideaways, Norfolk Stay & HB Short Lets, Sykes Holiday Cottages and Hoseasons, and it counts 30% of listings as professionally managed. Standards are high: listings average 4.83 stars, 45% hold Airbnb's Guest Favourite badge and about half are run by Superhosts. Second homes are common too; the Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk counts more than 3,000 in its area, about one in 20 of the borough's homes. The North Norfolk listings that fall behind tend to slip in the same few places: a kitchen as the lead photo when the quay is two minutes away, silence on parking and dogs, a cleaning charge that turns up at the last step, and an empty calendar from New Year to Easter. Those are the first things a Cavmir audit looks for.
