In Photos: Life in ‘Britain’s only desert’

‘Welcome to Dungeness’ looks at the lives and stories of families living in the shadow of two nuclear power plants.

On March 11, 2011, a huge earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the east coast of Japan sparked a major disaster when it hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and caused the meltdown of its reactors. The tsunami caused widespread destruction, displacement and death, while frightening amounts of radiation were released into the surrounding atmosphere as a result of the power plant’s damage.

At the time, photographer Ed Thompson was living on the south coast of England in Seabrook, Kent around nine miles from the Dungeness A & B nuclear power plants. With their imposing size, the pair of buildings often towered across the horizon. “I could see the nuclear power stations from my bedroom window as a kid on the other side of the bay, looming large. Because they’re so angular they are very visible,” Thompson explains. “When Fukushima happened, [it got me thinking] that I wanted to say to the world: ‘Hey, look at this.’”

He ended up bringing his camera to Dungeness, a 12-mile-square strip of headland, which is commonly referred to as “Britain’s only desert”. Walking around its empty space over pebbled ground and patchy grass, past the occasional resident and oddly designed, fenceless buildings, the common designation – despite receiving too much rain to truly be categorised as a desert – made sense. “In 2011, it was dead. There wasn’t a huge amount, some people had converted some of the old houses and done some cool architectural stuff, but it was still very quiet,” he continues. “Then one day, I was walking by the power station and there was a bunch of families with pushchairs, and we got chatting. They said: ‘We live right by the power station, come over for a cup of tea,’ and I spent the next four or five months driving down that dirt road and hanging out with those families.”

A picture that Thompson took of their children, playing in the nature reserve, now features in his new self-published photobook, Welcome to Dungeness. With the power plant’s concrete-grey, brutalist exterior forming an imposing backdrop, the picture hints the station’s impact on the local area, as well as on life at the southeast fringe of England. “They’re running around like The Railway Children, but if it was set next to a nuclear power station,” he says. “I live nine miles away, if you think about the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone or the area affected by it, then that doesn’t really help [if there was to be a disaster].”

The pictures, made over the course of several months, provide an insight into the visually odd, unique pace of life in Dungeness. There’s a calm emptiness in the pictures, and a community warmth found among the people who feature. There’s also intriguing architecture. “Historically, what happened [in Dungeness] was that we had a housing crisis after World War Two, and they allowed people to drag up old housing stock from trains and drop them there,” he says. “And they dropped them there and were living in converted trains – that’s what a lot of the buildings I photographed were but then over the years, people added bits and extended them. There’s also little prefab structures, and then you’ve got wacky buildings like old radar stations that have been repurposed.”

Since the photographs were originally taken in 2011, Dungeness has increasingly become a destination, with growing numbers of visitors and people moving to the area in search of its unique landscape and otherworldly aesthetic. Airbnb rentals can reach thousands of pounds for a night’s stay, while recent homes have sold for as much as £855,000.

But for Thompson, despite its shifting character and ever migrating shores, Dungeness, and the photographic project he made, will always hold a special, personal meaning. After shooting it, he had the pictures exhibited at an art fair, where he met his now-wife, with whom the pair have two daughters. “The whole thing about deserts is that there’s no life in them,” he says. “But by hanging out with the families I met in the desert ultimately led to my own family. The moral of the story is about Dungeness, but it was also a hugely personal project.”