The Chapel and the Nuclear Plant
At a remote Essex chapel shadowed by a dormant nuclear plant, a battle over a new reactor is reshaping old conflicts between conservation, community and state power.
For eighty years, a small religious collective called the Othona Community has worshipped by the chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, at the edge of a marsh on Essex's Dengie Peninsula. It’s a simple structure, more like a barn than a church, its sandstone walls patched with brickwork. In the seventh century, Saxon monks built it from the ruins of a Roman fort. Ever since, this compact form has stood in counterpoint to the broadening span of the mudflats, to the expansive sky.
In recent decades, this ancient place has stood in tension with a more recent force, one that arrived on the Essex coast in the mid-twentieth century: nuclear energy. Two miles to the chapel’s east, at the mouth of the River Blackwater, is a dormant atomic power plant called Bradwell A. In the 1950s, when plans for the power station were announced, local people and conservation organizations made the chapel a symbol of their opposition. For these campaigners, the contrast between the chapel and the power plant expressed a wider conflict in post-war Britain, in which centrally planned motorways, towns, and reservoirs intruded into quiet, hidden places. Decades later, those struggles seemed to have faded into history, while Bradwell A, retired in 2002, was encased in a metal sarcophagus to seal up its four thousand cubic metres of irradiated graphite.
Life by the marshes went on. Then, rumours of a new nuclear project reached the estuary, and the chapel once more became a focal point for debates about nature, history, and power.
In 2015, EDF (the French state-owned energy group) and CGN (a Chinese state-owned energy corporation) proposed the construction of a new atomic plant in Essex. Five years later, their joint enterprise BRB was claiming that nuclear energy was critical to the UK’s recently announced target of net zero emissions by 2050. Bradwell B, as it would be known, ‘would make a vital contribution to meeting the UK’s future need for low carbon, secure and affordable energy’, they declared, and would offer a stable source of electricity ‘when limited wind and solar power is produced’.[1]
Locals baulked at the new project, which would be several times larger than Bradwell A. The Othona Community, in particular, voiced fears that the plant would devastate a sacred site, and questioned the need for nuclear power in the energy transition. Once again, the chapel and the nuclear plant became emblems of competing visions of this place: one channelled its distinct historical, ecological and spiritual qualities; while the other subordinated them to a grand industrial scheme. But now, a new tension was at play—a tension between a local form of environmentalism, and an emerging argument for nuclear power as a solution for the energy transition.
Since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, atomic energy has in the popular imagination been associated with abandoned cities, toxic clouds and cancer. Despite its continued prominence in electricity systems, this association persists. Two decades into the twenty-first century, as activist movements drove the climate crisis up the political agenda, lobbyists spotted an opportunity to refresh their industry’s image, developing a potent new narrative: there can be no decarbonization without nuclear power. Protestors against Essex’s first nuclear plant saw themselves as protectors of the natural world, defending what they called “this half-land of mud and ooze and salted winds” from an “industrial invasion.” This time, though, to resist development was to find oneself an adversary of state climate policy. Local opposition to a nuclear plant was revealing a new faultline in British environmentalist culture, pitting conservation against an increasingly mainstream vision of decarbonisation.
By the time I arrive at the Othona Community, I am quietly asking myself whether it is wise to have come here. It is spring 2021, and under the oak rafters of a spacious modern hall, I am drinking tea with Pete, who has been with Othona for twenty-two years, and Richard, the new warden. Pete is telling me how he joined the group. “It’s great being part of a cult,” he declares with a grin.
“My friend knew about Bradwell, and he knew about the chapel. And he says, ‘Would you like to go and see the oldest chapel in the country’. We came down, had lunch in the village, seen the chapel. And then we started walking along the sea wall.” He leans in conspiratorially. “We saw the sign for the Othona community, and thought, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ We walked in here, and it was kind of like…a strange place. There was nobody here, and I thought we were going to get chased away by some kind of mad cult thing. Which I soon found out it was.” I laugh nervously. “And I’m still here!”
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“Which way did you come in, by the way?”, he asks. Images flit through my mind: the blank sandstone front of the chapel; an opening in a hawthorn hedge like a tunnel; yurts covered in algae, laminated images of medieval saints at their doors. I describe the route to Pete. “Ah yes,” he says. “Generally when you come in that way, you don’t leave. I will get the next pit ready!” I force a strangled laugh and look down at the teapot, which sports a crochet tea cosy in the form of a chicken.
I can only think to ask how the pair feel about the nuclear plant. Pete’s expression darkens. “I hope this thing doesn’t go ahead,” he mutters. “The destruction to this area is just going to be immense.”
Norman Motley, the founder of the Othona Community, first came to the Blackwater Estuary in 1946 in search of a home for his new religious collective. Motley had investigated the island of Lindisfarne, which he found too remote, and a ruined mansion in Gloucestershire, which he found too expensive. Then, he found the chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall and “came under the spell of that ancient building”:
There, one can breathe. The land on which we stood is almost a peninsula, with the mile wide estuary to the north and Bradwell Bay behind – and all round and curving to the south, the North Sea. The cry of the curlew was heard, and a variety of maritime flora and many sea birds were visible on the saltings; and withal, a great silence.
During the war, Motley had worked as a chaplain at an RAF training centre in Blackpool. Assigned to give religious lectures to trainees, he became frustrated by their didactic format. In response, he set up what he called “answer back meetings,” in which men and women of all military ranks, religions and political persuasions were encouraged to talk across social barriers about collective wartime suffering. The result, Motley wrote, was “a sense of belonging, of solidarity, and of caring.” When the war ended, some participants in these meetings, dispersed but still communicating, decided to regather and resume their discussions, this time alongside released German and Italian prisoners of war. In doing so, they hoped, Motley later said, to “meet the post-war world with some idea of a framework which would make a contribution to the inevitable uncertainties of the time.”
The Essex coast near Bradwell is a place of contradictions. In its offshore world of saltings, creeks and islands, religious dissidents and writers have long sought to escape from convention and surveillance. Planners, meanwhile, have found here a blank space on the map, a surface onto which to project large-scale infrastructural fantasies.