A lifeboat was first placed at Cromer in 1804 by a local subscription committee led by Lord Suffield, the third baron of Gunton Hall, with support from merchants, drapers and grocers in the town. The Norfolk Shipwreck Association took over management in 1823, and the RNLI assumed responsibility in December 1857. For more than two centuries, a lifeboat has been stationed at Cromer — predating the national lifeboat institution by half a century.

In the early years, the boats were kept outdoors on the east jetty. A proper boathouse was not built until 1867, funded by Benjamin Bond Cabbell, who also paid for a 34-foot self-righting sailing and pulling lifeboat named after himself. The building went through multiple evolutions as lifeboats grew larger. When the motor lifeboat H. F. Bailey arrived in 1923, a new boathouse with a roller slipway was built at the end of Cromer Pier at a cost of £32,000. The pier boathouse was again rebuilt between 1997 and 1999, at a cost of approximately £3 million.

Blogg's career at Cromer ran from before the First World War until his retirement in 1947. His record accumulated across decades: the Empire Gallantry Medal, later converted to the George Cross; Gold Medal clasps for additional services beyond those that first earned the award; a Silver Medal from the Dutch government after the rescue of the crew of a Dutch vessel in 1927, when the Queen of the Netherlands also awarded him a gold watch. Italy decorated him. France gave him the Maritime Cross. The RNLI gave him everything it had, repeatedly.

Blogg worked alongside crews who were also remarkable — families named Davies appear throughout the station's honours list across multiple generations, reflecting how lifeboat service ran in families along this coast. The station's roll of honour includes those lost while serving Cromer lifeboat, names that mark the understanding every crew member carried: that going out was not guaranteed to mean coming back.

The present station operates two boats. The all-weather lifeboat 16-07 Lester (ON 1287), named by H.R.H. The Duke of Kent at a ceremony in September 2008, sits in the 1999 boathouse at the end of Cromer Pier. The smaller inshore lifeboat Mr Eric Sharpe (Civil Service No. 54), on station since 2022, is housed in a smaller boathouse built in 1902 at the foot of Brunswick Terrace — the oldest surviving structure associated with the station.

The pier extends north into the North Sea, and the boathouse at its end is one of the more visually striking positions for any lifeboat station in England. The crew that launches from it remains entirely voluntary. On a normal evening, the pier is full of people walking, fishing, looking at the lighthouse just along the cliff. Then a pager sounds, and the volunteer crew runs past them to the boathouse, and the boat goes down the slipway and into the sea, because that is what it has always done.