The town earns its self-given motto in ways both obvious and oblique. Its cliffs, rising to 70 metres east of the town, are among the richest Pleistocene fossil beds in Britain — a prehistoric rhinoceros was found nearby at West Runton in 2017, dating back 700,000 years. The chalk reef offshore, designated a Marine Conservation Zone in 2016, is thought to be Europe's largest. The 14th-century Church of St Peter and St Paul, rebuilt by architect Arthur Blomfield in the Victorian era, holds the highest bell tower in Norfolk at 158 feet. Stained-glass windows inside commemorate the lifeboat crews — not saints or monarchs, but fishermen.

The town came to wider attention in 1883 when London journalist Clement Scott arrived and named the surrounding coastline 'Poppyland' for the wildflowers that still bloom in the hedgerows and meadows each summer. Railways brought visitors from across England. The future King Edward VII played golf at Royal Cromer Golf Club, which he helped found in 1888 and gave royal status to in the same year.

For most of Cromer's history, the sea has meant one thing above all others: the Cromer crab. Brown crabs caught in the waters off this stretch of Norfolk coast have a flavour that devotees insist no other crab can match, attributed to the chalk reef habitat where they feed. Fishermen once worked the waters year-round — crabs and lobsters in summer, longshore herring in autumn, cod by long-line in winter. The pattern has narrowed since the 1980s to crabs and lobsters almost exclusively, and experienced crabmen were struggling to recruit the next generation well before the turn of the millennium.

The town beneath the cliffs has remained small — under 8,000 people — but what it lacks in size it compensates in density of identity. The Friday market. The Amazona zoo in the old brick-kiln woodland south of town, with its jaguars and pumas. The South American wildlife park that nobody expects to find in Norfolk. The Victorian hotels along the seafront: the Hotel de Paris, rebuilt from a lord's coastal residence; the 17th-century Red Lion.

Cromer Lifeboat Station was founded in 1804 — the first in Norfolk. Through the 19th century it operated rowing boats launched from the beach. In the 1920s a station was built at the end of the pier, letting motor lifeboats reach calmer water before launching into the open sea. The coast covered is relentlessly exposed: no harbour for 40 miles east to Great Yarmouth, 25 miles west to Wells-next-the-Sea.

Henry Blogg served the station for 53 years, becoming the most decorated lifeboatman in RNLI history: three gold medals for gallantry, four silver medals. Between 1917 and 1941, rescues involving Blogg and his crews made Cromer's lifeboat famous across Britain. The Henry Blogg Museum on the seafront tells his story. The stained-glass windows in St Peter and St Paul's Church commemorate his crews. Cromer does not let you forget the debt it owes to the men who launched into the surf when everyone else was retreating from it.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, looking at the surface of an alien planet in the 1972–73 Doctor Who serial The Three Doctors, famously said: 'I'm fairly sure that's Cromer.' Actor Nicholas Courtney improvised the line — he had gotten his first professional job here. Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell both set scenes in Cromer. Edward Lear wrote a limerick about it. Monty Python gave a character a fictional degree from the town. Alan Partridge's most cinematic moment happened on Cromer Pier.

The town that names a geological stage — the Cromerian, a warm period in the Pleistocene ice ages — has been present in British culture at a volume disproportionate to its size. Perhaps because it is small and specific and weathered-looking, the kind of place that stays in the memory. Perhaps because the cliffs are eroding and a medieval village called Shipden, which once stood northeast of town, now lies under the sea, marked only by a submerged rock. Cromer has always known that nothing lasts — and has carried on regardless.