Sizewell is a fishing hamlet in the East Suffolk district, on the North Sea coast just north of Thorpeness and two miles east of the town of Leiston. It belongs to the parish of Leiston and sits inside the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. From the beach you can see the two nuclear power stations to the north, Sizewell A and Sizewell B, the boxy dark profile of the Magnox plant beside the white dome of the pressurised water reactor. A refreshment kiosk and a pub called the Vulcan Arms serve walkers and the small fleet of fishing boats that still works from the shingle. The contrast is the point. The hamlet is tiny. The infrastructure beside it powers a meaningful slice of the British grid.

Sizewell A came online in 1966, twin Magnox reactors that ran for forty years before generating their last electricity in 2006. Decommissioning is scheduled to continue until 2027, with the cleared site not expected until 2098. Sizewell B opened in 1995, a single pressurised water reactor with the dome that has become the visual signature of the site. It is currently the UK's newest operating nuclear power station, due to close in 2035 with a planned twenty-year life extension under discussion that would take it to 2055. Sizewell C, twin EPR reactors, has been on and off the drawing board for over a decade, with significant doubts surfacing in May 2013 and a new funding mechanism announced in October 2021 through the Regulated Asset Base model. Anti-nuclear campaigners once used the slogan, Welcome to Sizewell, twinned with Chernobyl. Those campaigners are still here. So is the work.

About 1,700 people escaped occupied Holland to England during the war and were called Engelandvaarders, England-farers. Of those, about 200 made the crossing by sea. Most went on small boats. Thirty-two attempted the journey by canoe. Henri Peteri's brother Willem was with him on the September 1941 crossing, and they made it together. The other twenty-nine men who tried by canoe mostly did not. The inscription on the broken paddle in the Sizewell memorial reads, In memory of the thirty-two young Dutchmen who tried to escape to England by kayak during World War II to join the Allied Forces. Eight of them reached the English coast. Only three survived the war. The last living survivor dedicated this memorial to his brothers in arms who were less fortunate. He reached England, and freedom, on this beach on 21 September 1941. Henri Peteri commissioned the memorial in 2005. His widow unveiled it in 2009. The kayak itself is part of the monument.

Sizewell became the nucleus of the Ogilvie estate in 1859, an estate that eventually stretched south to Aldeburgh. Sizewell Hall is still owned by the Ogilvie family and now operates as a Christian conference centre. After the war and into the summer of 1955, it housed a mixed semi-progressive prep school whose pupils included the theatre critic and biographer Sheridan Morley. Behind the hamlet, Sizewell Marshes form a 260-acre biological Site of Special Scientific Interest, part of a 356-acre nature reserve managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust as Sizewell Belts. The reserve is one of the main wetlands in East Anglia for wild flowers, and it carries rare invertebrate and bird species in habitat that the power stations and their fences have, perhaps counter-intuitively, helped protect from agricultural intensification. The Suffolk Humane Society stationed a lifeboat at Sizewell Gap from 1826 until 1851, the shallow water and sandbanks of this coast having long made local rescues necessary.