The first organised rescue service at Wells was run by the Norfolk Shipwreck Association, which established a station here in 1830 by sending an unnamed lifeboat from Cromer. For twenty-one years it operated, then closed in 1851. Before the Norfolk Shipwreck Association, rescues had been left to private citizens — and the record suggests some of them were more interested in claiming salvage rights over rescued vessels than in saving lives. The first genuinely public-spirited service came with the NSA, though it would take the RNLI, arriving to re-establish the station in 1869, to bring professional standards and continuity.

The 1869 boathouse was built on the Wells quay to house the self-righting RNLB Eliza Adams. It is still standing — a Grade II listed building now used jointly as the Harbour Master's Office and a small maritime museum. The original site had a fundamental problem: at low water the lifeboat simply could not reach the open sea.

The January 1978 storm that destroyed the Wells Harbour Railway's track also hit the lifeboat station hard. Winds reached hurricane force 12. Waves peaked at 40 feet. It was still snowing heavily when the Wells lifeboat was released from service and began the return to harbour — arriving home between six and seven in the evening after approximately eleven hours at sea. The coxswain received an RNLI Silver Medal for his actions that night.

The station's honours board across its history includes a list of awards that reflects both the frequency of callouts and the quality of the crews who answered them: Silver Medals to coxswains David James Cox in 1979 and Francis Robert Taylor in 1963, Bronze Medals across multiple decades, and numerous letters of thanks from the Institution inscribed on vellum. The people who have served here were volunteers, arriving when the pagers sounded, often in the middle of the night, through the winter, into weather that would keep most people indoors.

The original 1895 beach road station served the crew for over a century, undergoing renovations in 1983, 1986 and the mid-1990s — including the reuse of greenheart timber salvaged from a demolished Eastbourne lifeboat station to shore up the eroding sandy headland beneath it. But the structure aged beyond renovation, and in October 2022 it was demolished to make way for a new boathouse built at the beach on the western side of the harbour mouth.

The new all-weather lifeboat, the Duke of Edinburgh (Civil Service No. 53), arrived at Wells in October 2022, partly funded by a local fundraising campaign from 2014 to 2015 and partly by the Civil Service charity The Lifeboat Fund. It replaced the Doris M. Mann of Ampthill in early 2023. The smaller inshore lifeboat Peter Wilcox (D-797) has been on station since 2016. The crew that serves them remains, as it always has been, entirely voluntary.