In 1750, the maltings of Wells contributed a third of all the malt exported from England, most of it shipped to Holland. Only Great Yarmouth pushed more out. Twelve maltings worked the town at its height, taking in Norfolk barley and turning it into the base for English beer. Wells had been an exporter of grain to London and to the coal miners of the north-east since the late Middle Ages, taking coal back in exchange. In 1580, nineteen ships of over sixteen tons were operating from Wells, making it the largest port in the area. The trade defined the place. F. and G. Smith eventually swallowed every maltster in town and ran the operation until 1929, when they closed it after a local dispute. The granary on the quay, built in 1904 with its dramatic overhanging gantry, is now flats. The malt is gone.

Wells has no river. The harbour exists only because the tides scour the channel twice a day, and the merchants of the town spent four hundred years arguing about how to keep that scour working. Sir John Coode, who had finished Portland Harbour, was hired in the 1880s to fix the silt. Nothing he tried held. In 1859 the Holkham Estate reclaimed eight hundred hectares of saltmarsh to the north-west by building a mile-long bank, and the tidal scour was further reduced. The faster boats of the 20th century widened the channel with their wakes. The North Sea is now a full mile from the town. The mile-long bank is also the only road to the beach, walked or driven by tens of thousands of summer visitors who come for the long flat shore and the painted beach huts on stilts.

On 29 October 1880, the Wells lifeboat Eliza Adams launched into a gale to help a stricken ship. The boat capsized. Eleven of the thirteen men aboard drowned, leaving ten widows and twenty-seven fatherless children in a town of around two thousand people. The grief was on a scale Wells could barely contain. A memorial to the crew stands next to the old lifeboat house at the western end of the quay. The town has kept a lifeboat in service ever since. In 2022 a new station opened to house the Shannon-class Duke of Edinburgh, which replaced Doris Mann of Ampthill after thirty-two years of service. When the tide is out, a callout means towing the new boat over a mile of sand for launch in Holkham bay.

Wells has been flooded since the 13th century. The 1953 North Sea flood breached the beach bank and damaged houses on both ends of town, destroying the Pinewoods caravan site behind the dunes; the pines themselves, planted in the 19th century to stabilise the sand, survived. The 1978 surge was nearly as bad, and the town was better prepared. In 1982 a tidal barrier went up next to the harbour car park, and on 5 December 2013 it earned its keep. A storm surge that exceeded both 1953 and 1978 hit the quay, but the floodgate held back the water from the west end of the town. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, visited four days later to inspect the damage. Most quayside houses now have their own private flood defences alongside the public ones.

Inland from the quay, the town centres on The Buttlands, a large green ringed by lime trees and elegant Georgian houses, the Crown Hotel and the Globe Inn looking down on it. Down the hill is Ware Hall, a 15th-century house that Miss May Savidge dismantled in Hertfordshire from 1969 onwards, transported brick by brick to Wells, and rebuilt over the rest of her life. John Fryer, sailing master on the Bounty under William Bligh, was born in Wells and is buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas. The church burned in a lightning strike in 1879; the rebuilt interior is light and airy. The town has become an expensive place: more than a third of its houses were second homes by 2019. Tourism that once was a sideline now matters more than the malt ever did.