Emma Tullett was sitting on the sofa scrolling through YouTube music videos when her home began to fall apart.
A window blind came crashing down and as her partner tried to reattach the fitting, he saw a row of trees slowly sliding over the nearby cliff edge.
“He said ‘you need to get out’ and I think that’s when I just lost it a little bit,” the 42-year-old said.
She gathered up her four children, throwing coats over the youngest, aged six and eight. In the dash for safety, she didn’t even have time to put on their shoes.
Over the next four days, she watched from a distance as her home on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, went over the cliff in stages. The slow process was “like torture”, she said, and left a strange sense of “relief” when the whole thing finally fell on 2 June.
“I’ve got nothing,” she said. “All we got out with was the pyjamas we were wearing.”
Across England in the next decade, it is estimated that up to 2,000 homes could face a similar fate due to coastal erosion, which is expected to accelerate with climate change.
Thousands more properties have been protected by costly coastal defences.
So, why are some areas saved and others left to fall into the sea?
Like other small communities nationwide, Ms Tullett and her neighbours on the Isle of Sheppey have been told that, simply put, their homes are not worth saving.
The island’s relatively soft cliffs, made mainly of London Clay, have for centuries been slipping into the Thames Estuary, exposing internationally renowned fossil deposits.
On the north of the island, 124 homes and 1,000 caravans along a four-mile (6.6km) stretch are thought to be at risk in the next century. It would cost more than £25m to protect them all, engineers employed by Swale Borough Council found.
With this in mind, the council and the Environment Agency – which are jointly responsible for managing coastal defences in the area – agreed on a policy of “no active intervention”. Nature would be left to run its course.
“The financial value of the area at risk does not outweigh the costs to build and maintain the measures required,” residents were told in a letter from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Coastal defences, such as building a wall of rock to stop waves lapping at a cliff’s base, are expensive and can have unintended consequences, like hastening erosion elsewhere, said landslide expert Dave Petley, a professor at the University of Sheffield.
“For smaller communities in general, it’s not considered to be worth the damage to the adjacent sections of the cliff or the damage to the environment,” he added.
Ms Tullett made an offer less than an hour after viewing her dream home. The property, called Cliff Hanger, had stunning views and ample space for her children.
She paid in cash in August 2018, believing the family would have decades before they need worry about the encroaching cliffs.
Erosion is a gradual process, she thought, and by the time her home was at risk “they’d probably have dumped me in a nursing home”.
Her neighbour Malcolm Newell moved to Surf Crescent with his wife in 2001, hoping to escape the “hustle and bustle” of the mainland.
The retired wood-turner, 71, said they had enjoyed “16 good years” before his wife died. “The memories that are here can’t be replaced,” he said.
But, by 2015 he had become increasingly concerned about his future and began campaigning for action to halt erosion.
2020 BBC