Wells-next-the-Sea is a town and also port on the North Norfolk coast of England. The civil parish has a location of 16.31 km2 (6.30 sq mi) as well as in 2001 had a population of 2,451, reducing to 2,165 at the 2011 Census. Wells is 15 miles (24 kilometres) to the east of the resort of Hunstanton, 20 miles (32 kilometres) to the west of Cromer, as well as 10 miles (16 kilometres) north of Fakenham. The city of Norwich lies 32 miles (51 kilometres) to the south-east. Close-by villages include Blakeney, Burnham Market, Burnham Thorpe, Holkham and also Walsingham. The North Sea is now a mile from the town; the main channel which as soon as strayed through marshes, foraged by sheep for hundreds of years, was constrained by earthworks to the west in 1859 when Holkham Estate recovered some 800 hectares of saltmarsh north-west of Wells with the building of a mile-long bank. This reclamation was claimed to have actually decreased the tidal search though the West Fleet which gave much of the water entered the channel to its north.Because the town has no river going through it, it depends on the trends to scour the harbour. The trouble of siltation had busied the merchants of the community for hundreds of years and inhabited the attentions of various engineers, leading at some point to conflicts which pertained to court in the eighteenth century. Sir John Coode, who had been knighted for his work with the completion of Portland harbour was recruited to resolve its siltation issues in the 1880s. No attempted option confirmed long-term. The growth of faster marine traffic whose wake cleans at the banks of the marshes has actually broadened the channel and lowered tidal circulation even more. The community has actually been a port because before the fourteenth century when it supplied grain to London and consequently to the miners of the north eastern in return for which Wells was supplied with coal. Up until the nineteenth century, it was less complicated to carry bulk cargoes by sea than overland. Wells was additionally an angling port: in 1337 it is recorded as having had thirteen angling boats; next door Holkham had nine. Its sailors brought initially herring and afterwards cod from Iceland in quantity in between the fifteenth as well as seventeenth centuries. The law of the harbour in order to maintain its usage was by Act of Parliament in 1663; and also in 1769 Harbour Commissioners were assigned with powers over vessels going into and also leaving (as they still have today). The Quay was substantially reconstructed in 1845 as part of attempts to improve the community. At the same time, Improvement Commissioners were designated with the job of making the community wide as well as appealing to homeowners as well as the burgeoning traveler trade. As a little port, it built ships until the late nineteenth century; it never moved to developing motor vessels or to steel hulls. The resulting the train in 1857 reduced the harbour profession yet it revived briefly after the Second World War for the import of fertilizer as well as animal feed. In 1982 there were 258 ship movements right into the harbour.