Wells-next-the-Sea is a town and port on the North Norfolk shore of England. The civil parish has an area of 16.31 km2 (6.30 sq mi) and in 2001 had a population of 2,451, lowering to 2,165 at the 2011 Census. Wells is 15 miles (24 kilometres) to the eastern of the resort of Hunstanton, 20 miles (32 km) to the west of Cromer, and also 10 miles (16 km) north of Fakenham. The city of Norwich lies 32 miles (51 kilometres) to the south-east. Neighboring towns include Blakeney, Burnham Market, Burnham Thorpe, Holkham as well as Walsingham. The North Sea is now a mile from the community; the major channel which once strayed through marshes, grazed by lamb for centuries, was constrained by earthworks to the west in 1859 when Holkham Estate recovered some 800 hectares of saltmarsh north-west of Wells with the structure of a mile-long bank. This improvement was declared to have lowered the tidal search though the West Fleet which offered a lot of the water got in the network to its north.Because the town has no river running through it, it relies on the trends to comb the harbour. The trouble of siltation had busied the sellers of the community for centuries and occupied the focus of various designers, leading ultimately to conflicts which concerned court in the eighteenth century. Sir John Coode, that had actually been knighted for his work on the conclusion of Portland harbour was hired to solve its siltation problems in the 1880s. No attempted solution proved irreversible. The development of faster aquatic website traffic whose wake cleans at the banks of the marshes has widened the network and also reduced tidal flow additionally. The town has been a port since before the fourteenth century when it supplied grain to London and also consequently to the miners of the north eastern in return for which Wells was provided with coal. Until the nineteenth century, it was much easier to carry bulk cargoes by sea than overland. Wells was also an angling port: in 1337 it is recorded as having had thirteen fishing watercrafts; next door Holkham had nine. Its seafarers brought initially herring and after that cod from Iceland in quantity between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The policy of the harbour in order to preserve its usage was by Act of Parliament in 1663; and in 1769 Harbour Commissioners were appointed with powers over vessels entering and leaving (as they still have today). The Quay was considerably restored in 1845 as part of efforts to improve the community. At the same time, Improvement Commissioners were appointed with the job of making the town commodious and also appealing to homeowners and also the expanding visitor profession. As a small port, it constructed ships up until the late 19th century; it never transferred to constructing motor vessels or to steel hulls. The coming of the railway in 1857 reduced the harbour trade but it revived quickly after the Second World War for the import of fertilizer and also pet feed. In 1982 there were 258 ship motions into the harbour.