Project Timeline

The National Lottery Heritage Fund awards funding for our pilot CITiZAN project. We carry out fieldwork to test our methods along the Thames Estuary, and the Suffolk, Sussex, Kent, and Essex coastlines.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund awards us three years of funding for CITiZAN.

With further funding from the National Trust and the Crown Estate, along with help from Historic England, a team of nine inter-tidal archaeologists are recruited across the country. Three CITiZAN offices set up: at our head office in London, at the office for the Nautical Archaeology Society in Portsmouth, and with the Council for British Archaeology in York.

CITiZAN’s smartphone app is launched. Over the next six years, volunteers record thousands of sites around the English coastline.

The first season of Britain at Low Tide airs on Channel 4. We worked with Turn TV to film three exciting seasons of Britain at Low Tide, where the team explored the coastal heritage of England alongside presenters Tori Herridge and Alex Langlands.

The first phase of CITiZAN ends in celebration, as we win the Arts, Culture and Heritage Charity Award.

The NLHF awards us a further three years’ funding for CITiZAN. From April 2019 to March 2022 a new team of intertidal archaeologists focus on recording the heritage of Liverpool Bay, the Humber Estuary, Mersea Island, the East Kent coast, the Solent’s harbours, and the rivers of South Devon.

CITiZAN project ‘Changing Minds, Changing Coasts’ is Highly Commended Council at the Archaeology Achievement Awards in the category of Archaeological Innovation. This project became the inspiration for Coasts in Mind.

The last of our five CITiZAN conferences takes place on Liverpool’s waterfront, celebrating coastal and inter-tidal archaeology around the country. Watch the conference as it happened here.

The NLHF awards MOLA a development grant to refine the methodologies explored during Changing Minds, Changing Coasts, at a national level. The team trial methods to record the impact of the climate crisis using people’s memories of coastal change.

CITiZAN’s dataset goes lives on the Archaeology Data Service’s (ADS) online portal, protecting it for the future. As part of archiving the first two phases of CITiZAN, we deposited over 6,000 images with the ADS.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund awards us three years funding for Coasts in Mind. Archaeologists will be working with local communities at four key locations around the English coast: Poole Harbour (East Dorset), the Swale Estuary (North Kent), the Taw-Torridge Estuary (North Devon), and the Sefton Coast (Merseyside).