The first ever mass deployment of mother reef bricks aims to rebuild habitats – and could reshape the North Sea
Allie Wharf’s career unfolded amid conflict. As a senior foreign producer for Newsnight, she reported on Iraq and Afghanistan. Just two years ago, she was filming mass graves in Ukraine.
But burnt out by wars, and after a detour farming ducks in Tanzania, Wharf has now settled on the quiet north Norfolk coast. Here, alongside her life and business partner, Willie Athill, she has embarked on a different kind of mission: the creation of Europe’s largest natural oyster reef.
The Luna Oyster Project, a collaboration between Norfolk Seaweed and Oyster Heaven, aims to restore 4 million oysters to the North Sea, using the first-ever mass deployment of mother reef bricks.
These fired clay structures provide the skeleton of a lost world. Centuries of bottom trawling and human impact have stripped historical oyster reefs bare, leaving only scattered fragments of what was once a teeming underwater landscape across Britain and Europe. These reefs, long absent, are now poised to anchor a new era of marine life along the coast.
