The Shingle Street Shell Line

In 2005 two childhood friends, Els and Lida, spent a week in Suffolk after each had been through a year of cancer. On their first long walk along the beach, they picked up some white shells and, sitting down to rest, arranged them around a plant. From that day on, every walk added more shells to a growing line, symbolic of their slow, day by day, shell by shell recovery. Twice a year they spend a week repairing and re-laying the line and find that many people have added to it. Frail and transitory, like us and those who come and wonder at it, the line is a signal of courage and survival. 

Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley & Els Bottema