World's end

Saudi Arabia has its Empty Quarter; southern England has this peculiar scrubland by the sea, dominated by the Dungeness nuclear power stations. There is nowhere else like it. Here, in close harmony, live the Oilers, the Tarts, the Richardsons and the Thomases, families whose elemental existence seems incredible to Londoners barely two hours away. Report by Peter Popham. Photographs by Peter Marlow

Jo Thomas lived for 50 years in a wooden cottage with a mossy iron roof, twin gables, daffodils out in the front, flowering yellow gorse all around, and a matchless view of the Dungeness nuclear power stations.

Yards from her front door is a chain-link fence, with signs that read: nuclear installations act 1965, licensed site boundary. Beyond are the towering steel hulks of the two power plants, the squarish, older Magnox and the newer, curvilinear AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor), like a monster pair of binoculars upended on the shingle. The stations emit a low, steady roaring, and at night "they're lit up like Las Vegas", as Janet Thomas, Jo's daughter-in-law, puts it. Once in a while, they have to test the steam valves, and then it's like living 50 yards from the runways at Heathrow, or pressed up against the world's biggest pressure cooker. The plume of steam shoots thousands of feet up into the sky.

Fifty years ago, Jo's husband, John, brought her here from her home in Leith, on Edinburgh's docks. "When relatives came down, they always said, how can you bear to live in such a terrible place?" she says in her precise Edinburgh accent, sitting on the three-piece in her snug cottage, which is made from old wooden railway carriages. They were not referring to the power stations, which, when she first moved here, not long after the bombing of Hiroshima, can have been no more than a twinkle in some boffin's eye.

Back then, Dungeness consisted of little more than a lighthouse, a foghorn- testing station (no longer in use) and fishermen's cabins sprinkled thinly across what one young resident proudly describes as "the second biggest shingle field in the world". But come here at the wrong season and you can still see what Jo's relatives meant. Or rather, you can't, because often visibility is close to zero: the fog creeps in off the sea, clamps tightly to the miles of shingle, and won't be shifted. The rest of Kent can be having a lovely spell of weather, but Dungeness is wrapped in gloom.

At other times, it is not fog but wind that is the problem. Throughout March this year, for example, the bitter east wind came burning in off the sea, ripping down the budding creepers, chafing and chapping the skin of your face, and buffeting anyone who ventured out.

Dungeness is a postscript to an addendum, an appendix of an appendix, an afterthought at the end of an epilogue. England proper ends at Dover, with its chalk cliffs proud and sheer above the Channel. But, to the southwest, all such stark definitions dwindle away. South of Ashford, the Royal Military Canal severs Romney Marsh from the rest of the county, separates the roll and lollop of the Kentish hills from the flat land that stretches to the edge of vision and then, at Dungeness, merges quietly with the sea.

Saudi Arabia has its Empty Quarter, a trackless waste which, even on a small-scale map, awes by its absence of features. This is southern England's empty corner: not awesome or trackless or featureless, but emphatically different, for which reason it was called, in the old days, "the sixth continent". The difference starts below Ashford, on the road towards Lydd: the landscape flattens and simplifies to pasture, telegraph poles, sparse wintry hedgerows, no trees, and a horizon as sharp as a knife blade. Near New Romney, two more simple shapes appear: the great slabs of the power stations, grey against the sky. And, as the land stretches out towards them, it refines ever further, to the ultimate simplicity of shingle, gorse, fishermen's huts, lighthouse, sea.

Simplicity in a complicated world has made Dungeness special. Here there are no speculators' bungalows, few garden fences, no shops, no school, no traffic lights, no police station. There are a few people, with their home-made, randomly dotted homes and their boats, living in the teeth of the merciless wind. Dungeness suddenly became famous a few years back when the late film director and artist Derek Jarman set up home in a weatherboarded house on the shore. Today, the main complaint locals have is with the trippers who come to see his garden, and who trample carelessly around their own houses in the process. That is Dungeness's idea of a social problem.

Human life here retains an elemental, frontier quality. The few established families - the Oilers, the Tarts, the Thomases and the Richardsons - have intermarried with perilous frequency over the generations. Practically everybody on the beach is, therefore, related to everybody else. "When I first came here, I could walk into anybody's house on the beach without knocking, and call, 'Hallo, Uncle Jack', or whoever," says Jo. "Nobody locked their doors. You always knew when an outsider came to call, because they knocked."

Thus, important events cast long, sharp shadows. Jo recounts how in 1886 her father-in-law, orphaned at the age of three, was sent here to live with his grandparents on the shingle. His grandfather had been the first Thomas to settle in these parts, coming from London to work as a diver. He had married a Miss Tart, descendant of Huguenot refugees of that name who had fled from the Continent and stopped where they fetched up. In those days, the Tarts lived in the shore defences built at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, which are now ruins. They say there was a pub nearby whose roof was made from the hull of one of the boats which had brought the Tarts across the Channel.

Jo and her fisherman husband settled in the twin-gabled cottage with the mossy iron roof, "Lloyds" by name, built by Lloyds of London a century ago as part of their system for keeping watch on sea traffic. Jo's husband was for years head launcher on the Dungeness lifeboat. When the "maroon" went up - the flare signalling an SOS - Jo recalls how she and the other women ran to the lifeboat house and heaved the greased railway sleepers into place across the shingle . Then John blew his whistle, and they struck out the pin and the lifeboat rumbled down into the sea.

Jo remembers those hectic, alarming days; also the huge, unimpeded expanse of sea and sky and shingle. "I remember standing on a rise on the beach and being able to see all the way from Beachy Head to the cliffs of Dover," she says. "You could walk out of our front door and right along the beach to Camber Sands."

The power stations put an end to all that. Jo and her family have never complained about them; they accept their looming presence with resignation. But the years in the early Sixties when the foundations were being built are indelibly printed on Jo's memory: five great piledrivers going day and night, month after month. They drained the fresh water from under the beach, though the first the Thomases knew about it was when their trusty, hand-operated water pump ceased to function.

But the nuclear people have been considerate since then, providing mains water and electricity (until then they had oil lamps), and running Geiger counters over the house from time to time. "Though it gets on your nerves when we have a power cut - which happens quite frequently - and you look out the window and there's the power station, all lit up," adds Janet.

Last week, the power station people made one final, kindly gesture. In the Visitors' Centre, with its interactive displays and mock-ups of nuclear cores, they hosted Jo Thomas's leaving party. For her half-century on the shingle is up. A little over a year ago, her husband died. He was her wheels as well as her companion, and since then her isolation and dependency have become a burden. She's moving a couple of miles down the coast, to sheltered housing in the village of Lydd.

In tribute to their nearest and most tolerant neighbour, the power stations' lady guides, wearing their blue uniforms, served up tea and cake and sandwiches for Jo and her friends and relatives, and presented her with a leaving gift, "a little memento of us at Dungeness". She unwrapped it: a framed aerial photograph of the power stations.

If there were a Geiger counter for the detection of irony, you could have run it over all present without getting a reading. "This is what I've seen out of my front window for 30 years," Jo remarked matter-of- factly