Europe’s largest restored oyster reef will soon take shape off the Norfolk coast, reviving a long-lost marine ecosystemThe UK is about to get Europe’s largest oyster reef, with four million native oysters set to be returned to the seabed off the coast of Norfolk (main picture) in eastern England. Conservationists say the scale of the project could transform local waters and provide a model for marine restoration across the continent. Each is seeded with about a hundred juvenile oysters that will grow into adults, creating an interconnected reef system along the North Sea coast. Oyster reefs once covered more than a million hectares of Europe’s coastline, but overfishing, disease and pollution reduced them to near-extinction over the past century. “Building an oyster reef is fundamentally about scale: you need enough oysters to trigger population recovery and bring back the vibrant reef ecosystems, rich with life, that disappeared from the North Sea long ago,” says Birch.