When Sussex fisherman Alan Minter retired after almost 45 years working in the waters along the south coast of England, he wanted to give back something to the sea that had provided him and his family with a living for generations. Over the years he had seen many changes in the ocean environment. “We all know the state of the sea,” he says. “You've lost the beach, the sand, the inshore reef. You've lost everything due to climate change, dredging, pollution. It's like the perfect storm for nature. There's no helping hand under the sea because nobody sees it.”
Minter’s ambition to be that helping hand and do something about the degradation of the Sussex marine scene led to the Minter Hotel, a tiered concrete structure specially designed to shelter crustaceans. It took more than two years to arrange the necessary permissions, pay for the construction to be made and arrange its installation, but the former fisherman was undaunted. As the 67-year-old says, “Nature is really struggling to hang in there and survive. We're just trying to help it along a little bit.”
A ban on trawl fishing along extensive stretches of the West Sussex coast was imposed in 2021, to protect environmentally important kelp forests and help them to regenerate. The ban also stopped the damage that was being done to the ocean floor by dredging. The time was right to create a new environment for sea life to re-colonise and Minter hopes that his ‘hotel’ will be the first of a chain of purpose-built crustacean habitats that will eventually be dotted along the southern English coast.
The first Minter Hotel was installed in May 2025 with the assistance of a team of volunteer divers from Sussex Underwater, a charity that has been documenting the recovery of the marine environment in Sussex Bay following the 2021 ban. The 3.5-tonne structure was carefully lowered to the seabed off the town of Lancing on a perfect, calm sunny day.
Eric Smith, co-founder of Sussex Underwater, says: “Our intention… is to monitor the structure to see how long it takes nature to colonise it and to provide our followers with regular updates. We hope to install a camera on it in the future so schools and others can tune in to the underwater world live.”
Marine scientist Dr Raymond Ward from Queen Mary University, London, will be leading the observation of the Minter Hotel to see what takes up residence in the coming years. “This initiative led by Alan Minter provides an excellent three-dimensional structure for a range of important species such as cuttlefish, squid, lobsters and brown crab,” he says. “These creatures have been substantially reduced by trawling in the area prior to the recent protections in Sussex in 2021.”
Now the UK Government is also potentially about to provide a boost to local marine conservation with its proposed wider ban on damaging bottom trawling in English waters.
So it’s a ‘watch this space’ for marine life around the UK, while Minter and the Sussex Underwater team watch the 19 crevices in an innovative concrete block for the first signs of a healthy crustacean population return to their particular coastal waters.
Watch Alan Minter and the team discussing the installation of the crustacean hotel here.
