Eight thousand years ago you could walk from Yorkshire to the Rhine. The land under your feet was Doggerland: river plains, reed marshes, and low hills that held some of the richest hunting grounds in Mesolithic Europe, until the sea took them back. Today we are announcing the project to return. Nieuw Doggerland is a new multinational province rising from the shallows of the central North Sea, reconnecting Immingham and IJmuiden through a chain of engineered islands.
This website is the project’s public front door, and this post is the first entry in its logbook.
What we are proposing
Nieuw Doggerland is not one idea but several, stacked on the same shallow sandbank:
- An energy super-hub: building on the wind farms already turning above the Dogger Bank, adding green hydrogen production and grid interconnection between the UK and continental Europe.
- A biodiversity powerhouse: a constitutional no-take marine sanctuary in all inter-island waters, anchored by the largest native oyster reef restoration programme ever attempted in Europe.
- A transport corridor: stepping-stone causeways, bridges, and rail links closing the gap the sea opened eight millennia ago.
- An innovation frontier: marine research stations, aquaculture, eco-tourism, and a dedicated spaceport.
- A new province for its frontier inhabitants: because this is not just infrastructure. Nieuw Doggerland is planned as a place people live and work: homes among the reedbeds, harbours, schools, and civic squares for those who choose to make the North Sea’s new land their own. The destination, per the roadmap: an autonomous binational province by the 2040s.
The legal architecture matters as much as the engineering. The Dogger Bank lies beyond any nation’s territorial waters; four North Sea states hold overlapping economic rights there, and three of them already co-govern a joint marine protected area across it. The machinery for multinational governance exists; our Sovereignty page explains how a Svalbard-style treaty could build on it.
Where we are in the roadmap
We are at the very beginning. Phase 0, “Vision Ignition”, runs through 2026: the founding prospectus, the visual materials, this site, and the formation of the Founding Circle of experts and early supporters. Phase 1 (2027–2028) moves to coalition-building and commissioned feasibility studies; the first hub island is pencilled for construction from 2029.
That is a long arc, and we intend to document all of it here. Explore the seven pillars of the vision, walk the phase roadmap, or, if you build, study, fund, or govern things in the North Sea, get involved.
Ex Mare, Vita Nova: from the sea, new life.
