Serena Cant is currently Maritime Research Specialist at Historic England, having spent nearly 30 years in maritime research, with a secondment to Marine Listing in 2014-16, specialising in researching and recording shipwreck sites and documented wreck events which may be potential matches for wreck finds. Over that time she has curated over 37,000 wreck records from prehistoric logboats to wrecks of the 20^th century in English waters, a rich heritage which encompasses a wealth of histories: the ebb and flow of trade patterns, the fortunes of war, and the historic vagaries of the ever-changeable British weather.

She has written extensively on various aspects of this rich shipwreck heritage with the aim of making it accessible to a wider audience and is the author of England’s Shipwreck Heritage: from logboats to U-boats (2013).

Tanja Watson is the other Maritime Research Specialist, working at Historic England since 2005, having moved over to Maritime since 2019. She is also part of the editorial team.

This blog started life as an internal bulletin alerting Serena’s colleagues to interesting historical features of shipwrecks, but has continued to gain an increasingly wide audience, so it has been taken forward as a maritime wreck blog to reach a wider audience still.

Each story focuses on either a documented wreck event or a particular wreck site from somewhere around the many miles of the English coastline, including sites which have been afforded statutory protection under the Protection of Wrecks Act.