Sandbanks - Final episode

17 January 2008 @ 10.35-11.05pm on ITV1.

Piers Morgan has been discovering why Sandbanks in Dorset has become one of the most expensive places to live in the world, turning it into a magnet for the super rich.

Tonight, in the final programme of this new three part series transmitting on consecutive nights, Piers looks to the future of the tiny sand dune and finds out its prosperity is being threatened. Frighteningly experts are predicting that climate change could sink the peninsula and end the Sandbanks dream.

Dr Edward Coombe, former lecturer and research fellow at Oxford University and coastal geomorphologist, specialises in the effect of global warming on coastal tides. He predicts an impending disaster.

Dr Coombe says: "This is a tourist jewel. The fact still remains that what is going to happen must be inevitable I am afraid.

"Sandbanks is a wave created land form. Increasing sea levels now are going to eventually destroy it….Once you try to urbanise the coast you are inviting trouble," he warns.

But the main Sandbanks players at the centre of the lucrative redevelopment don't buy it.

"That's just a mad professor who is coming out with poppycock ideas," says property tycoon Richard Carr.

Eddie Mitchell, who is looking to create a ten million pound lighthouse-style restaurant in the most vulnerable part of Sandbanks, isn't put off by the doctor's prediction either. "I don't think the sand is going to raise," he says confidently.

Piers also asks that, with the over-inflated prices, could it be the economy that overheats first and ends the Sandbanks dream?