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Marine interns 2026 - From the Big Smoke to saltmarsh

The life of the Marine Futures Interns is varied. One day they're in living it up in London, the next they're putting on waders and heading out onto the saltmarshes of the Lincolnshire coast.
Marine Futures Interns 2026 in London

Five weeks into our internship, the much anticipated Crown Estate week in London had arrived.

If you are a regular reader of these blogs, as you no doubt are, you will likely have heard of The Crown Estate’s luxurious offices – the stunning seventh floor view over London’s skyline that they boast, with Big Ben peaking up on the horizon, the delicious food served on a rooftop cafeteria, the barista coffee… I will therefore not bore or antagonise you, dear reader, with more descriptions of the wonders of 1 St James’ Market.

If all this is news to you, I suggest you take a look at previous years’ Marine Interns blogs and let yourself be carried to the bustling streets of Piccadilly Circus for a little while.

Offices aside, it was a wonderful week during which we met our fellow interns from across the country, as well as previous interns now working at The Crown Estate.

After a warm welcome, we spent our first afternoon attending a series of presentations from just such previous interns, as well as others who had gone on to work in adjacent fields and companies such as Ørsted and the Tees Rivers Trust. It was followed by a social on the rooftop terrace during which we got the opportunity to chat to them – I had the most interesting conversation with someone about her rather unusual background which encompassed seemingly everything from boat building to puppeteering to graphic design to marine conservation. I was, frankly, blown away and truly inspired. I’m sure she won’t mind me saying so, especially as a chef stepping into the marine conservation world myself, I often find myself battling with imposter syndrome.

We spent our days in various training sessions such as Project Management and Excel on the more practical and possibly drier side, or Insights personality and Laughology presentation/public speaking training on the lighter side. 

In the evenings we joined up with the North Wales interns and visited museums, later meeting the rest of the cohort for drinks and dinner. Despite the grim and worrying reason behind it, the weather was always beautiful – we could not help but feel like the luckiest people in the world.

Marine intern Mona surveying sea couch grass

The following week was like stepping into a different world. We donned our wellies and waterproof trousers and began with a bird and invertebrate survey among the sea couch at Horseshoe Point, as part of the Wilder Humber project. We never did get wet as the sun was shining fiercely, but we left covered in scratches from the somewhat literally passive aggressive sea couch. It was a lovely day spent with the Wilder Humber officers James, Imogen and Beth, as well as the Marine Conservation officer Lauren and the student placement Emily.

After a glorious 30th birthday spent partly in a Grimsby Town Council meeting and partly in Ørsted’s offices, followed by a lovely dinner with the Ørsted Consents team, we spent a day at Sea View Nursery where James and Imogen are growing saltmarsh plants as part of the Wilder Humber Project. Along with aforementioned Ørsted team, we monitored seedlings, counted seeds and potted them.

It was again a wonderful day and a great insight into the career possibilities in our sector.

The weekend was spent at the North Sea Observatory with Dave Miller (Warden for Coasts and Wolds at the Trust) watching seals and harbour porpoises as part of the National Whale & Dolphin weekend. 

We were astoundingly lucky as we caught 13 sightings of the often elusive harbour porpoises. Dave himself, in over a decade of watching out for them on this annual event, had never seen so many. As George so well put it in the parlance of the day: he was chuffed. As were we. In between sightings we basked in the sunshine, picked the hundreds of ladybirds that landed on us and pondered the discussion and viewing of the previous day’s National Emergency Briefing, hosted by Tammy Smalley and Paul Chibeba at Banovallum House. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend going to a viewing.

Mona

Marine intern George

July brought the opportunity for some fun hands-on conservation work. Working with the Wilder Humber team we carried out bird and invertebrate surveys at Horseshoe Point. To a sane person scrabbling through sharp couch grass in 30-degree heat counting sandfleas and snails may not seem like much of a fun time but to me it was brilliant. 

The Wilder Humber team also gave us the opportunity to visit Sea View Nursery alongside Ørsted helping to monitor their saltmarsh and dune plant seedlings as well as planting new seeds for them to grow. Mona and I were also lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Whale & Dolphin watching event at the North Sea Observatory as part of marine week. The highlight of this was definitely watching a small family of harbour porpoise hanging out just off the beach. 

As part of our internship Mona and I spent a week down in The Big Smoke being hosted in the amazing The Crown Estate offices. I have to say this was my highlight of the internship so far. We finally met all our fellow interns from around the country and what a fantastic group of people they turned out to be. The week also gave us the opportunity to learn some valuable skills including excel (which I hated before but now hate much less) as well as presentation and project management. We also participated in QUEST which was a social event hosted by TCE, a sort of scavenger hunt/ puzzle activity which was excellent because my team won (I still have my medal and crown). Overall the highlight of the week was being able to meet and spend time with all the other interns. 

After our intense weeks of being out and about constantly we were finally able to spend some time in the office to continue working on our projects. We also attended the Emergency Briefing screening hosted at Banovallum House. 

George

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