The reputation of a village beach plagued by pollution has reached a new low after it was handed a ‘Brown Flag Award’. Heacham Beach has become renowned as Norfolk’s most noxious beach in recent years, with the standard of the bathing water consistently deemed to be ‘poor’. Debates over the cause of this have been fiercely fought, with many complaining about waste from Anglian Water’s Heacham Wastewater Treatment Works flowing into the sea. However, the water company has insisted that seabirds are the main culprits. Whatever the cause, the beach has now gained another unwanted tag after resear…