In the Anglo-Saxon period, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles, but the harbour and most of the town have since disappeared due to coastal erosion.

[6] However, many historians now prefer to locate Dommoc at Walton Castle, which was the site of a Saxon Shore fort (confusingly these were Roman structures).

As a legacy of its previous significance, the parliamentary constituency of Dunwich retained the right to send two members to Parliament until the Reform Act 1832, and it was one of Britain's most notorious rotten boroughs.

[21] In 2005, historian Stuart Bacon stated that recent low tides had shown that shipbuilding had previously been undertaken in the town.

[22] The Dunwich 2008 project funded by English Heritage and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation was intended to collate all reliable historic mapped data on the same co-ordinate system and combine this with aerial photography and an underwater survey.

[23][24] New digital maps were produced by Prof. David Sear of Southampton University, marine archaeologist Stuart Bacon and the Geodata Institute.

In 2009 Wessex Archaeology working with Professor Sear, captured the highest resolution sidescan images of the town site including the ruins found in 2008.

This work hopes to confirm the date of the town ditches and roads and explore the record of environmental change in the marsh sediments.

[28] During the Second World War, RAF Dunwich was one of the Chain Home Low stations which provided low-level radar cover for the central East Anglian coast.

The Dark Heart of Dunwich is piece of a Suffolk folklore, the origins of which appear to lie in the twelfth century.

The title character, Eve Clavering, is a member of a Dunwich family whose properties have been partly destroyed by the sea.

[36] In the novel An Affair of Dishonour by William De Morgan, the Battle of Solebay is viewed from the shore by characters living at a manor house said to be remote "since the sea swallowed up the township of which it was a suburb".

[39] Al Stewart's 1993 song "The Coldest Winter in Memory" includes the lines[40] By the lost town of Dunwich The shore was washed away They say you hear the church bells still As they toll beneath the waves W. G. Sebald's 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn features a visit by the author to Dunwich in the course of his walking tour of Suffolk in 1992.

[41] British Progressive Rock band The Future Kings of England recorded a track called Dunwich for their 2007 album The Fate of Old Mother Orvis.

[42] Mark Fisher and Justin Barton's essay On Vanishing Land references the sunken city, the surrounding area and the Eno album from where it takes its name.