At the same time, Improvement Commissioners were appointed with the task of making the town commodious and attractive to residents and the burgeoning tourist trade.
As a small port, it built ships until the late 19th century; it never transferred to building motor vessels or to steel hulls.
The coming of the railway in 1857 reduced the harbour trade, but it revived briefly after the Second World War for the import of fertiliser and animal feed.
The problem of siltation had preoccupied the merchants of the town for hundreds of years and occupied the attentions of various engineers, leading eventually to disputes which came to court in the 18th century.
Sir John Coode, who had been knighted for his work on the completion of Portland Harbour, was recruited to solve its siltation problems in the 1880s; no attempted solution proved permanent.
The growth of faster marine traffic, whose wake washes at the banks of the marshes, has widened the channel and reduced tidal flow further.
The North Sea is now a mile from the town; the main channel which once wandered through marshes, grazed by sheep for hundreds of years, was confined by earthworks to the west in 1859 when Holkham Estate reclaimed some 800 hectares of saltmarsh north-west of Wells with the building of a mile-long bank.
[7] This reclamation was claimed to have reduced the tidal scour though the West Fleet, which provided much of the water entered the channel to its north.
Eventually, the entire estate was acquired by F. & G. Smith who had maltings in Dereham and Great Ryburgh; they latterly bought out the competition becoming one of the biggest maltsters in the country.
Other agriculture-related enterprises, such as the local flour mill and the Ipswich-based Eastern Counties Farmers Cooperative, were, over the following years, bought out or closed.
Small coasters, mostly from across the English Channel,[8] brought in fertiliser and animal feed, latterly mostly soya beans until 1992 when changes in government regulations and the increasing size of vessels made the port uneconomic.
The transfer of operations to Yarmouth, on the closure of the facility in Wells in 2021, repeated the long-term pattern of opportunity and reversal in the town.
Tourism, which had begun on a small scale a century before, became a major draw; it was based on the Pinewoods Caravan site much expanded post-war first by the Town Council and subsequently by Holkham Estates.
(The narrow-gauge railway, built in 1976, that ran partway alongside the mile-long sea wall north of the harbour closed in 2021).
A landlocked brackish pool called Abraham's Bosom was for many years used for pleasure boating and canoeing; it is all that remains of the West Fleet which once drained the Holkham marshes.
The church burned down after a lightning strike in 1879; the exterior shows the original stonework, but the interior, while light and airy, lacks stained glass, once found.
John Fryer, Captain Bligh's sailing master on HMS Bounty, was born at Wells and is buried in the churchyard.
It proved its worth in December 2013 when a flood exceeded both the 1953 and 1978 events, holding back the waters so that the west end of the town was unaffected.
Large elegant Georgian houses overlook The Buttlands, as do the Crown Hotel, Globe Inn and the Wells Catholic Church.
[24] In addition to the two passenger railway routes in and out of the town, there was a tramway from the station to the quayside at Wells Harbour, whose rails are still visible today just beneath the modern road surface along East Quay.
Wells was located on the high-profile Coasthopper bus route between King's Lynn and Cromer, run by Norfolk Green.
In 1880, during the Wells lifeboat disaster, eleven of the thirteen crew drowned, leaving ten widows and 27 children without fathers.
The siren sounds around 5–10 minutes before the tide is predicted to take over the beach to allow users to vacate the area safely.
On 5 December 2013, a storm surge occurred which caused severe damage to the properties on the Quay and to the east; it did not affect the west end of the town because of a tidal barrier built in 1982.