Foulness Island passing of the Ministry of Defence Act 1946 and the subsequent rationalisation of five agencies in 1971, ownership of the island passed from the War Office to the Ministry of Defence. In 2003, a contract to manage the testing of munitions was awarded to the defence contractors QinetiQ, and they also control access to the island. In the 1850s, the South Essex Estuary and Reclamation Company proposed a grand scheme to reclaim around of land on the Essex coast, which would have included most of Foulness Sands and Maplin Sands. The civil engineer Sir John Rennie produced the plans, and
Foulness Island commissioners were sent to inspect the state of the banks in the Rochford hundred, which included Foulness. The earliest record of sea walls is from 1271, and in 1348 there were problems with one of the marshes, which was flooding every day, indicating that it was below the level of normal tides. The sea walls were made of earth, and were thatched with hurdles of brushwood and rushes. The island was divided into 11 or 12 marshes, each with its own wall, rather than one wall around the whole area, and was extended in 1420 by a new wall around