There can be few animals with quite the cachet of the oyster, yet although now synonymous with luxurious living, oysters were once so abundant that they formed a cheap and easy source of food for even the poorest.

In her "Book of Household Management", Victorian cook Mrs Beeton - the Mary Berry of her day - noted the widespread abundance and ready availability of oysters around Britain's coast...before going on to describe how they should be fried, steamed, coddled and grilled!

Writing a little later in 1883, the Grimsby-based mariner O. T. Olsen published a "Piscatorial Atlas", a compendium of where-to-fish maps which indeed shows extensive oyster banks around our coasts, including along much of the Humber Estuary and down the Lincolnshire Coast.

Astonishingly, almost all of these are now gone, and the natural population of our native oyster - the European Flat Oyster, Ostrea edulis, is in a state of collapse. It can be difficult  to come by reliable data from the past, but published estimates suggest populations have reduced by as much as 95% since the 1800s. This has largely been as a result of a combination of overfishing, dredging, pollution and disease.  Natural stocks are now so low and fragmented that independent recovery from this parlous situation is simply not possible, thus human intervention is needed.

Although not concerned with oyster fisheries for their economic value, conservation groups such as Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) are actively involved in restoring our native oyster populations. This is because as they grow, oysters build living reefs - not all reefs are made of coral - and thus creates a habitat that can be populated by a myriad of other organisms.

A study published in 2023 showed that historically our oyster reefs were home to an extraordinary 190 marine species representing a huge range of animal and plant types including other molluscs, crustaceans, worms, sponges, fish, seagrasses and marine algae. Even more than that, as the infographic shows, they benefit the environment by filtering and cleaning seawater and by protecting the coast from erosion.

So pivotal are they to the marine environment that oysters are referred to both as Ecosystem Engineers and as a Keystone Species. Lose them, and many other species are lost with them, but restore the oysters and we can help bring back the physical health and biodiversity of the estuaries and shallow seas they inhabit.

These were the key messages I heard from Dr Boze Hancock, an expert in Marine Restoration, when I attended a press day at the Spurn Discovery Centre, held to announce an exciting new initiative that YWT has entered into as part of the Wilder Humber coastal ecosystem project.

YWT, along with their partners in the Wilder Humber project, has established the Native Oyster Restoration Programme, which aims to bring oysters back to the Humber Estuary. The scale and ambition of this programme is hugely impressive - the intention is to rear some 500.000 oysters, recreating the oyster banks that were once so abundant there.

Sounds challenging? It is!

Nature needs a little help for this to happen - it takes at least three years for an oyster to reach maturity, and of the millions of planktonic larvae they produce only a tiny percentage reach adulthood.

Enter The Oyster Restoration Company, who are now working with the Wilder Humber team on the project. The company specialises in delivering huge numbers of disease-resistant oyster larvae from their base in NW Scotland using an innovative rearing technique called Remote Setting.

This involves transporting the oysters from hatchery to recovery site while they are still tiny planktonic larvae (each of which measures about 0.2 mm across, roughly the size of a grain of beach sand) rather waiting for them to grow into more mature "spats", as juvenile oysters are called. Remote Setting is an altogether more efficient, less stressful and cheaper method to use if you are in the oyster husbandry business.

The larvae are delivered by courier to the team base at Spurn; a new batch arrived the day I was there. When they arrive,  they're added to huge aerated seawater tanks that the team has installed outside the office and workshop they share with the Wilder Humber Seagrass Team.

Oysters develop to maturity by abandoning their free-living younger lives and attaching themselves to a hard surface. This could be rock or other shells... anything that they can cement themselves to. Oysters, like us, like to settle down as they get a bit older.

The team are using scallop shells for the oysters to attach to - these have a high calcium content, a substance that the oysters have a natural affinity for since it's what they too use to build their shells. Moreover, scallop shells are rough, and have lots of surface area for the larvae to cling to. They're cheap and readily available as well, a by-product of the food industry.

Over the course of a few days, the larvae are left to settle out onto the scallops.  After that it is a matter of allowing the oysters to grow until they are at a stage that they can be transferred to a new home. Home in this case means a series of trestles that have been installed on the landward side of the Spurn Peninsula, where the team can monitor them as they mature further.

This is what six month old oysters look like, already forming their own nascent mini-reef. You can see from the photo how they grow together.

Along with other members of the press pack, I was able to get an insight into the oysters' world by viewing some amazing video shot by team member Finn Varney.

Oysters live rather sedate lives, but sped up the video shows them feeding, their shells gaping to allow water to pulse in and out. At the same speed, tiny snails zip about and barnacles flash their feathery cirri like the opening and closing of an umbrella, as they feed too.

Rearing the oysters in the tanks and on trestles is only the first stage of the restoration project. As Marine Restoration Manager, Kieron McCloskey told me, the next thing is the task of selecting suitable sites to start to develop the oyster banks. The team hopes that once they are established, the oysters will then take care of themselves.

Beyond this, there is huge potential for restoring oyster reefs around our coasts, and you can get a glimpse of that potential by making the short walk from the team office to Spurn Beach.

Look out past the old sea defences, and there on the horizon are the turbines making up the Humber Gateway Wind Farm. Now, offshore structures like wind turbines have a problem - marine currents can scour the seabed where they are anchored, a problem addressed by placing rock and concrete around them. Ideal oyster habitat! And there are already thousands of offshore wind turbines in the North Sea, many in areas where oysters once flourished... A tantalising prospect!

The value of restoring oysters to our seas is now widely recognised in conservation circles, with numerous projects in progress around the world.  The skills and expertise that the Wilder Humber Oyster Restoration Team are gaining are making an important contribution to this work, as well as bringing back lost biodiversity to the Humber Estuary.

If you'd like to find out more, you can read more about the progress of the project here. The Wilder Humber website includes lots of interesting information about the programme, as well as video of oysters feeding.