In northern Europe and the UK in particular, a remarkable series of storms occurred over the winter of 2013/14, with large waves which led to considerable damage to coastal infrastructure. The most significant features of this storm season were the length of coastline affected by flooding (i.e., ‘spatial footprints’) and the short inter-arrival times between extreme events (i.e., ‘temporal clustering’) (Haigh et al., 2016). These extreme wave event characteristics had a large contribution to the devastating consequences along the coast, yet little attention has been paid to them in previous studies. The main aim of this study is to assess the spatial footprints and the temporal clustering of extreme wave events around the UK to facilitate the inclusion of such information into coastal management.