Apologies the formatting of this post seems to have gone a bit haywire!

A few days ago I was in Suffolk for a short holiday. It was cold, wet and windy but one day  we braved the weather and walked along the beach north from Aldeburgh finally reaching a few rather   battered seaside bungalows.  But beyond them, on the other side of the dunes we  entered another world entirely:  a fantasy village that seemed to have escaped from an early Disney Film about “Olde England.”

This was  Thorpeness, a place that was largely the vision of one man,  G.Stuart Ogilvie, and I found myself smiling as we wandered round realising what fun he must have had creating  Britain’s first planned seaside resort.

Probably the most famous single building is a former water tower that provided storage for 50,000 gallons to supply the whole village.  Water was pumped up by the nearby windmill which was built in 1803 in  Aldringham just down the road and   moved to Thorpeness by Ogilvie in 1923.   It might have been useful but the tower was  ugly so  it was deliberately “disguised” as  a cottage,  albeit one perched 70 feet high in the trees. The structure below the tank was  boxed in to provide a home called The Gazebo. Apparently Ogilvie had  already disguised his own water tower at Sizewell a mile up the coast as a dove-cote in 1908, using the bottom part as a carpenter’s workshop.

The Gazebo was  first  used  by a friend of his, Mrs Malcolm Mason,  who was so inspired by the house that she wrote a poem for children about it called “The House in the Clouds”. It contains the less than memorable lines “The Fairies really own this house – or so the children say – In fact, they all of them moved in upon the self-same day.”

Mrs Mason is often described as an author of children’s books but according to the British Library she only wrote one book: a collection of  verse for of children called surprise surprise “The House in the Clouds.” [Sadly I can’t find a copy on-line].

That  name  fitted  the fantasy feel of the village and it stuck.  In 1979, following the introduction of mains water to the village the tank was removed and the space used to create a huge room.   Both Thorpeness Windmill  and The House in the Clouds are listed at Grade 2 by Historic England and The House in the Clouds is available to rent.

By 1929 the tank in the clouds wasn’t big enough to supply demand and another was constructed with its purpose even better concealed by the architect William Gilmour Wilson. Known as West Bar it actually resembles a large late medieval  gatehouse but was built out of concrete and  given a facade of  timber and  brick. It stands on an arch in the middle of a row of half-timbered mock Tudorbethan houses.

Not content with one medieval style gateway, another stands in the middle of the range of the Margaret Ogilvie almshouses  which were built as staff accommodation and finished in 1928.  Although it resembles parts of Hampton Court it too is concrete underneath the brick and timber facings.  Indeed many of the village’s seemingly traditionally built cottages are also built of concrete and several of the most significant have been listed  by Historic England.

So how did this extraordinary place come into being?

 

In the 16thc there had been a safe shipping haven at Thorpe, but over the centuries this had silted up and the previously thriving settlement that had grown up nearby declined into just a small, quiet scattered  fishing village of 20 or 30 houses. In 1859  the local “big house”,  Sizewell House,  a few miles along the coast was bought, along with two and half acres,  by Alexander Ogilvie in 1859 to serve as a holiday home. He had made a fortune building railways and after he died in 1886 his widow Margaret   continued to buy land so that by the time she died in 1908 the estate stretched to over 6000 acres.

Thorpe and Sizewell House were inherited by their son Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie [always called Stuart],  a lawyer [who didnt practice law] and  a dramatist at heart who had some successes on the West End stage. He set about transforming the landscape and  gardens  around Sizewell, employing up to 20 gardeners but  by 1910 his attention switched to make Thorpe a stage set that came to life.

 

As the 1912 guidebook explained: “By then Thorpe had become known to a “faithful few as an ideal seaside Summer resort. The country gentry, retired military officers, well-known artists and well-to-do merchants from Norwich, Ipswich, and even London, have built and occupied bungalows on the edge of the rolling sand dunes overlooking the North Sea.”

That must have given him the idea of developing the  collection of small cottages that made up Thorpe at the time, and creating something designed  specifically to cater for such upper middle class holiday makers and no-one else.    He acquired manorial rights over the sea shore  “to preserve .. the amenities of Thorpeness for the sole benefit of its residents [and] provide an important and powerful weapon of defence against trippers and other “undesirables”. Exclusivity and “class” were clearly important so in a later edition of the guidebook he declared “there will never be a pier, cinemas or slide shows, plate glass or peacocking.”

However several other things also marked Ogilvie and his ideas  out from the usual run of seaside resorts.  The scheme was not supposed to look planned at all but to have been the  natural piecemeal development of the existing settlement. It was not to be overtly commercial and instead aimed at providing a beautiful and tranquil setting,  with activities and facilities to suit both young and old. His  vision seems to have been heavily  influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s  Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898)  where the best of town and country fused harmoniously and led to a healthy lifestyle for the inhabitants.

To help him achieve his aim Ogilvie turned to an architect friend W. G. Wilson [1856-1943] who had helped enlarge Sizewell Hall , and added several  pavilions and follies to the garden. The pair then involved another  architect, Forbes Glennie (b.1872, d.1950) and slowly  lowly Thorpe was rebranded to became  fashionable Thorpeness.

It was to be a place of contradictions.

 

Ogilvie’s scheme was visionary in its ambition, and  from the outset Thorpeness was to be different. The houses were not for sale but for seasonal renting. They would be fully furnished and equipped,  with lavish communal facilities and even domestic staff provided. Built by local builders they cost between £298-380 each.

 

 

While each house was in a recognisably similar style each was subtly different to its neighbours, and set amongst the natural landscape, with scrub allowed to grow between properties and open boundaries, giving them what garden historians would probably recognise as a picturesque quality.

All this led, despite the visual differences and eccentricities, to a visual unity because of Ogilvie’s unwavering commitment for building quality enhanced by landscape.  That’s clear from the guidebook. There was a village green and playing fields, while, for example, each of one group of bungalows  “had its own little garden, with Lilliputian lawns and miniature borders gay with herbaceous and annual flowers.” Additionally the leading local nursery Notcutts of Woodbridge supplied most of 25,000 trees, sets, flowering shrubs and creepers and by the time of his death Ogilvie had planted about a million trees around the estate.

His architectural vision at first sight appears very conservative. Many of the new buildings were in mock Tudor and Jacobean styles as had been fashionable for much of the 19thc, particularly with Arts and Crafts movement. There was  an abundance of exposed timber, complex roofs of gables and eaves and chimneys, and  irregular facades.   Some even had a Dutch or even Spanish note about them. Nothing was quite what it seemed because while it looked “traditional”,  William Morris would probably have been horrified as it was, all  underpinned by 20th century technology with many of the early houses made of poured concrete which was then rendered more in keeping by being give a half-timbered finish.

Although Thorpeness was by the sea, and indeed some the houses overlooked the sea, the village was not planned around it. Instead it was planned round a man-made lake. This    was created in the autumn of 1910 when the small Hundred river which runs  through the area overflowed and flooded the silted up  former haven.   The flood inspired Ogilvie to block the river permanently, and so create a 64-acre lake, now known as The Meare.  It was deliberately extremely shallow – no more than 2ft 6inches deep, and was  dug out by hand  by estate workers on 8d a day. They also  created a series of islands and installed sluices to control the water level. The boathouse was put up in 1911 and the lake was formally declared open in July 1913.

There was a large fleet of boats of all sorts including some small sailing boats which were given names such as Red Rover, Purple Emperor and Pink Pearl with sails to match. Many of these boats are still in use. It became the scene of an annual Regatta and fireworks display which still continues today.

Ogilvie published a guidebook in 1912 to promote the venture and its from that that we can see how the fantasy really kicks in. One of his good friends was J.M.Barrie, author of Peter Pan which had only been published in 1904 and early advertising emphasised the similarity between the attractions of The Meare and the adventures of J.M. Barrie’s fictional characters.   The Guidebook  described Thorpeness as “the home of Peter Pan”, and the lake  a “children’s paradise” of “sixty acres of safe and shallow water and ornamental islands”.

The islands and the various sectors of The Meare were named after characters and places in popular children’s books, such as Wendy’s House, the Crocodile from Peter Pan and  the Spanish Main, but also  Pegotty’s House from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Robinson Crusoe,  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs  and Puck of Pooks Hill by Rudyard Kipling.

Such a focus on children  and their interests is  a completely new concept in an era when it was not usual to give any weight to their leisure  needs or indeed those of  families.

But it wasn’t all for children and Ogilvie also called it a “Temple of Tranquillity, where the Soul of over-civilised Man may escape the thraldom of the Great Cities and find its Self alone with Nature and at one with God.”

What that meant in practice was that as well as the attractions of the beach, the Meare and the beautiful Suffolk countryside, holiday makers could take part in a full programme of dances, quizzes and other activities at the Country Club.

There was a circulating library, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, bowling green  and a golf  course was also planned. Unfortunately  WW1 broke out before work got underway and it wasn’t  opened until 1922 on what was initially  barren heathland, although it was  soon planted up with trees.

The resort continued to grow boosted by the opening of a small station – Thorpeness Halt – in 1914, although Great Eastern Railways [which had been partly built by Alexander Ogilvie] did it on the cheap using redundant railway carriages as the waiting room.

The station finally closed in 1966 – thanks Dr Beeching.

 

By the time the rail line opened all the first phase of housing was completed and had been let. However this was on the eve of the Great War and planned future developments came to a halt in August 1914 when hostilities broke out.  The army occupied the grounds of Sizewell Hall and there was little available labour as so many men enlisted

After the war was over work began again, with Ogilvie’s commitment to providing interesting public spaces remaining clear. A large extension was planned to the north of the existing settlement with long tree-lined avenues with a rotunda  and areas of lawn linking  the new housing to the sea. Unfortunately it was never completed.

Nevertheless other development continued and Thorpeness became “an architectural crucible for experimentation”, with, for example, a concrete-brick-making machine  imported from  Australia to make blocks from beach shingle, and the use of   “vermin-resistant materials such as asbestos.” In all about  one hundred houses of varying sizes were constructed.  Almost all the labour used were ex-servicemen and they also formed the majority of the staff.  But still the class element continued to dominate with The Sphere magazine [14th May 1938] reporting  that “all charabancs, pierrots and concert parties are rightly barred.”

Building continued after Ogilvie’s death  in 1932, with the church finished in 1936 and finally a large apartment block, The Headlands,  going up in 1937.  He had also planned to add a hotel with room for more than 400 guests and a half-timbered shopping arcade based on The Rows in Chester, although these were never built either because financial pressures were taking their toll.

Thorpeness  stood the idea of a traditional village on its head. Whereas most grew up around the manor house and church and sat in the middle of working agricultural landscapes Thorpeness was the opposite. The village revolved around the landscape of leisure, with its centres being the country club, golf club and The Meare.

Despite appearances Ogilvie was not seriously wealthy but he does not seem to have regarded Thorpeness as a place  to make huge profits. Indeed it’s thought he probably only broke even on his investments, and was often in debt.  Sizewell Hall burned almost to the ground in 1920 and had to be rebuilt, and gradually through the late 1920s not only did many of his schemes have to be abandoned because of shortage of funds but  land and property  had to be sold off as leasehold as well, although the estate tried to maintain development quality through the use of strict covenants. Worse still he had to deal with his second wife who by all accounts must have been a very difficult woman and ended up being paid to leave! [See One Man’s Dream for all the gossip!]

During the Second World War the Hall  was commandeered and the Golf Club used as a military hospital, while the course was used for tank training and had obstacles placed on the fairways to stop them being used for landing strips.

 

The estate was inherited by the founder’s son, another Stuart Ogilvie, and the business
began to be modernised and streamlined. More attention was paid to making the agricultural side of the estate profitable, while Sizewell Hall was let to  a boarding school. It’s now home to  a Christian Conference Centre.  After Stuart Ogilvie’s death in 1972 death duties hit hard and  forced  the sale of more land and  properties, and eventually  the golf course.

However, the major part of the village became a conservation area in 1976, although it wasn’t until the 1990s that some of the buildings were individually listed. Despite the new houses and other inevitable changes which have taken place  Thorpeness  retains the original  plan and many of the features envisaged by Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie himself and the  most recent Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan of  2022 is designed to maintain its character.

Historic England added The Meare to the register of Historic Parks and Gardens earlier this year as a result of research carried out as part of the Suffolk’s Unforgettable Garden Story  project run by the Gardens Trust  in partnership with Suffolk Gardens Trust and made possible by a small amount of funding from Historic England. Three other Suffolk gardens  were added to Register at the same time.