A while ago, I mentioned in passing The Pleasaunce, another of Overstrand's grand houses. There is a cluster of interesting stories here too, and they're not as dark as those associated with Sea Marge.

On Saturday, we happened upon a street in Overstrand that we'd never traversed. (We keep finding tracks in Overstrand that have previously eluded us. It's obviously an enchanted place, that's never visible all at the same time...)


Anyway, this street turned out to be The Londs, and we went back on Tuesday for a closer look. (And it's now Friday... You wouldn't believe how busy a lockdown gets...)

Apart from being delightfully flinty, the most immediately striking feature of The Londs is the clock tower and associated knot of buildings:





We later found that this is all part of The Pleasaunce.

The whole complex is Grade II Listed, so we might as well benefit from the experts' description:

"This group of buildings is a very significant seaside home built from 1897 onwards by Lord and Lady Battersea and designed by one of the most important of all British architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens... [The] original name 'The Cottage' was probably for the original house incorporated in the core of the new one. It might have been a joke (the house has some 35 bedrooms), except for what it could be compared with, since Lady Battersea was the eldest daughter of Sir Anthony de Rothschild ... and granddaughter of Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild, the founder of the London branch of the great banking house... She was thus a cousin of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, the builder of Waddesdon. Waddesdon was being completed in 1888 at the same time as the Batterseas bought the couple of original villas, linked to form one home. Set alongside Waddesdon and other Rothschild properties, The Pleasaunce is perhaps a cottage in comparison.

"Cyril Flower, created Lord Battersea in 1892, was the son of a wealthy business man with multiple shops in Battersea, a Liberal M.P. and Chief Whip in Gladstone's 1886 Government. Both he and his wife had artistic interests...

"[T]his important commission, that Lutyens received early in his career, had an architectural sting in the tail because the couple insisted that the recently built villas set close together and united as one were not demolished for the new house but incorporated in it... Whatever the reason [for this decision], it may have given to Lutyens the concept of a large house evolved over several generations for, in addition to disguising the pre-existing, he added elements which are mid C17, late C17, and early C18 in style, both vernacular and polite, to achieve a very large rambling house which seems endless... There are many imaginative ideas and, as the overall atmosphere is a wonderful seat of pleasure by the sea, The Pleasaunce is well named.

"Whilst it may not have been of the grandeur of Waddesdon, visitors were of the grandest: Queen Alexandra and her sister, the Empress of Russia, made an unexpected visit in 1911 just driving over from Sandringham, much to the consternation of the staff...

"Although the Batterseas were not easy clients and Lutyens wrote in 1899 that he was 'not at all proud of the Pleasaunce', this view is from his own perception of perfection...

"[The] clock tower has flanking loggias and an attached series of outbuildings with smaller round towers and a feature bake oven. The ensemble is a very fine example of Lutyens' genius with the smaller scale of the lower buildings enhancing the grand entrance to the house opposite and contrasting with the extremely unusual clock and look-out tower, which is the climax of the group."


Lady Battersea's Reminiscences are a fascinating little window onto the Overstrand of the late 1890s.

She notes that her first impressions of their new home (before Lutyens set about remaking it) were not that positive: "Very commonplace, rather uncomfortable, extremely draughty, and with little pretence at beauty, 'The Cottage,' as it was then called, was neither romantic nor picturesque. The two houses built in red brick had been thrown into one and stood a little way off the main road leading down to the cliff. A field lay in front of us, whilst in a narrow lane, called 'The Londs,' stood some of the old cobble cottages inhabited by fishermen. I failed to see any real beauty in the place; indeed, I had not yet acquired the taste for Norfolk scenery that grows upon one so rapidly and so strongly." She also records that she was not initially bowled over by the clock tower, although she later grew attached to it...

A later chapter explains how tourism was organized in those early days:

"I have learnt to know and to appreciate Overstrand itself and its inhabitants. Our house ... stands in close neighbourhood to the dwellings of the fisher-folk; an easy walk takes me to all the doors at which I am anxious to knock, which always open very kindly to me. During the Overstrand season, however -- that is to say, for about ten weeks in the summer -- it would be difficult to find the owners of these houses at home in them, for the premises are systematically let to the numerous seaside visitors who have had the good sense to discover the charm of the place... During the season the inhabitants live in strange little makeshift dwellings, even in railway carriages, standing at the rear of their houses, the latter having been given over to the lodgers, and made as fit for their reception as circumstances will permit. Happily, there is much fine weather to be counted upon during the summer or early autumn season, when the daylight hours are long, and the sea able to offer the much-appreciated bath on a grand scale. Then the shore is alive with human beings, the bathers disporting themselves from early morning until the late hours of a well-spent day."

Also in The Londs can be found Pear Tree Cottage. Occupied in the summer leading up to WWI by Winston Churchill's wife, Clementine, its lamentable lack of telephone saw the Speyer family at Sea Marge springing into the breach.


A little further down the road there's the Reading Room cottage, provided in the early 1800s (by the Batterseas again, I think), while next door is the pre-fabricated building originally erected by Lord Battersea as a convalescent home for the patients of the Metropolitan Hospital in London. It was used as a military hospital during WWI, and it is now the Parish Hall. It's notable for being a Bolton & Paul building. This extraordinarily versatile firm not only made all manner of pre-fabs, but also turned its hand to making products that ranged from wire netting (Australia apparently bought up about 7,500 miles of B&P netting in an attempt to keep its rabbits in their place) to equipment for Scott's Antarctic expedition and aeroplanes.


And finally, what seems like a really, really long time ago, I posted about Clement Scott, who is credited with coining the term Poppyland, and popularizing this area of Norfolk back in the 1880s. On that first revelatory visit, Scott stayed at the miller's house on the edge of Overstrand ("one of those farmhouses that is the exact reproduction of the style of cottage that all children are set to draw when they commence their first lesson"). Maybe he fell in love with the miller's 19-year-old daughter, Louie Jermy, or maybe he fell in love with her food (he was particularly a fan of her blackberry pudding). Any which way, he returned regularly.

Louie became "modestly famous", after Scott's writings made her home "the mecca of Poppyland"; her guests included Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote a rather beautiful poem about "The Mill Garden":

Softlier here the flower-soft feet of refluent seasons glide,
Lightlier breathes the long low note of change’s gentler call.
Wind and storm and landslip feed the lone sea’s gulf outside,
Half a seamew’s first flight hence; but scarce may these appal
Peace, whose perfect seal is set for signet here on all...

All the place breathes low, but not for fear lest ill betide,
Soft as roses answering roses, or a dove’s recall.
Little heeds it how the seaward banks may stoop and slide,
How the winds and years may hold all outer things in thrall,
How their wrath may work on hoar church tower and boundary wall.
Far and wide the waste and ravin of their rule proclaim
Change alone the changeless lord of things, alone the same:
Here a flower is stronger than the winds that work their will,
Or the years that wing their way through darkness toward their aim...

The guests were sometimes unpredictable (Swinburne and his novelist companion, Theodore Watts-Dunton, it seems, were incapable of turning up simultaneously for a meal). More generally, as the rich and famous continued to flock to Overstrand, "the quiet village stirred with stories of 'middle-aged lunatics from London' careering about the lanes at night".

Ah, the trials of tourism...


So many stories slumber around us, and how few we succeed in waking...