Landmark Trust sets to work on historic seaside building, home of the author of The French Lieutenant's Woman until his death
In 1999, six years before he died, the novelist John Fowles wrote that despite its beauty, acres of garden, ravishing views and historic interest – not only as his home but that of the pioneering Georgian businesswoman, Eleanor Coade he – was failing to give away his beloved house in Lyme Regis, Dorset.
He dreamed the Grade II* listed Belmont House could become a centre "for young writers and artists" who would be as inspired by its beauty and history as he. The main windows of the room where he wrote look straight out to sea, or steeply down to the Cobb where he sent his melancholy heroine, The French Lieutenant's Woman, on her solitary walks. His desk, possibly to give him some defence from the distractions of such a view, was set at right angles to it.
He had lost count of the institutions he approached, he wrote sadly, including the University of East Anglia, famed for the creative writing course co-founded by his friend Malcolm Bradbury, of which he was an honorary graduate. None felt capable of taking it on.
One American demanded assurance that the property could never suffer from landslip: since the house is perched halfway up a cliff on the Jurassic Coast, where for centuries fossil hunters have flocked to pry treasures from the rapidly eroding slopes, he could give no such promise.
Now, though there are many more cracks in walls and terrace, and the garden is even more of a jungle than he affectionately complained of, his wishes may come true.
The Landmark Trust, which restores historic buildings, has bought Belmont from Fowles's widow Sarah, and is fundraising to restore it not just as a holiday rental like its other properties, but a residential centre for young writers. This time the University of East Anglia, whose graduates include Anne Enright, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, has said yes.
Discussions are also ongoing with Royal Holloway and other academic institutions.
The move is an innovation for the Landmark, but one which its new director Anna Keay hopes to build on at other properties.
"I love the thought of bringing that literary life back into the house, and making the whole place not just a nicely restored old building but a living memorial to Fowles and his work," she said.
"The history of this house is already so rich and multilayered, it's nice to think of adding another chapter."
Many of the trust's properties are eccentric, including a pineapple-shaped summer house, a palatial water tower and a pigsty designed as a Greek temple.
The extraordinary facade of Belmont, a plain Georgian box bristling with applied decoration including sea monsters, urns and a head of Neptune, will fit perfectly into the portfolio.
The house was a summer home and a sort of three dimensional trade card for the formidable Eleanor Coade, who manufactured classical figures, architectural ornaments and garden statues at Coade's Artificial Stone Manufactory in Lambeth, out of an artificial stone which has proved astonishingly tough.
The facade is sadly damp-stained and cracked, and inside ceilings, verandah and windows are propped to prevent collapse: the fierce little dolphins, made in the 1780s, are as crisp as if made yesterday.
Fowles, who was for many years curator of the Lyme Regis museum, was fascinated by Coade – "that very rare thing, both an artist and a successful early woman industrialist".
The trust has now won planning permission to demolish the shabby stumps of once ornate Victorian wings added by later owners, but will keep a charming observatory added in the 1880s by a Victorian GP, Richard Bangay.
They plan to restore the surviving mechanism on which the entire roof once rotated and opened, and reinstate a telescope – and, they hope, some visiting astronomers too.
Another rare survivor, a little stable building, will become an exhibition space telling the story of the house and its owners.
When Keay first saw the building she felt she had been there before. "Everything about it, the views, the steep scramble down through the garden to the Cobb, even the fact that there really had been a telescope like the one the doctor in the French Lieutenant's Woman uses to spy on women on the beach, seemed so familiar it was almost eerie."
In fact, although Fowles had obviously already paced every inch of the settings he used in the novel, he bought the house just after he finished the book which became even more famous as the 1981 Harold Pinter-scripted film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.
In his journal for September 7 1968 he recorded both the house and the telegrammed reaction of his publisher, Tom Maschler.
"I have offered £18,000 for Belmont House. 'The French Lieutenant's Woman is magnificent, no less. Congratulations. Letter follows. Love Tom'. That's a relief."
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