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The Sun
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
I bought Ian Fleming's incredible UK beach home for under £1million – now I'm selling up because it's ‘too small'
A JAMES Bond superfan who snapped up Ian Fleming's former seaside home for less than £1million is putting it back on the market – because he says it's no longer big enough for his family. Mermaid Cottage, the striking 1920s Art Deco house in St Margaret's Bay, Kent, was once owned by both Bond creator Ian Fleming and legendary playwright Noel Coward. 7 7 7 It's now up for sale with a guide price of £1.75million. Fleming is believed to have written part of Moonraker at the property between 1951 and 1957, taking inspiration from the surrounding cliffs and coastline for the novel's dramatic setting. Its villain, Hugo Drax, constructs his deadly Moonraker rocket just outside Dover, near Deal. Coward had owned the house previously and renamed it 'White Cliffs' after restoring it following wartime damage by British and Canadian troops preparing for D-Day. He spent around £2,000 reinforcing the chalk cliffs and reportedly found his love of painting during his years there, according to Dover Museum. The house passed to Fleming in 1951, becoming his weekend and holiday escape. It remained in private hands until 2008, when current owner Mark Sawyer spotted it during a visit to Kent with his then-partner. The 56-year-old, who works in private equity, first glimpsed the village while swimming the Channel in a team relay: 'I distinctly remember the captain of the boat saying, 'There's St Margarets, it's a really pretty village'. I saw it from the water for the first time.' Although the house wasn't officially on the market, the couple fell in love with it and persuaded the estate agent to take it off the books immediately with a £20,000 deposit. They bought it for £800,000 and have since spent around £1million on renovations, including buying land to extend the garden. 'I'm a massive Bond fan. For me that was the cherry on the cake,' Sawyer said. 'Most people say when we're down there: squint and you could be in the Mediterranean,' he added. 'In the winter, the bay is so much quieter. "You sit there with the log-burning stove roaring with a storm blowing outside. 7 "You're immersed in nature. "The only land you can see from our living room is France.' His partner Lara Jewitt, a Chelsea Flower Show gold medallist, helped design the garden, which echoes the style of Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage. The couple bought land from the council in 2014 to create it, but soon ran out of space. 'We developed every square inch down there, and we just wanted a bit more room,' Sawyer said. 'I never thought I would sell it, to be honest with you. It has three bedrooms, and that is too small to have both of my children back, potentially in the future with their partners, and my family to stay.' Not everyone is pleased about the decision. 'My daughter is still not talking to me since I told her I am selling it,' he admitted. 'She'll get over it eventually.' Strutt & Parker, who are handling the sale, describe Mermaid Cottage as a 'breathtaking location' with a 'rich history of famous connections.' 7 7
BBC News
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
White Cliffs house where Ian Fleming wrote James Bond for sale
A 1920s art deco seafront house in Kent, once owned by James Bond author Ian Fleming as well as playwright Noel Coward, is up for Cottage is one of four homes located directly under the White Cliffs at St Margaret's Bay and has a guide price of £1.75m. Fleming is believed to have written several of his Bond novels at the house between 1951 and 1957, including Moonraker. A spokesperson for estate agent, Strutt & Parker, said the house was "set in a "breathtaking location" with a "rich history of famous connections". Between 1945 and 1951 Noel Coward owned the home, formerly known as White Cliffs. The house was damaged by British and Canadian troops as they trained for D-Day and restored by the playwright and composer soon after he bought spent £2,000 pinning back the chalk cliffs behind his house, according to Dover Museum. It was during his time at White Cliffs that Coward discovered a love of sold the property to his friend Ian Fleming in 1951 and moved inland to used it as his weekend and holiday home for several years. He was so inspired by the dramatic White Cliffs of Dover and the picturesque surrounding region that he used the region as the setting for Moonraker, according to Dover Museum. Fleming enjoyed using his beloved Dover area as the location for the 1955 novel, his third Bond book. Its villain, Hugo Drax, built his Moonraker rocket just outside of Dover, near the seaside town of 1979 film bore little resemblance to the novel, with the action taking place in the United States, Italy and the Amazon Fleming died in Canterbury in 1964 aged 56.
Telegraph
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I swam past a small village in Kent and knew I had to move there'
Mark Sawyer first set eyes on the small Kent village which would become his home from the Channel. It was 2006 and he was swimming from England to France in a team relay with two others. 'I distinctly remember the captain of the boat saying, 'There's St Margarets, it's a really pretty village '. I saw it from the water for the first time.' The 56-year-old and his ex-partner had determined that their second home would be in the east of the country, as they eschewed Devon and Cornwall. Then, on a trip to Kent in 2008, they drove through the village. Sawyer says: 'We saw this house, at the end of the sea promenade, and just fell in love with it. There was no For Sale sign nor evidence it was on the market. It didn't even tick any of the boxes that we had set ourselves.' But it was love at first sight. The couple liked the property so much that Sawyer paid £20k to the estate agent to take it off the market immediately. They paid £800k for the three-bedroom house, Mermaid Cottage, and Sawyer says he has spent in the region of £1m renovating it – including buying extra land to cultivate a garden. Mermaid Cottage was built in 1929 in Art Deco style. Playwright Noel Coward bought it after the Second World War, and lived there for seven years. Guests at the house included actress Katharine Hepburn and Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond, who later took over custodianship of the house, and wrote it into his 1955 Bond thriller Moonraker. 'I'm a massive Bond fan. For me that was the cherry on the cake,' says semi-retired Sawyer, who works in private equity. 'Most people say when we're down there: squint and you could be in the Mediterranean,' he adds. 'In the winter, the bay is so much quieter. You sit there with the log-burning stove roaring with a storm blowing outside. You're immersed in nature. The only land you can see from our living room is France. 'It gets into your soul a bit. You feel that you are in the middle of nowhere – but you're not.' His partner, Lara Jewitt, is a former Chelsea Flower Show gold medallist, and the garden emulates Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage. In 2014, the couple bought land from the council to develop a garden, something which became a lockdown project. But they still wanted more garden space. 'We developed every square inch down there, and we just wanted a bit more room.' Sawyer says: 'I never thought I would sell it, to be honest with you. It has three bedrooms, and that is too small to have both of my children back, potentially in the future with their partners, and my family to stay.' The decision to sell has not been popular with every member of his family. 'My daughter is still not talking to me since I told her I am selling it. She'll get over it eventually.' The cottage is listed for sale with a guide price of £1.75m.
Vancouver Sun
12-07-2025
- Vancouver Sun
The golden age of international travel is over, says Pete McMartin
This is the second of a two-part account of a trip to France and the changing nature of travel by Sun columnist Pete McMartin. In the small town of Beaune, the hotel concierge warned us that the daytime temperature would rise to 36 C. 'Be careful out there,' he said. It was mid-June. Temperatures were 12 to 15 degrees above average. Since our arrival in France, the heat wave had become progressively worse, but Beaune felt like another level of hell entirely. Other than a short half-hour burst of rain in Lyon, we had not seen a cloud in the sky for 12 days, and by the time we reached Beaune, our only thought was to retreat to the refuge of our air-conditioned hotel room. The power went out twice. Famed for its vineyards, Beaune sits at the centre of the Burgundy region, and while wine may have been its cultural touchstone, the town had given itself entirely over to tourism. Rather than wine connoisseurs, we found the tourist profile largely to be composed of shambling groups of pale English retirees who — true to the old Noel Coward song that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun — did just that. They shuffled about town in packs, poking into the dozens of tourist knick-knack kiosks and the schlock art galleries and the wine shops selling bottles of Burgundy that only Russian oligarchs could afford. Meanwhile, my wife and I sought shade and — rather than the local full-bodied reds — sipped on bottles of Chablis sweating in ice buckets. It was so blazingly hot we couldn't walk in the sun for three minutes before becoming light-headed. On to Paris. Was Paris burning? Oh my, yes. The heat wave followed us there, a fact driven home when we discovered our rental apartment, like much of The City of Light, lacked air-conditioning. The ambient temperature of our room? You know when you throw water on the heated rocks in a sauna? That. Paris, as usual, swarmed with tourists. We packed into the open-air bistros and sidewalk cafés at night to escape the heat where, literally, we paid the price. The food? Atrocious, and so expensive it tasted of disregard. A limp Caesar salad came with chicken strips. A duck confit could have been cut from a saddle. And my first mistake after ordering two glasses of Sancerre in a sidewalk café next to our apartment was not looking closely enough at the menu. Those two glasses cost $76! My second mistake was to complain to the manager, who, after levelling a volley of outraged insults, pointed me to the exit. We were in Paris when scores of anti-tourism protests erupted in Portugal, Spain and Italy. Protesters complained that tourism had not only made their cities uninhabitable by causing housing shortages and overtaxing local infrastructures, but had made their countries increasingly uninhabitable due to the environmental damage tourism exacted — the vast amounts of garbage generated by the tourist trade, the degradation of cultural treasures and historical edifices, and the anthropological-caused climate change brought on by emissions from ever-increasing air and auto travel. (The growing disaffection with tourism in Europe wasn't new to us: Over a decade ago, we stepped out of our hotel in Barcelona to see spray-painted on a wall 'F— Off, Tourists' — accommodatingly written, I thought, in English, so as we were sure to get the message.) The prolonged heat wave not only ignited these protests; it lent them an apocalyptic air. Record-breaking temperatures of 46.6 C were set in Spain and Portugal — and set off, too, talk of the increasing desertification of the Hibernian peninsula. Authorities closed the top of the Eiffel Tower due to the heat, and closed the Louvre after its exhausted staff, staging an impromptu strike, complained that the crush of tourists had overwhelmed their ability to deal with them. Elsewhere in Europe, the heat wave took on more dire forms. At least eight deaths were reported from heat prostration. Schools closed in Germany, and while that might have gladdened the kids, it was offset by tragedy — ice cream-makers there said it was too hot for ice cream production. In Italy, fields of melons cooked on the vine, and farmers covered their fruit and vegetable crops with tarps. Most of Italy's regions banned work between 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and hospitals reported a 20 per rise in emergency admissions. The UN climate agency offered little reassurance in the face of all this. Quite the opposite. It warned tourists that the heat wave was 'the new normal' — that Europe would increasingly experience not just singular bouts of record heat but prolonged periods of heat so intense they could affect health, disrupt vacation plans and, in worst-case scenarios, threaten lives. (Insurance companies, already facing a surge of claims due to weather disruptions, had adjusted their rates to this new reality by the time of our trip: Our health and travel insurance cost almost as much as a round-trip flight to Europe.) Now, as typifies the climate of our times, there were those who pooh-poohed all this as alarmist — apostate scientists, climate-change deniers and online trolls who view the world as a conspiracy perpetrated by governments and their co-conspirators, the mainstream media. To which I thought: They can believe what they want, though I would first welcome them to live through the intensity of the heat wave we did while in France, not only because it was alarming and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but because it was revelatory. It brought home the truth of my own hypocrisy and that of the many millions of other tourists who, by constant travel, help cause the very climate and local animosity that discomforted us. So, a prediction: The golden age of international travel is over. Tourists will not only think twice about locals who are clearly sick of them, or waver at the thought of climate-related extremes that could leave them stuck in a country not their own, although both those factors will come into play. More importantly, tourists will begin increasingly to see travel — as we see much of the aspects of our lives now — as a moral question: Do we curtail our insatiable appetites, or do we help destroy the world we are so hungry to consume?
Telegraph
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Inside the most bizarre seaside village in Britain
All summer we are taking the pulse of Britain's most famous seaside towns, examining the efforts being made to regenerate them, and opining on whether they are still worth visiting. This week, David Atkinson visits Portmeirion. It's known as 'The Village'. The pastel-coloured façades and magpie-like collection of buildings provided the psychedelic backdrop to the 1960s TV series The Prisoner, and offered a haven for artists and musicians from the Jazz Age to the Sixties. The author Noel Coward wrote his comic play Blithe Spirit here in 1941, and The Beatles were regular visitors after their manager took a lease on Gatehouse. But, most of all, Portmeirion is the creative vision of its founder, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis. He bought a plot of land on the Snowdonia coast in 1925 and devoted his life to his Italianate folly, working with nature to create something unique. The 'home for fallen buildings' was constructed in two phases until just before his death in 1978, salvaging old edifices from demolition in an early take on upcycling. Celebrations for Portmeirion's centenary year are now in progress with plans for a 1920s-style house party at Hotel Portmeirion to commemorate the Easter 1926 opening, and a series of open-air concerts to keep alive Clough's desire for the village to bring pleasure to others – as it did to him. Today, Portmeirion is a staple of North Wales day trips but, despite the coach tours, Clough's words still hold true: 'My main objective, that of architectural and environmental propaganda, is by no means obscured.' What's it really like? A trip to Portmeirion is not your typical seaside break – it's more like a Mediterranean resort than the North Wales riviera. It's a self-contained site with multi-generational appeal for all interests – from pop-culture nerds to kids building sandcastles. It's easy to see it as just pretty buildings, but delving into the stories behind them reveals its quintessential charm. The statue of Hercules by William Brodie, for example, was rescued by Clough from Aberdeen. He bought the ceiling of the Town Hall, depicting the 12 Labours of Hercules, for £13 at auction before reassembling it. Seek out elevated views from near The Belvedere, where Jerry Lee Lewis stayed when he played at Butlins, Pwllheli, in 1974, and from the podium under Chantry Cottage, first designed as a studio for the artist Augustus John. The village's fairy-tale feel made it ideal for filming The Prisoner in the late Sixties, just in time for colour TV. Catherine McGoohan, daughter of the programme's star, Patrick, recently unveiled a bronze statue of her father close to The Prisoner Shop, with its T-shirts bearing the slogan: 'I am not a number, I am a free man.' Portmeirion also hosts the annual Prisoner Convention each April. The wider region, too, has plenty to offer, with beach combing and coastal strolling at nearby Harlech and Borth-y-Gest. Nearby Porthmadog is home to Shop Fawr which, founded by Clough's daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, sells a range of homeware and Portmeirion pottery. Look out, too, for the Purple Moose Brewery shop, selling craft ales from the local microbrewery. What's not to like? Portmeirion can get very busy during high season – but you can avoid the crowds. Swerve the coach parties by visiting outside of the peak hours, or book lunch at Castell Deudraeth for free entry to the village after 12.30pm. Better still, stay overnight and you'll have the village to yourself for a pre-breakfast stroll, or a post-dinner game of human chess, recreating The Prisoner episode Checkmate. Do this… While most visitors congregate in the village, fewer strike out into The Gwyllt (Wildwood), with its 70 acres of woodlands of exotic species brought to North Wales by Victorian plant hunters. Explore the Japanese Garden with its pagoda and lily-covered lake, or the Dog Cemetery, where Adelaide Haig, the reclusive former owner of the old manor house reborn by Clough as Hotel Portmeirion, buried her beloved pets. The latest addition is the Peace Statue, a tribute to the spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy – hold the torch and wish for peace. Alternatively, walk the coastal path beyond Hotel Portmeirion, hugging the estuary before dropping down to an oft-deserted beach with secluded coves. If you're paddling then watch out for jellyfish, and keep an eye on the tide times displayed on site. Finally, if you're staying over, you'll have private access to the heated, outdoor swimming pool (April to September) and to channel 801 in your hotel room, a constant loop of all 17 episodes of The Prisoner. Eat this… Expect formal dining at both hotels, plus casual daytime options throughout the village. Deudraeth's Brasserie is more casual (two/three courses, £30/35) while Hotel Portmeirion has a table d'hote menu (£68/75), plus a six-course gourmet menu (£100), as well as afternoon teas. Pre-dinner drinks on the terrace showcase the coastal view across the Dwyryd estuary to the deserted island of Ynys Gifftan, a gift from Queen Anne to Lord Harlech. The pick of the café-style lunches is Caffi'r Ddraig for street food; Caffi'r Angel has gelato and espresso. But don't do this… The magic of Portmeirion is best enjoyed in the sunshine. If grey-slate Snowdonia skies dominate, then you'll be more confined to the village itself for shelter. It's worth checking out the soundscape in Town Hall, whereby Clough talks about his ideas for the village, or simply reschedule for a sunny day. From a local Robin Llywelyn, grandson of founder Clough Williams-Ellis: 'As children, my sister Menna and I would play in the woods and go for picnics on the beach. These days, my role is caretaker. My grandfather would be surprised to reach the centenary but gratified to find the village is still relevant today, inspiring different people in different ways. His spirit lives on around us.' From a tourist Emily (daughter) and Karen (mother) Roberts from Sheffield: 'This is our first visit to Portmeirion and we didn't really know what to expect. We're on holiday nearby at Barmouth and came for a day out. It's a quirky place and gives me The Truman Show vibes.' Linda Johnson from Wrexham: 'I've been coming to Portmeirion since the 1970s, and once bumped into Clough just walking around the village. For me, it's a little paradise. A place of peace.' Lisa Johnson, Linda's daughter: 'I've been coming here since I was a child with my mum and now my partner, Andy. There's a sense of nostalgia about return visits. My advice is to stay overnight. The whole village settles down once the crowds have gone.' Get there Entry to Portmeirion costs £20 for adults. There are mainline rail services to Llandudno Junction or Bangor from London Euston with onward connections by taxi (50 mins). The closest station is Minffordd (walking distance) on the Cambrian Coast Line with onward connections to Shrewsbury and Birmingham. Travel by car to explore the wider Snowdonia coast; the nearest town is Porthmadog on the A487. Stay here There are two hotels in the village – Art Deco-styled Hotel Portmeirion (14 rooms) and Castell Deudraeth (12 rooms), plus 35 village apartments (with use of hotel facilities).
