Belmont House, Lyme Regis, home of John Fowles

I understand that there is some controversy surrounding the conservation and future of Belmont House, where the author John Fowles lived in Lyme Regis.

Many years ago I remember that John Fowles explicitly wanted it to become a writers' centre, or even an international young writers' centre. That plan seems to have been shelved. I am sure he would not have wanted it to be converted into holiday accommodation. It is equivalent in importance to Max Gate or Hardy's birthplace. In matters of literary reputation one has to take the long view.

In his book "A Short History of Lyme Regis" (1991). John Fowles remarks: "Local politics tend to become a matter of  a party of conservation facing a party of development." He goes on to say that "there is a cruel but sadly accurate phrase describing Westcountry seaside towns like Lyme: 'Summer, grockles; winter, death'". In the same year (1991) Fowles upset his fellow townspeople, including the Town Crier, by writing an article in the Daily Telegraph (15/8/1991), with the unfortunate headline, "Stupid grockles - curse of the coastal resort", which I am sure was not his phrase. The article was provocative: "It is not only the sewage that stinks here these days....When to that you add the present unhappy economic state of this country, it is perhaps no surprise that the most rudimentary environmental common sense suffers."

Perhaps local people don't care about the fate of Belmont? The Town Crier published an angry (but quite unfair) open letter to John Fowles on 16/8/1991, in the Bridport and Lyme Regis News. He accused the author of irresponsibility and of causing irreparable damage, of destoying the hard work of generations,: "You sit up in your ebony tower at Belmont in Pound Street, hoping to remain isolated from our reality".

John Fowles cared passionately about Lyme Regis. In "The French Lieutenant's Woman" he suggests that for Lymers, familiarity has bred contempt, even for the Cob, a degree of resentment being justified in part because of the cost of repairs for over seven hundred years:

"Real Lymers will never see much more to it than a long claw of old grey wall that flexes itself into the sea...they seem almost to turn their backs on it...But to a less tax-paying, or more discriminating, eye it is quite simply the most beautiful sea-rampart on the south coast of England...Primitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a paragon of mass...a superb fragment of folk-art."

Yesterday was a halcyon day in Lyme. A sunny January Sunday with lots of people about (not too many). Some things in Lyme do change for the better. Like other grateful grockles, I have to agree with Valentine Warner about the good value for money at Herbies Dino Fish Bar on Marine Parade!

Later I consulted Eileen Warburton's excellent biography of John Fowles, "A Life in Two Worlds" (2004). On the question of the ultimate fate of Belmont House, she writes:

"He had been concerned since at least 1995 lest after his death it would be sold and converted into yet another Lyme Regis hotel. He feared that his beloved garden would be destroyed. He looked for ways to create a trust that would establish Belmont as a student writing centre, nature research centre, and conference facility, under the aegis of an institution of higher learning...A registered John Fowles Literary Trust was planned in 1998 to map out Belmont's future and secure funding."

Whatever happened to that Trust and its plans?

This is the latest plan from the Landmark Trust.

It is opposed by the Victorian Society.

More about the controversy.


See also my posting on John Fowles and the Aegean Blues 

View the trailer from The French Lieutenant's Woman 

Thanks in part to the film and to John Fowles' novel, the Cobb harbour wall has become one of the most romantic spots in this part of the country. Jane Austen also helped. Alfred Lord Tennyson walked on the Cobb with his friend, another poet, William Allingham, who wrote "We go down to the Cobb, enjoying the sea, the breeze, the coast-view of Portland, etc., and while we sit on the wall I read to him, out of Persuasion, the passage where Louisa Musgrave hurts her ankle."

The good people of Lyme Regis should be proud of John Fowles and of Belmont House, as much as they are of the Cobb. The names John Fowles and Belmont House still have the power to attract cultural tourists, writers, academics, students and lovers of literature from all over the world, especially from the USA and Greece.

Belmont House, as it was, from British History Online