A writer's house

    "Belmont House stands 200 feet above sea level, set back 230 yards from the easily visible English Channel, at the southeast corner of Pound Street and Cobb Road in Lyme Regis. Its grand Georgian property incorporates relics of dwellings from medieval and Renaissance times. The elegant façade dates from 1785, when Eleanor Coade, astute owner of the Coade Stone Manufactory in London, adorned the front of her summer villa with serenely classical, ceramic stone faces, samples of the company's fine Adam-style ornaments. John Fowles imagined Belmont as aristocratically feminine, though as they took possession of the house just after New Year 1969, it was more like "an old whore, with its splendid façade and all the mess that lies behind ...

    "In the southwest upstairs corner of the house, Fowles established his writing room, with his well-worn worktable, bookshelves, and space for his New Hall china. Looking seaward over the garden, French doors opened onto a south-facing balcony where vines eventually twined and birds alighted. The pounding of keys on his small portable typewriter thudded audibly through the house."

    That's a passage from John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds by Eileen Warburton, and I quote it as we're to be reading The French Lieutenant's Woman (see below) and because The Landmark Trust has just launched an appeal to raise £2.1 million to restore the house - full details and more pictures (including one of the writing room) here.