by Ben Fogle
The first petrol mowers appeared in the late 1890s. Then someone came up with a steam mower, and electric jobs came in the 1920s. And herein lies a smudgy-cheeked point of lawns for many a bloke: the chance to play with machines. The lawn became the pride of the English home. I still have vivid memories of the noise and the smell as my father emptied the big green collecting bucket from the front of the mower into a huge pile of grass cuttings at the end of the garden.
I can’t imagine how many hours my father and father-in-law have dedicated to mowing, trimming, weeding and perfecting their lawns. In a sense lawns are a way of taming and controlling Nature; they give a sense of control and order that is deeply English. Neat and tidy.
In Britain, we tend to be quite private about our lawns, often keeping them hidden behind the sort of hedges stipulated by Bacon. ‘Keep off the Grass’ was a familiar sign in my youth. It always struck me as strange to be kept away from such an inviting landscape. Surely a lawn was for walking on, not just looking at?
The French laugh at us for our obsession with lawns. In one of the Asterix cartoon books, a suburban Englishman loses his temper when Roman soldiers are about to march across his lawn. He holds them up with a bristling pitchfork, one indignant moustache facing an entire legion.
I wonder whether it is the ‘greenness’ of the lawn that is so evocative. When I think of England, I imagine a green landscape, lush and heavily watered from our high rainfall. There has to be some positive from our damp climate. And that’s greenness. On an island with such geographical diversity it is difficult to pick a landscape that sums up Englishness. We have an extraordinarily varied coastline, from the dramatic cliffs of Cornwall to the vast flat expanses of northern Norfolk. We have the chalky South Downs, the glorious lakes of Cumbria and the wild moorland of Dartmoor and Exmoor, not to mention the forests and the world-class National Parks. Our landscape is unique and yet undefinable. It is like our weather, unpredictable and changeable.
But there is one phrase that has entered our everyday conversation when we talk about our landscape. ‘England’s green and pleasant land’. The phrase comes from William Blake’s Milton: a poem – not, strangely enough, from ‘Jerusalem’, which is the name every one associates with it.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
The poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 at the request of poet Robert Bridges. Sir Edward Elgar arranged it for orchestra and ever since, it has been played at stirring English occasions like the Last Night of the Proms. And it is, of course, the WI’s hymn of choice. It was always my favourite hymn at school and shall forever remember it being sung in Westminster Abbey at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. It was also used with particular poignancy as the opening hymn for the London Olympics in 2012.
England doesn’t have a national anthem. Isn’t that incredible? Of course we have ‘God Save the Queen’, but that is Great Britain’s anthem. North of the border they have ‘Flower of Scotland’, Wales have ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ (Old Land of My Fathers). But England doesn’t have one. The fact that we don’t have a national anthem is symbolic of our loss of identity and our shame at displays of our English heritage.
Yet ‘Jerusalem’ is the official hymn of the England and Wales Cricket Board; it was used as the England football team’s official Euro 2000 song, becoming a top ten hit; and most famously it is sung at the Last Night of the Proms. Giving ‘Jerusalem’ official status as England’s national anthem is frequently mentioned as an option but no government will decide. It would get my vote.
Our lawns, fields and rolling hills are our ‘green and pleasant land’, but we are an island. And so we have cliffs, beaches and of course, seaside resorts.
Blackpool, Redcar, Bognor Regis, Margate, Whitstable, St Ives, Brighton, Bournemouth … the names of the English seaside towns are synonymous with smutty seaside postcards, slightly dodgy B&Bs and tooth-breaking ‘seaside rock’. They are where we go crabbing while seagulls mug us of our chips; they are synonymous with slot machines on the end of the pier and the promenade. My late grandmother, Jean, lived in Brighton and the city still evokes happy memories of my childhood: the smell of the sea mixed with the vinegar of chips and sweet scent of candy floss. But beyond our shoreline is another world.
It is perhaps a little-known fact that my full title is Lord Fogle of Sealand; however, it was not bestowed by Her Majesty the Queen but by King Bates of Sealand. If you’ve never heard of Sealand, then you’ve missed out on one of the strangest and most eccentric English stories of the last few decades. Did you know that just an hour from the Suffolk coast lies one of England’s strangest and most eccentric kingdoms? A tiny principality sitting in the North Sea, defiantly proclaiming its independence.
A cross between a bizarre steampunk sea monster and the alien tripods from The War of the Worlds, the ‘sovereign nation’ soared from the ocean as I approached. The word SEALAND was painted on the side of one of the buildings, with its black, red and white national flag fluttering in the stiff breeze. As I reached the bottom of the platform I scanned the structure for a ladder or a staircase. There was nothing, just barnacle-encrusted steel dipping sheer into the stormy ocean, pounded by the waves.
‘How do we get up there?’ I asked Prince Michael.
‘You’ll see,’ he answered with a smile, handing me a life jacket.
High above, tiny heads appeared over the parapet as people manoeuvred what looked like a very old crane over the side. A thick cable descended to our rocking boat, a short plank of wood on the end acting as a sort of bo’sun’s chair. ‘Do you want to go first?’ asked the Prince. Before I could answer, I was ushered on to the contraption and soon I was dangling high above the North Sea. Buffeted by the wind, the boat disappeared below me and all I could see was the angry swirl of the ocean.
As I reached the deck, a surly man came to meet me. ‘Passport.’ I handed over my passport, complete with the visa that I had acquired at a Harwich pub. I told you this was an eccentric story.
The Principality of Sealand is an old Second World War fortress, seven and a half miles off the Suffolk coast. Its total area is 0.0015 square miles, or perhaps a couple of squash courts placed back to back. Former British Army major Paddy Roy Bates and his wife, Joan, declared Sealand a state in 1967, although it has never been recognized by the British government or any other international body; in fact its status has been derided by just about every legal opinion in the field of international law. Its relatively short but rich history is littered with court battles, international intrigue and even an attempted coup by armed mercenaries. In those five decades of existence, only 106 people have been given ‘citizenship’. I was joining an elite club.
When Roy Bates died in 2012, his 63-year-old son ‘Prince’ Michael Bates succeeded. He continues to rule, but is doing so from his land-based home in Essex where he runs a business – even monarchs have to make a living these days. And the future of the nation is in doubt as there are repeated reports of it being sold.
That is for the future, though. As I was winched on to the platform, I was more interested in its past.
The story begins in 1943 at the height of the Second World War, when the government built anti-aircraft forts off the Kent and Suffolk coasts for protection against the w
aves of German bombers. The forts were decommissioned in the 1950s but, because they lay outside British waters, in the 1960s they attracted pirate radio operators who were banned by the government from broadcasting on the mainland.
In the decade of peace and love, the fight for the forts was very physical. Roy Bates attacked and ousted a station already broadcasting from HM Fort Roughs – Sealand’s previous designation – intending to set up his own radio station. Before they could transmit, though, a new law banned broadcasting even from these forts outside British territorial waters. So Roy’s radio station was never heard. As it happened, the day the law came in was also the birthday of his wife, Joan. So he proclaimed Fort Roughs a sovereign state, renamed it Sealand and bestowed the title of Princess of Sealand on her as a birthday present.
‘It was not long before the British government decided they could not have what ministers described as a possible Cuba off the east coast of England,’ Sealand’s website says. Helicopters and destroyers were sent by the government to destroy the other forts and Bates was threatened that Sealand would be next. Roy and Michael fired shots at one Royal Navy ship and were prosecuted, but the judge in the case ruled that, as Sealand was in international waters at the time, the UK had no jurisdiction over it. Bates declared that the judgement was ‘de facto recognition’ of Sealand’s sovereignty. Most of the rest of the world sniggered.
In 1982, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea extended the UK’s waters to include the platform. It was a crushing blow but Roy, with true plucky English underdog spirit, retaliated by extending Sealand’s own territorial waters to twelve miles, thereby annexing Felixstowe. To this day, the annexation has not been challenged.
There have since been kidnappings, international smuggling operations and attempted coups, with armed troops dropping on to the platform at midnight from helicopters. One final bizarre incident happened in 1997. When police in Miami discovered the body of Andrew Cunanan, who had committed suicide after murdering fashion designer Gianni Versace, they also found a Sealand passport and Sealand diplomatic plates.
It really is a study in English eccentricity.
After my first visit I was honoured with a knighthood for services to Sealand, and I returned to the rusty wreck to receive my title. It was strange to return in a suit and tie to be honoured out on the helicopter deck. Ed Sheeran also received a knighthood, and he has promised to do a highly exclusive concert on Sealand.
While I haven’t managed to set up my own micro nation, I did once try to buy a lighthouse.
I have always been fascinated by lighthouses and their keepers, and over the years I have been lucky enough to explore countless lighthouses around Great Britain, but in 2004 a friend told me about a lighthouse for sale down in Kent. I had just started seeing a new girlfriend, and I thought I would romance her with my lighthouse shopping.
The Old Lighthouse is now a historic building, its lighthouse duties long replaced by newer self-automated models. Opened with great ceremony by His Royal Majesty the Prince of Wales in 1904, it survived two world wars before it was decommissioned in 1960.
Dungeness is a vast expanse of shingle ridges, built up over the centuries by longshore drift. By the end of the medieval period it had grown into a promontory reaching out into the English Channel and had become a lethal shipping hazard. Advances in marine technology during the sixteenth century had led to a large increase in both the number and size of ships in the English Channel. It is said that during one winter gale over a thousand sailors lost their lives and many valuable cargoes sank with them. The name Dungeness derives from the Old Norse nes, ‘headland’, the first part of the name probably being connected with the nearby Denge Marsh – although the name is popularly held to be of French origin, the meaning being ‘dangerous nose’.
The first lighthouse, a wooden tower with an open coal fire on top, was licensed to private ownership by King James I in August 1615. As time passed, the sea continued to retreat as the shingle banks grew. A second brick lighthouse 110ft high was constructed around 1635. This second lighthouse lasted over 100 years, but it too became victim of the growing shingle banks and after complaints about poor light visibility at sea another new lighthouse was built in 1790. This third lighthouse, some 116ft tall, was lit by Argon lamps, fuelled first by oil and finally petroleum. The light was magnified by silvered concave reflectors. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the shingle bank had grown to such an extent that an additional smaller Low Light near the water’s edge became necessary. A siren-type foghorn was housed in the same building.
In 1901 Trinity House commissioned Patrick & Co of London to build a new, taller fourth lighthouse, approximately 150ft high. It was this lighthouse which was ceremonially opened by the Prince of Wales in 1904. For fifty-six years it provided a welcome landlight to vessels negotiating the perils of the English Channel. Constructed of more than three million engineering bricks with sandstone inner walls, the lighthouse features in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of Kent.
During the late 1950s work began on Dungeness power station and it became apparent that, due to the height of the new building, the light would be obscured from the sea. Subsequently a fifth, automatic lighthouse was built closer to the water’s edge, where it still operates today.
Now the Old Lighthouse was on the market and I was looking to live out my Fraggle Rock fantasy. But while the lighthouse was my motivation, Dungeness is the real star. It’s one of the most eccentric landscapes in England.
Often called the desert of England, Dungeness is a crazy, odd, surreal landscape. It is open and bleak and weird in a slightly post-apocalyptic kind of way. Not that it’s devoid of life: on the contrary it is a thriving nature reserve, and home to a third of Britain’s plant species. But even the rich flora and fauna can’t quite detract from the sheer surreality of this odd environment.
The landscape itself certainly divides people – a broad, echoing flatness, the vast planes of shingle dipping into the ocean. What makes it so surreal though is the eclectic range of dwellings. Railway carriages and upturned boats have been turned into quaint and spooky homes, while there are a wide range of alternative buildings, from cabins and shacks to tiny cottages standing alone in the vast shingle plain. The unique structures have attracted modern artists and architects to create a mind-boggling array of futuristic and post-apocalyptic dwellings that prickle the senses.
Bleak black rubber houses and stark concrete boxes bring a Mad Max edge to the landscape. But perhaps the most famous house is Prospect Cottage, a black (of course) cottage that belonged to the late Derek Jarman. In the 1990s, people went to Dungeness because Jarman, the seminal arthouse film-maker, lived there: fashion shoots regularly took place in his front garden, and there’s now a note in the window saying: ‘No fashion shoots in my front garden without prior written permission’.
Jarman’s garden is still intricately tended, around beds of intensely weird vegetation that can’t decide if it’s seaweed or something else. Unsurprisingly, Dungeness has become a popular location for music videos as well as fashion shoots. The surreal landscape appears on the cover of Pink Floyd’s A Collection of Great Dance Songs and The Thrills’ So Much for the City. The Prodigy shot one of their videos, ‘Invaders Must Die’, here, a rather appropriate name for a landscape that looks like the set of The War of the Worlds. Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom have filmed here and Athlete wrote a song about the place, but my most vivid memory is of a 1970s episode of Doctor Who located in the otherworldly landscape that gave me nightmares for months.
As if the area wasn’t weird enough, the area is also home to the Denge acoustic mirrors, known as listening ears, built between 1928 and 1930. These huge concrete structures were designed as an experimental early warning system to detect aircraft by capturing their sound waves. Dungeness was chosen because it was one of the quietest spots in England. The acoustic mirrors didn’t work, and were abandoned when radar was invented, but they remain as huge ‘
ears’ emerging from the already odd surroundings.
This really is a Marmite landscape, and my girlfriend squirmed as we drove across the desolate desert towards the imposing lighthouse.
The owner met us at the door before ushering us up the vertiginous, spiralling staircase. Internally there are a series of mezzanine floors made of slate and supported by steel beams and massive rivets. Each floor is linked by circular concrete stairs which hug the walls and have decorative wrought-iron banisters. There are viewing windows on all floors.
We squeezed around the lens of the long-decommissioned magnifying glass encasing the light, and through a tiny metal door onto the surrounding balcony. A stiff breeze blew off the ocean, but it was clear enough to see France in the distance. It was the most breathtaking view as tiny fishing boats puttered across the relatively calm waters. The vast shingle desert stretched out far below. I could make out the railway tracks, and dozens of fishing boats hauled up on the shingle by rusty old bulldozers.
Three hundred degrees of beautiful perfection. It was the other sixty degrees that presented a small problem.
‘Will workers from Sector A please report to the plant office,’ boomed a Tannoy from the nuclear power station behind. The power station is now arguably the area’s most famous and controversial landmark. The local fishermen fought a long battle against its construction … but lost. Today it stands out like a vast wart on the landscape.
In fact, there are two power stations. The first was built in 1965 and the second in 1983. One of the positive aspects was that the warm water created by the station’s outflow turned the desert into a wildlife haven, even leading to its classification as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Apart from the obvious reason that locals didn’t want a nuclear power station on their doorstep, another unforeseen problem was the noise attenuation of shingle. You can hear somebody talking half a mile away. So they must know their neighbours pretty well.