It’s a quiet Wednesday afternoon in Britain’s most expensive market town, and there’s a sense of foreboding in the air. Well, there is if you’re a G.K. Chesterton fan. South Bucks District Council is about to decide whether Overroads, the house where the author lived from 1909 to 1922, will be demolished and replaced with a block of flats.
A Londoner until the age of 35, Chesterton moved here on a whim. He and his wife Frances, in a spirit of adventure, went to Paddington and asked to buy a ticket for the next train. It was going to Slough. (‘A singular taste,’ he remarked in his autobiography, ‘even for a train.’) From there they wandered to Beaconsfield, and liked it so much they never left.
It was at Overroads that Chesterton first developed his most enduring creation, the priest-detective Father Brown. But the biggest protest against the demolition plan has come not from the crime fiction community, but from the academy. Thirty-nine scholars have signed an open letter asking the council to defend ‘so important a piece of national and international cultural heritage’.
In Jungs Bakery I meet Alison Wheelhouse and Kari Dorme from the Beaconsfield Society, a local amenity group who do everything from litter-picking to scrutinising planning applications. Dorme says the council has a poor record with protecting local heritage: Enid Blyton’s former house, for instance, was knocked down in 1973. ‘We could have had a world-famous heritage site,’ she says. Robert Frost’s old bungalow, meanwhile, was demolished in the 1980s. So does Overroads have a chance? ‘Oh yes,’ says Wheelhouse. ‘We’re very hopeful.’
Chesterton’s house has more than just literary significance.
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