26 'A DISGUSTING BLOT ON THE LANDSCAPE' "What is one to say? Peacehaven has been called a rash on the countryside. It is that, and there is no worse in England." (N. Pevsner) Helen Walker traces irs bungaloid (and bungled) origins. Above: Aerial view of Peacehaven in rhe mid 1930s. So in his The Buildings of England, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner echoed the words of Thomas Sharp who, writing in 1932, expressed the official view that Peacehaven was "a national laughing stock". However, the development, a few miles to the east of Brighton, remains of interest to planning historians, representing not only one of the final examples of private land speculation and a major prompt for Below: "Fforacot", a typical Peacehaven example of plotland devclopmenr from the late 1920s. the land use control legislation introduced in the post war period, but also an element of that unique pattern of unplanned and informal 'plotland' development which occurred in the first three decades of the century - and which has now largely disappeared. Plotlands, the "makeshift worlds of shacks and shanties", sprang up in uneven, unserviced and anarchic clusters of development on marginal land in the countryside and by the sea, just ahead of and outside the remit of emerging local authority environmental controls. The impetus for their building was the desire for escape to a rural idyll, the creation of an arcadia by those who worked in the great cities or who lived in the anonymity of the new suburbs. Defiantly ignoring existing building codes, the plotlanders built their holiday and weekend homes in the Thames Valley,Jaywick Sands, Canvey Island and elsewhere. Capitalising on this vogue for escapism came one Charles William Neville, a developer whose vision was a new town in which opportunities to find arcadia would combine with a lip service to Ebenezer Howard in a 'Garden City by the Sea'. No doubt also recognising contemporary calls for the provision of 'homes fit for heroes', during the years of the First World War Neville acquired for £15 per acre over 600 acres of downland on the Sussex coast, a holding which was later increased to a five mile swathe of cliff top which he named Lureland, and began to market. At the beginning of 1916 Neville set up a competition to find a name for the proposed development. The advertisement in The Times ran: .(20,000 in prizes for a Name of a New South Coast Resort First Prize .(100 in cash and Fifty other prizes will be given consisting of splendid Freehold Building Plots similar to those offered by us in this magnificent Estate at Fifty Pounds (£50) each. No Entry Fee Although the site was as yet open farmland, the advertisement was illustrated with line drawings showing a train, a seashore with bathing machines and a wide avenue lined with substantial houses and mature trees - all intended to convey the impression that the resort was well established with good public transport links. CONTEXT 29
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