Is this Britain’s most eccentric village? Inside Suffolk’s Peter Pan-themed utopia

The road to utopia was never going to be smooth. That’s what I told myself as I hitchhiked along a puddle-strewn lane in East Anglia, the rain coming in sideways. Nobody stopped, so I dived into the Aldringham Tea Room, which was warm and smelled of soup. I told the staff about my predicament, how I made the mistake of relying on rural buses. “The buses are a joke,” was the consensus.

After serving two pensioners their scones, Hannah, the tearoom’s heaven-sent manager, offered me a lift to Thorpeness, three miles down the road. “Couldn’t let you walk in this,” she said, throwing her brother’s Civic Type R around the lanes, which cut through woods and fields. “You could have got lost, found by a dog walker – I’d have heard about it on the radio. Always a dog walker isn’t it?”

Nothing lifts your spirits like the kindness of strangers, and as I waved Hannah off from Thorpeness village green, I had a spring in my step. The rain had stopped, too; blue skies were rolling in, the low autumn sun pushing the clouds away.

It was just me and the geese on the green. Not a soul in sight. I looked around and thought of the Netherlands; something about the steep pitched roofs on the houses, the windmill in the distance. And the water. Not a canal, admittedly, but a vast, artificial lake – or meare – strewn with islands.

At the water’s edge I saw an alligator. The geese were unmoved by the fibreglass beast, apparently ignorant to its literary symbolism. Thorpeness Meare was, you see, inspired by JM Barrie’s fantasy novel Peter Pan, and other fantastical realms from children’s literature. There’s a Blue Lagoon, a Dragon’s Den, Crusoe’s Island. It’s a purpose-built Neverland for wild imaginations.

In the summer, children explore the waterway on boats, often unaccompanied by adults, as they have done for generations. And if they fall out? They just stand up and get back in – the lake is no more than three feet deep.

An East Anglian utopia

Like Thorpeness, the meare was designed to be a utopian destination for families. It’s wise to beware societies created in the vision of one man – you need not look far for examples of how that can go wrong – but Stuart Ogilvie, the man behind Thorpeness, was no megalomaniac dictator. He was, by all accounts, as benevolent as they come.

A playwright of Scottish descent, Ogilvie inherited his wealthy parents’ Suffolk estate in 1908 and vowed to transform it into a fantastical holiday destination for the middle classes. Or in the words of an early holiday brochure: “Those who have no desire for promenades and cinemas… those who can appreciate a beautiful little hamlet situated between sea and lake.”

He commissioned a Dutch architect to design the houses (some in the Tudor revival style), had a golf course and tennis courts built, and hired men to dig a boating lake inspired by his chum JM Barrie’s novel.

A man with a vision

Stuart Ogilvie’s name is never far from anyone’s lips in Thorpeness. “He was ahead of his time,” said Craig Block, the meare’s 50-something boatman, who I found at the boat house. “He had a vision to build basically what Centre Parcs offers today.”

Block was on his lunch break. In a nearby workshop he was fixing up the lake’s fleet of 140 boats after a busy summer season. He took over from his father as boatman in 1990, and works for Stuart Ogilvie’s great-grandson, Glen, and his wife Jennifer.

“[Stuart] owned basically the whole village. He employed about 100 men. If you worked for him you used to get a house with the job, or at mate’s rates,” said Block, who, pleasingly, has a swallow tattoo on each hand.

“When you retired you moved to the almshouses,” he added, referring to the pretty, mock Tudor cottages conveniently located opposite the town’s only pub, The Dolphin. “I remember going there to visit my granddad.”

Looking at Block as he gazed across the meare, I sensed his love for the place. He and his friends used to ‘borrow’ boats on moonlit nights as kids, play games of football on the iced over water, back when winters were cold. “Old school fun,” he said. “Old school fun has gone.”

There’s still the annual regatta, though, which for more than a century has been the highlight of Thorpeness’ calendar. There are fireworks, flotillas, families having fun.

Block told me how he asked his father once if they could go on holiday. “He said: ‘boy, you’re always on holiday, what more do you want?’ He was right.”

Paradise lost?

But tragedy struck in 1972. Stuart Ogilvie’s grandson Alexander Stuart, heir to the Thorpeness estate, died on the golf course one day, overlooked by the ‘House in the Clouds’, a water tower turned eccentric holiday home that had become a landmark in his village, a Thorpeness legend like his grandfather.

Death duties forced the family to surrender their slice of paradise to market forces. They sold the golf club and most of the houses, keeping the meare and some farmland.

“A lot of the village is second homes now,” said Tracy Maynes, who has a stall at nearby Thorpeness Emporium, which sells antiques, vintage clothes, anything from Duran Duran CDs to old maps. It’s still a “nice little town,” she added, “quirky” with a “sense of community”.

Embodying that quirkiness is Maynes herself, who was dressed in leopard print trousers and reckoned the indoor market was haunted. “By an old man,” she told me, clutching her vape. “He smells of cigar smoke and wee. Some people who used to work here left because they were scared.”

Maynes’ grandfather knew Stuart Ogilvie. “Used to drive a white Rolls Royce,” she said. “They called it the white mouse. When it drove past you had to take your hat off like he was royalty or something.”

Maynes sent me off into the fading day with a gift: a book, titled More East Anglian Humour. I flicked through it for laughs in The Dolphin, which was busy for a Wednesday afternoon. Few were forthcoming, but this tickled me as I tucked into my braised pheasant:

A Suffolk farmer was helping one of his men to fill out a government form. “How old are you?” he asked. “Oi’m 91,” said the man. “Nonsense,” said the farmer. “Your father’s still alive. How old is he?” “He’s turrble old,” said the man. “Over 80.”  

You had to be there.

After lunch, I walked through a silver birch woodland, past the windmill and the House in the Clouds, and the golf course, eventually ending up on the shingle beach. In the far distance, I could see Sizewell nuclear power station, which offers its own utopian vision: low-carbon energy for millions of homes. Radioactive waste is the payoff. There’s always a payoff.

Neither Sizewell, Beeching’s rail cuts (which severed it from the network), or the availability of cheap holidays abroad appear to have dimmed enthusiasm for Thorpeness. Beachside properties go for hundreds a night on Airbnb, although some homes further up the coast are falling into the sea, cursed by erosion.

I walked along the beach, over grassy dunes and heath. The sea roared, a kestrel hovered overhead, the sky was a Constable painting, and in that moment I thought how refreshing it was, in a world that is changing so rapidly and confusingly, to look around and see a landscape that has barely changed for centuries. Constant and reassuring, it sent me to a utopia in my mind. And then I remembered that I had to get the bus back.

Getting there: Thanks to Beeching it’s difficult by rail. The nearest train station is Saxmundham, from there it’s a (not very regular) bus that takes half an hour.

Where to stay: The House in the Clouds is a private home that’s periodically available for rent. A former water tower, it was converted into a quirky house and offers incredible views over East Anglia.

Where to eat: A locals’ hangout that’s not cliquey, The Dolphin does excellent food and is the only pub in town. The Meare Tearooms and Thorpeness Emporium also do breakfast and lunch.

More information: visitsuffolk.com/destination/thorpeness