STANDFAST

THIS week we bring you an unusual Looking Back with a feature on the restoration of John Fowles' Lyme Regis house - among other fascinating characters.

RESTORING the Grade II* listed Belmont House in Lyme Regis must have been a project manager's dream - and nightmare.

A dream because who wouldn't want to resurrect the glory of an 18th century house, whose inhabitants included the remarkable Eleanor Coade who literally broke the mould with her Coade stone which now adorns some of the country's most notable buildings - including Buckingham Palace, the Victorian doctor Richard Bungay, whose large family and love of astronomy shaped the house during his lifetime (1834 to 1933) and the literary giant John Fowles?

A nightmare because the house had more add ons than a ship's barnacles and changing it back to its Regency glory, without the Victorian and 60s extensions, met with disapproval from English Heritage.

Not to mention all the rotten woodwork and corroded stone from 200 years by the sea and the fundraising to come up with the £1.8 million bill.

Project manager Carole Paton said: "English Heritage objected because they didn't want things taken away, they have this 'conserve as found argument'.

"But the more research we did the more convinced we were we were dong the right thing."

Still nothing daunted the Landmark Trust, whose raison d'etre is preserving history buildings, sent Carole Paton to project manage the work, with a brief to use local labour if she could and get back as much of the original 1784 building as humanly possible.

That's just was she has done, but it has been eight years since the trust bought the building in 2007 from John Fowles' widow, helped by a legacy from Dorset resident Joyce Hanson.

The challenges she faced made the legendary Grand Designs' problems look like Lego construction.

Carole could be forgiven for being daunted but to hear tell of the horrors they uncovered you can only conclude the sort of challenges that would make a lesser woman weep are her life's blood.

Although she does admit it was worse than they expected.

From pictures she found Carole discovered some of the Victorian extensions built by Dr Bangay, to house the 21 occupants, were already gone, including the glass houses.

She said: "The Georgian building was the plug in the middle of the Victorian part, but that was the part that was used as circulation routes through the building."

To get back to the original was a mixture of detective work and a jigsaw puzzle.

By re-discovering hidden doorways and lintels they pieced the interior back together but there was also the actual restoration.

This included practically taking the whole front of the house apart.

Carole said parts of the front of the house were bowing by as much as 10 inches, the whole roof had to come off and all the Coade stone decorations restored.

She said: "The parapet was bending badly because the timbers above the window had rotted collapsing on itself, the wall plate the roof is seated on, that was completely gone

"We had to put in a new oak wall plate and take down the parapet to get to the rotten timbers.

"All the Coade stone had to come off because it has iron fixings and that rusts, blooming out like a posy, breaking and cracking the Coade stone."

They are all fixed using stainless steel.

But worst of all was the blue lias stone work, not much of which was more than crumbling stone.

What could be fixed was done with clay tiles cut into bits and layered like sandwiches and tied in with stainless steel with lime mortar in between.

None of which work is visible to the visitor.

Nor could more than 12 of the Welsh slates on the roof be saved, having over the years been bodged in with foam that destroys both slate and timbers.

It did mean that Carole could use solar slates though.

Interior work has been just as painstaking, from paint analysis to discover both the colours and dates of the decorating schemes, to windows moved back to their original positions, the staircase opened up, the mahogany stair rail restored, with new joining old seamlessly.

In John Fowles' writing room the balcony has been made accessible (sash windows sliding up into the ceiling) and where possible books from his collection sold off after his death traced and bought back.

Considering the size of the bound copy of the catalogue of those books though it was only ever going to be a fraction of the whole.

Fireplaces have been recreated using the one Coade stone original and cornices cleaned of centuries of paint - in one room the individual 'ball bearings' on the cornice pinged off with alarming regularity.

"That was certainly a labour of love," said Carole.

One significant Victorian edifice has been kept - Dr Bangay's observatory that now has a turning roof once again thanks to the efforts of a group of retired engineers from Lyme's U3A who enjoyed themselves tremendously pondering how to get it moving again.

The stable block has been conserved but kept largely as it was to house a visitor centre with sections on each of the three notable inhabitants.

It will be open to the public, and manned by volunteers, on Fridays from April to October.

The house itself will be used for holiday lets, apart from two weeks of the year witn creative writing students from the University of East Anglia will tow free study weeks.

The house is already booked up for all of 2016.

There is a Channel 4 programme coming which should be worth seeing.