Glades End, Surf Crescent

A Memory of Eastchurch.

Eastchurch cliffs
My parents bought a plot of land on the Eastchurch cliffs in the 1940s and my father designed and had built our bungalow called Glades End in Surf Crescent. At this time, there were very few buildings on the cliffs but then more people started to buy land and build. My father (who was a draftsman) designed and prepared drawings for several of these properties.
It only took about an hour or so to drive to Eastchurch from our house so when I was a child, we spent all our holidays at Glades End. Looking back it seems quite Spartan. There was no electricity - my mother cooked by calor gas, we had oil lights, and meat and milk were kept in a zinc meat safe outside the kitchen. There was also no water supply. My sister and I shared the job of walking to the nearest stand pipe with a bucket.
We walked to Elmhurst or Eastchurch holiday camps to buy provisions every day. Sometimes we would walk to Eastchurch village, taking the often muddy path that ran from the cliffs alongside Hens Brook. We would then cross the road at the end of the path and cut across the fields to the village, often stopping to pick mushrooms on the way.
Occasionally in the evenings the family would walk to the Wheatsheaf on the Warden Road. My sister and I would sit outside and our parents would bring us out drinks and packets of Smith crisps with their little blue bags of salt.
On one side of our garden was a field owned by ‘Monty’, an elderly gentleman who would walk his dog on the cliffs every day. His wife sold apples to the holiday visitors. In the 1950s, my parents bought part of the field from Monty and established a vegetable patch there.
Spending summer, Easter, Whitsun and often weekends at Glades End meant that I got to know some of the children of other holiday property owners quite well. We were a small ‘gang’, spending as much time as we could climbing the cliffs, playing cricket and paddling in the rock pools. Even at times when none of my friends was staying there, I still roamed the cliffs and beach via ‘the Gap’ – the break between two cliffs where Hens Brook flowed into the sea. It was idyllic and it’s sad that life has changed to the extent that today’s children cannot enjoy the same freedom.
When I was about eleven my parents decided to sell Glades End. This was for two main reasons. First, the bungalow had been broken into several times by prisoners escaping from Eastchurch open prison. Second, maintaining the garden and especially the vegetable plot was hard work and they wanted more relaxed holidays.
I went back with my own children to show them Glades End in the late 1980s. The people who were staying there noticed us looking and kindly showed us round. Although it had been modernised with a bathroom instead of our outside toilet and electricity, it brought back many happy memories.
In 2013 I made the mistake of going back again. I saw that Glades End had been sold some years previously and I wanted to see how it was getting on. I could see nothing because it was fenced off with high boarding. Many of the buildings in Surf Crescent seemed to be ‘fortified’. Obviously there have been major security problems there. The Gap was overgrown with apparently just a small muddy path between bushes leading down to the sea.

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