It’s a quiet Wednesday afternoon in Beaconsfield, Britain’s most expensive market town and the burial place of Edmund Burke. There’s a sense of foreboding in the air. Well, there is if you’re a G.K. Chesterton fan. South Buckinghamshire District Council is about to decide whether Overroads, the house where the author lived from 1909 to 1922, will be demolished and replaced with an apartment block.
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 station and asked to buy a ticket for the next train. It was going to Slough, the town that John Betjeman once invited friendly bombs to fall on. From there, the Chestertons 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. Yet the biggest protest against the demolition plan has come not from fans of crime fiction, 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’.
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https://spectator.us/fight-save-g-k-chesterton-home-demolition/
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