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Jonathan
Creek
(Click
for Jonathan Creek Gallery)
Shipley Windmill is the fictional
home of the hero of the BBC Television series Jonathan Creek.
The BBC has so far filmed parts of 22 episodes at the mill.
The star of Jonathan Creek is comedian Alan Davies, who plays the
eccentric inventor and sleuth, with Caroline Quentin and Julia
Sawalha as his reporter sidekicks.
When the BBC comes to film they bring with them a team of around
40 people, with a fleet of vehicles; catering wagons, wardrobe,
dressing rooms, toilets and generators, plus a vast quantity of
equipment.
The mill is dressed both inside and out to fit the story-line.
The Meal Floor becomes Jonathan Creek’s study, with plum-coloured walls
and a matchboarded dado, and is filled with furniture and properties so
that little of the mill can be seen.
The ground floor is turned into his kitchen, with pine dresser, sink
unit, cooker and washing machine, with a farmhouse table in the center.
While the first floor becomes his bedroom, with a double bed flanked
with Egyptian-style pillars.
Outside the mill is
surrounded with foliage and other assorted properties, while scaffolding
springs up and camera cranes swing about.
Shipley Windmill has
also appeared in a number of other television programmes.
It doubled as Wimbledon Windmill in the comedy drama The Wimbledon
Poisoner, and has featured in a number of programmes about the
countryside.
Hilaire Belloc
Hilaire Belloc, the writer, poet politician and historian was born
in France in 1870. His father was a lawyer and his mother was of
Anglo-Irish descent.
After the death of his father, his mother moved to Slindon in
Sussex, and sent her son to the Oratory school. From there he
went to Balliol College, Oxford, gaining a first in history.
In 1896 he married an Irish-American girl, Elodie Hogan, and he
become a naturalised Englishman in 1902.
In 1905, he and Elodie bicycled to Shipley, and found the house,
Kings Land. They decided at once to buy it, together with the
mill cottage, the windmill and five acres of land.
(See History of Shipley Mill)
The Bellocs moved into the house in 1906, and Hilaire lived
there until his death in 1953, about 40 years after his wife.
Belloc served in Parliament as a Liberal MP for 4 years, from
1906 to 1910, when he resigned, disillusioned with politics.
During his lifetime he wrote nearly 150 books, ranging from
historical biographies to The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and
Cautionary Tales for Children.
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