Liner Notes for Down From London
If you live in a nice quiet seaside town, or maybe just a nice country town that isn’t by the sea but is in the southern half of the country, you probably know about DFLs. People who live and work in London and buy a second home. It’s good because local businesses can sell them things, it’s bad because they buy up all the good houses and no one local can afford to live there anymore. And you can’t build more houses because this is a nice rural part of the country so you can’t get planning permission. There’s some (class-based) tension, with offcomers being amused by the local yokels and assuming they have no culture, while being taken advantage of, people with two sets of prices etc. You can play this for laughs if you like.
Look, this is a thing that the story’s named after, these are only liner notes, I’m just giving you the broad strokes. We could already buy olive oil and baby vegetables in the Co-op before weekend people started moving into the nice cottages down by the river you know, there’s always been a wacky new-age coffee shop. It’s not all about you guys.
The stately home is based on no particular one; the statues heightened versions of the type of thing you can see. I say no particular one but the fire water installation is based on one at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the seat of the Cholmondeley family. If you know how to pronounce their name you’ll find another inspiration.
The first Marquess of Cholmondeley was elevated to that distinction thanks to his time in the administrations of Spencer Percival and Lord Liverpool; keen students of history will note that he thus spent the Regency in government service, not fighting duels or learning about magic. That’s all pieced together more from fiction than fact, though if pressed I could find unreliable sources for much of it. As in, it probably wasn’t true but some people at the time thought it was.
Faith Renard comes from my resolutely un-supernatural LaceyLee detective stories, the sister of her ex-boyfriend. I wanted someone from London, and someone who didn’t normally get caught up with weirdness, or rather was on the periphery of crime weirdness rather than spooky weirdness. So I put her in as a placeholder character, then realised that with that name she was practically begging to be put into a Strandbridge story. Will she be back? Yes, probably.
The line These words are not fit for human eyes is stolen from a friend talking about a deleted tweet.
Anyway this is just a cute ghost story, disguised by being a walk around a slightly creepy garden. We’ve had Strandbridge silly, Strandbridge cute, Strandbridge dark and now Strandbridge cosy-spooky. What next? (It’s Standbridge silly again).
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