When T. E. Lawrence first set eyes on Clouds Hill, Dorset, in 1923, he realised that it would make a good place to hide. Although its name suggests that it sits high up, open to the sky, this humble whitewashed brick cottage is concealed from casual sight. Set in a hollow in the south Dorset heathland and enclosed by pine trees and rhododendron bushes, it possesses a powerful atmosphere of secrecy (Fig 1). Then about to turn 35, Lawrence was living under the assumed name of T. E. Shaw as a private in the Tank Corps, based at Bovington Camp, a mile to the south.
He had sought this obscure anonymity to escape his international celebrity as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (Fig 3), the result of his starring role in the Arab revolt of 1916–18 that had helped the Allied Powers defeat the Ottoman Empire. He hoped also to find peace to complete Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the epic account of his desert campaigns that was to secure his lasting fame.
Fig 2: The upstairs sitting room at Clouds Hill. The fender was made by a local craftsman to Lawrence’s design and the candlesticks on the chimneypiece were a leaving present from the RAF in 1935.
Lawrence had made his first bid for anonymity in July 1922 by enlisting in the Royal Air Force as an airman under the name John Ross, only to be discharged a year later when his identity was leaked to the press. Arriving at Bovington in March of 1923, he found his initial feelings of pessimism were ‘very much like the wintry heath, of bog and withered plants and stripped trees’ that surrounded the camp.
Yet, as he recognised, this was also the Egdon Heath of Thomas Hardy’s novels. As soon as he arrived, he sought an introduction to Hardy, who lived in Dorchester, 15 miles away, an easy ride on Lawrence’s motorcycle.
Fig 3: T. E. Lawrence — Lawrence of Arabia — in Arab guise.
Shortly after this, he was shown Clouds Hill, which was being restored from almost total ruin by one of his fellow soldiers. Seeking a refuge from what he called the ‘cat-calling carnality’ of life in barracks — he returned to the RAF in 1925 — Lawrence offered to complete the work at his own expense and rent the cottage. Built in 1808 on the Frampton family’s Moreton estate, perhaps for a forester, the house has only four rooms, two on each floor.
Initially, Lawrence fitted out only the upper floor, for use primarily as a writing room. It was only a daytime retreat as, when not on leave, he had to sleep in camp, where he also ate, and he installed neither running water nor electricity. Lawrence was content with this make-do life because he assumed that he would not need the cottage for long, but, in 1929, he decided to buy it, to form a permanent base in his peripatetic service career.
Fig 4: The bunk room. Lawrence had its walls covered in silver paper in 1935, giving it an unexpected Art Deco look.
After Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident on the road from Bovington in 1935, the novelist E. M. Forster, who knew the cottage well, wrote that to think of Clouds Hill ‘as T. E.’s home is to get the wrong idea of it. It was rather his pied-à terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment and found rest’. Nonetheless, in his later years there, Lawrence dedicated considerable effort and money to making the cottage suitable for the more settled life he envisaged after retirement from the RAF.
This was not such a departure as Forster’s comment may imply: throughout his life, Lawrence took a great deal of care about his domestic settings. Clouds Hill was the last of four small houses Lawrence helped create in the course of his life and it drew on memories of its predecessors.
Fig 5: The house used by the archaeological team excavating Carchemish, now on the Turkey/Syria border, and furnished by T.E. Lawrence when he worked there in 1911–14.
Lawrence was the second of five brothers brought up in a large house in Polstead Road, north Oxford. Recognising that their clever, unusual second son needed independence and a place to study, in 1908 his parents had a two-room bungalow built for him in the garden. He draped the walls with blue cloth to block out external noise: ‘it was the most silent place I have ever been in,’ remembered a friend. Lawrence lived there when an undergraduate at Jesus College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with a young Welshman, Vyvyan Richards, who shared his enthusiasm for fine books and printing.
In 1910, Richards became a master at Bancroft’s School in Woodford, Essex, near the southern edge of Epping Forest, where he had the use of a wooden hut on Pole Hill, a steep slope set in the forest with a fine view of the London skyline. Intending to install a printing press there, he and Lawrence made plans for replacing it with a house of medieval type that would incorporate beams Lawrence had rescued from a demolished 14th-century hall in Oxford.
Fig 7: Egdon Heath from Clouds Hill by Gilbert Spencer, 1924, of Thomas Hardy’s ‘wintry heath’, which Lawrence had recognised immediately. The painting remains at Clouds Hill.
These romantic intentions foundered when Lawrence joined a team of British Museum archaeologists excavating at Carchemish, the Hittite citadel on what is now Turkey’s border with Syria. There, he was charged with overseeing the erection of a permanent house on site. Its scale was revealed when the foundations were excavated and conserved in 2013–14: the one-storey building comprised 18 rooms built around a courtyard, with living accommodation, spaces to display findings and a photographic darkroom. The director of the dig, Leonard Woolley, later famous as the excavator of Ur, recalled how the sitting room (Fig 5) was furnished with ‘some good rugs, the best of which Lawrence had bought. He had had made in Aleppo two armchairs of black wood and white leather of whose design he was very proud; he had brought out from home a piece of Morris tapestry to hang on the wall, he had some nice Kutachia pots, and of course books’.
This comfortable life was swept away by the First World War. Although it brought him international celebrity, the Arabian campaign left Lawrence desolate and exhausted and he was greatly cheered when Richards called him back to their former plans. Having gone back to London, Lawrence worked intensively on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as Richards prepared his hut to be the home of the press that would print it. In 1919, with money inherited from his father, Lawrence bought land at Pole Hill, intending to settle there. The original hut, described by him as ‘my house’, was destroyed by fire in 1921, but, with the help of his pupils, Richards rebuilt it with an open veranda, which he called ‘the cloister’, and an outdoor plunge pool.
In another hut on the land, Lawrence stored a pair of elaborately carved teak doors he had bought in Jeddah (Fig 6), perhaps with the intention of incorporating them in the larger house and garden on Pole Hill that he and Richards planned, for which they consulted the architect Herbert Baker. However, these dreams were undermined by Lawrence’s decision that he would take no profits from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and then his enlistment in the RAF.
Fig 8: The downstairs book room, as it was shortly after Lawrence’s death in 1935, with his library intact. He used the daybed for reading.
In 1929, Lawrence sold his land at Pole Hill to the Epping Forest authorities to ensure that it would not be built over, but also to raise funds for improvements to Clouds Hill, which by then he intended would be his permanent home. The Forest authorities moved the hut to their headquarters in Loughton, where — remarkably — it survives.
When Forster paid the first of several visits to Clouds Hill, in June 1924, he was enchanted by its informality and the hospitality that Lawrence gave to favoured soldiers from Bovington camp. The artist Gilbert Spencer, who that year was invited by Lawrence to make a painting of the heathland landscape that is still in the cottage (Fig 7), remembered him in the main upstairs room (Fig 2) correcting proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and listening to a gramophone record of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, as ‘a Company Sergeant Major sat with the poems of Laurence Binyon on his lap’. Lawrence had fitted out the room in his characteristic taste — bare wood and brick, with undyed leather curtains in place of doors, recalling the medieval inspiration of the proposed house at Pole Hill. Forster thought it very ‘brownish’.
Lawrence liked to exaggerate the cottage’s discomfort, writing in 1934 that it ‘is as ugly as my sins, bleak, angular, small, unstable: very like its creator’. In fact, fellow soldiers were impressed by his expensive motorcycle and gramophone and even the food on offer — in the absence of a kitchen, eaten directly out of tins, which made Forster ill — was ameliorated by Fortnum & Mason hampers.
Lawrence loved long, hot baths and, in 1933, he finally arranged for the house to have running water and a boiler. He installed a bathroom in one of the two ground-floor rooms, which was lined with sheet cork of high quality. The other room was fitted out with a fireplace, bookshelves, a large daybed on which he reclined to read (Fig 8) and an armchair of his own design. Its broad arms, designed to support books, give it an Art Deco look.
Lawrence fitted out the two upper rooms like a ship’s cabin, with a bunk bed and porthole window, taken from an old, broken-up battleship. Strikingly, he lined the walls with aluminium foil (Fig 4). Although this had a practical purpose — the room was used for storing food, so needed to be dry and cool — it also evokes the world of interwar glamour associated with an unexpected acquaintance of Lawrence, Stephen Tennant, the epitome of the 1920s ‘bright young things’. In 1927, this fey young aesthete was photographed by Cecil Beaton in his bedroom in London, which he had lined with silver foil. Tennant visited Clouds Hill in the 1930s and it seems likely that Lawrence knew the image, which might, therefore, have inspired his own silver room.
On the far side of the road from the cottage, Lawrence constructed a pool, partly to provide water to douse the heathland fires that occasionally threatened the cottage and partly for use as a plunge bath (as at Pole Hill). To keep fallen leaves out, he constructed a glass canopy over it, large enough to incorporate the two doors from Jeddah that had been in storage in Essex.
A few weeks before Lawrence’s death, Richards stayed at Clouds Hill. Lawrence intended to install a small hand-press in the building over the pool, taking advantage of the fact that its ‘atmosphere would always be damp and good for printing’. He hoped to start in the autumn of 1935 by printing his frank account of life in the RAF ranks, The Mint, and ‘some good but obscure poet’.
A view from the nearby rhododendron wood of Clouds Hill, taken around the time of the death of adventurer and author T.E. Lawrence in 1935. Photo by J. Dixon-Scott/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Lawrence’s plans for the cottage at the time of his death looked back, therefore, to the life he and Richards had first planned before the war. According to Richards, the intentions for their house in Epping Forest had included a pair of box beds inscribed ‘Meum’ and ‘Tuum’. These sleeping arrangements were replicated at Clouds Hill, in the form described by Lawrence, with ‘two sleeping bags, zip-fastened and labelled in embroidery MEUM and TUUM. When night falls the cottager takes up his bag, unfolds it on the piece of floor he momently prefers, and sleeps’.
Clouds Hill was inherited by Lawrence’s youngest brother, the archaeologist Arnold Lawrence, who in 1937, having removed the books and many of the works of art, donated the cottage to the National Trust. When James Lees-Milne visited in 1945, he was repelled by its setting ‘in the middle of Bovington Heath, which is a blasted waste of desolation, churned feet-deep in mud by a thousand army tanks’ and thought the cottage ‘a pathetic little shoddy place. The visitors have stolen all they could lay their hands on’.
It is a tribute to the careful restoration of the interiors embarked on by the National Trust at the beginning of this century, helped by a photographic survey made after Lawrence’s death, that Clouds Hill is now unrecognisable from that description. Instead, it evokes with almost unnerving immediacy the way its creator’s complex personality was embodied in his places of refuge.
Michael Hall is the author of ‘A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust’ (Bloomsbury, £25)
Visit the National Trust website to find out more about Clouds Hill.
This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.