The house where JM Barrie created Peter Pan is for sale, in one of the most unspoilt spots in the south of England
In a wildly bucolic stretch of the Surrey Hills, JM Barrie's summer retreat — where the children of his family friends inspired the adventures of Peter Pan — has come to the market.
There’s a tendency to think of great artists being inspired by the muse, sitting down at a desk with reams of blank paper before them, then pouring out pure originality from their imaginations.
In reality it doesn’t often work like that. Not for the greats, at any rate: Shakespeare never came up with a story in his life (even The Tempest is derived from other sources), Herman Melville based Moby Dick on a real-life albino whale, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy was Tolkien’s mash-up of Anglo-Saxon sagas, his research into linguistics, and the trenches of the First World War.
As for JM Barrie’s Peter Pan? That was inspired by his neighbour’s children, his dog, and the spectacularly unspoilt landscape of the Surrey Hills. And the house where Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys came together in his head is now for sale: Barrie House, a part of Lobswood Manor — formerly known as Black Lake Cottage — is on the market with Savills at £1.25 million.
The carved beam above the fireplace is a 16th century ship's timber.
Barrie had been born in Scotland, but by 1900 was a successful playwright living in Kensington with his wife, next door to the Llewelyn-Davies family and their three children, George, Jack and Peter.
JM Barrie at the height of his success in the early 1900s.
That year, Barrie's wife, the actress Mary Ansell, decided to lease a summer retreat called Black Lake Cottage, on the outskirts of the village of Tilford, close to Farnham. The Barries would have the place for eight years, and the Llewelyn-Davieses were invited to come regularly — an offer which they happily took up.
The three boys threw themselves in to this bucolic spot which, then as now, is a vast landscape of hills, woodland, lakes and rivers. Their roaming and games inspired Barrie, who created a photo book called The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, featuring the three boys and Barrie’s dog, a placid and endlessly-patient St Bernard (sound familiar?). He also began to spin tales of how the youngest brother, Peter, somehow knew how to fly, and Peter Pan was born.
The real-life Never Never Land: Frensham Ponds, close to Barrie's house.
Barrie didn’t publish the photo book (a copy does still survive, and can be seen at JM Barrie website), but it wasn’t long before Peter Pan was shared with the world — initially in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, and then two years later with the stage play Peter Pan, which was an instant and enormous success. A plaque adorns the front of the house, commemorating its pivotal role in one of the most enduring literary creations of the 20th century.
Black Lake Cottage came to be renamed as Lobswood Manor, and was split into three separate homes back in the 1970s, but the wing that is now for sale, Barrie House, forms the front portion of the building, and is full of charming, original features that Barrie would surely recognise were he to walk in today.
Take the fireplace in the sitting room, for example: its huge inglenook fireplace is framed by a carved timber which is believed to have been sourced from a 16th century shipwreck.
The ground floor has the aforementioned sitting room, a dining room and a huge kitchen-diner, with french doors opening onto the magical gardens — gardens which Mary Ansell herself created, and wrote a book about (copies of The Happy Garden remain prized today) while her husband stayed indoors working on his writing. (If that makes their life sound idyllic, it shouldn't: the couple divorced after Mary had an affair, while the Llewelyn-Davies boys would be orphaned in 1910, when their mother Sylvia died of cancer.)
One of the four bedrooms, with its own bathroom, is on the ground floor, with the others all on the first floor, and all en-suite.
There's also a cellar and a garage, and a separate one-bedroom annexe bringing the space here to well over 3,000sq ft in total. The annexe, separated from the main house by a stud wall, could easily be reincorporated to the main house; it could make an ideal part of a multi-generational living set-up; or you could just use it as a writer's retreat from which to create your own enduring story.
Barrie House, within Lobswood Manor, is for sale via Savills — see more details.
