Soaking up the vitamin sea

Living in a converted rail carriage isn’t everyone’s beach fantasy but for Frances Herrod, it was a dream come true, finds Ruth Bloomfield

- Ruth Bloomfield

Living by the sea is a fantasy for many, whether they see themselves in a West Country cottage or a glass palace at Sandbanks. Frances Herrod’s coastal dream was a bit different: a converted rail carriage on the shingles of Dungeness, set in the shadow of a nuclear power station.

“Dungeness is a really Marmite sort of place,” she says. “You either love it or hate it, and I really love it.” When she fell for the area, she was living in a small flat between Greenwich and Blackheath. “I really wanted some outside space,” she says. “I felt a bit like a battery hen. I started to go to Dungeness at weekends and I really fell in love with it. Houses very rarely come up and so when one did in 2006, I snapped it up.”

The patchwork of homes on the 468acre beach at Dungeness has evolved over centuries. As far back as 1617, makeshift wooden fishermen’s cabins were being built there. In 1883, a railway station opened. During the Twenties, Southern Railway offered staff the chance to buy redundant Victorian railway carriages and haul them on to the shingles for use as makeshift holiday homes. Herrod bought her house from the granddaughter of one of these original owners, who had extended it with a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom.