How I put the magic back in our tiny island
Joyous story of the amateur magician who conjured up a cinema, spa and gym... and breathed life into one of the UK’s remotest communities
AQUICK look through the window was all it took to deter most potential buyers. The ceilings were black with damp, floorboards and joists were rotten and not a single room looked habitable.
All things considered, even the rock bottom asking price of offers over £15,000 seemed hopeful. Who would want a derelict schoolhouse on one of Britain’s most remote and rapidly depopulating islands when restoration could take years and cost more than the property might ever be worth? The answer to that was a Welshman called Chris Harris who stepped off the ferry at Out Skerries in Shetland one day and announced that he had bought the building sight unseen.
He told them people called him Crazy Chris. They thought they understood why.
Within six months, they figured, he would be back in the rat race, ruing the day he ever thought he could make it in an island community of less than 30 people – somewhere which feels like the edge of the world and is frequently cut off from the rest of it.
But they could not have been more wrong. Two years after the stranger arrived in their midst, keys to his tumbledown purchase in hand, he is still there – and revolutionising island life.
For years there was so little to do at night on the two main islands which form Out Skerries that some people’s idea of entertainment was driving up and down the three quarters of a mile of road listening to their car radios.
Now they can go to the cinema. Or how about a session at the local spa or a work out at the new Skerries gym, complete with treadmill, exercise bikes and weights? Forthcoming attractions include an outdoor observatory and crazy golf.
All of them are available or soon to be so at the home of the 46-year-old amateur magician who stumbled upon the schoolhouse for sale on an internet search and made up his mind almost immediately to live there.
‘His spirit is uncrushable,’ marvels his new friend Alice Arthur, 57, who has lived on Skerries all her days. ‘He’s an absolute breath of fresh air, which is exactly what we were needing here.’
THE story of Mr Harris’s conversion from city-dwelling victim of the daily grind to champion of one of Britain’s tiniest communities dates back a few years to when he was working up to 16 hours a day as an area manager for British Gas.
‘I’d been married for about 13 years and the wife decided that she’d had enough of me and wanted a divorce,’ he says.
At least part of the reason was she rarely saw him – and, when she did, he admits he ‘wasn’t really in the game’ because he was still thinking about work.
‘I used to have to travel up and down the country, sometimes three or four hundred miles a day, and for what? I just had to rethink my life.’
The divorce took four years to settle, despite the fact there were no children, and when it was over Mr Harris had decided on a complete change of scene.
So he used his share of the money from the sale of the marital home to buy a small flat on the Isle of Bute where he lived for about 14 months – until he spotted a house for sale on the eastern extremity of Shetland.
‘I thought it was a misprint,’ he says. ‘It was on the market for offers over just £15,000 and we’re talking a four bedroom house with over half an acre of land. I was saying to myself “that just has to be wrong”.’
He was told there was no mistake. The seller, The Church of Scotland, was looking for little more than the cost of a new family car for the property where, traditionally, Skerries’ preacher/teacher used to live. So he offered £16,500 and was told the seller wanted to wait and see if other bids came in. He upped the offer to £20,000 and it was his.
Thus he bought his stake in the archipelago at what some might say was the worst possible time – just as many of the residents of the two main islands were leaving.
In the few years before his arrival the population had shrunk from more than 70 to less than half that after the salmon farm which employed most islanders of working age went into receivership and the secondary school closed.
That was followed soon afterward by the closure of the primary school, which meant pupils of all ages were now sent to Lerwick. With work and schooling disappearing on Skerries, some families left too, fearing life in their remote corner was about to become unsustainable.
Into this depressing picture strode the cheery Welshman as he arrived to inspect his new home. And, for the next year he was hardly seen at all.
‘It took me two weeks just to mop the ceilings,’ he says. ‘They were literally black with mould and grime.’
Timbers needed replacing or treatment for woodworm and the floors were covered with stick-on tiles which proved virtually impossible to unstick. Then there was the fact the whole place needed to be rewired and replumbed and Mr Harris knew nothing about
either and had not budgeted for calling in professionals. ‘I just had to train myself,’ he says. ‘Me and YouTube got on quite well.’
The main reason why Mr Harris was seldom seen outside on Skerries in his first year, then, is he was inside doing up his home with the help of instructional videos posted on YouTube. Watching them using conventional broadband proved near impossible on an island with chronic connection issues, so an early challenge was installing satellite broadband.
‘I’m not saying I didn’t have many floods when I was doing the plumbing,’ he says. ‘I did, but that’s just what happens. It’s called learning, isn’t it? It took me 12 months to the day to get everything done.’
But hang on. What about the materials and fixtures and fittings? Where, for example, did he get the 20 authentic cinema seats, the huge hot tub for his garage, the kitchen with granite work surfaces, the roll top bath…? ‘I’m an eBay fan. I get everything on eBay.’ Having sourced a series of bargains all around the UK, Mr Harris then hired a 7.5 ton truck in Lerwick, put it on the Aberdeen ferry and spent the next four days driving the length and breadth of Britain to pick them up and sleeping in the van at night.
‘I got the kitchen in Edinburgh, the hot tub from Hull, the cinema seats in Manchester, a bed from North Wales… I had quite a full van by the time I got home.’
And loaded inside, crazy bargains. The hot tub, worth £14,000 new, came from the home of a man who was emigrating and changed hands for only £300. It is now the centrepiece of the spa in Mr Harris’s garage.
The cinema seats were being sold at a fiver a time by an Odeon multiplex – minimum order 20. Much of the time there are not even as many as 20 people on Skerries.
And transport costs for hiring a van to drive around Britain collecting everything came to only £363.
YouTube, eBay and a budget of just a few thousand pounds had already set Mr Harris, right, well on the way to creating a dream home. Now it was back to work to get the place ready for the house warming party, on the anniversary of his arrival.
‘Everybody was just gobsmacked by how lovely it was,’ recalls Alice Arthur. ‘Everybody had thought it would be an impossible task for somebody because it needed to be gutted. We thought somebody would come and maybe try but they’d get disheartened. But Chris never gets disheartened. Nothing seems to faze him. He just gets on with it and what he doesn’t know he learns.’
Further surprises were in store a couple of months later at the grand opening of the Skerries cinema in the schoolhouse’s front room. Few had imagined they were about to enter a real cinema with a projector and a popcorn machine. Teetotal Mr Harris even offers wine and beer.
‘People never thought in their wildest dreams there would be a cinema on Skerries,’ says Mrs Arthur. ‘It has all the look and the feel and atmosphere of a cinema with hundreds of seats.’
Islanders request the film of their choice and Mr Harris checks his collection of 4,000 DVDs and blue ray discs to see if it is there. If not, he orders it on eBay and receives it through the post.
Having landed a job at the processing plant which produces Skerries’ water, he had planned to pay all costs for the twice monthly cinema nights himself but the islanders were having none of it.
‘They persuaded me to put a gratuity box out.
Even when I hide it they find it because they don’t want to take something for nothing.
‘They appreciate what I’ve done and they want to keep it going so I always put all the money back into the cinema. I’ll buy new drinks or popcorn or whatever.’
With a capacity of 20, the cinema can accommodate just one more than the smallest cinema in Britain, the Colosseum in Bournemouth. Yet there are barely enough islanders to fill it.
On weekdays there are often just 15 people. And while that number rises at the weekends and when the crew of Skerries’ only fishing boat is home, the official population is probably now below 30.
The community is less than a third of the size it was when Mrs Arthur was at school – and in the past five years, the pace of depopulation has quickened worryingly.
CAN their colourful new neighbour be part of the islands’ revival? That, certainly, is his intention. In the past few weeks he has rolled out the gym in a portable cabin on his land and hot tub spa which he plumbed in himself in his garage.
He launched the whole affair to the strains of Hawaiian music, greeting arrivals with flower garlands and non-alcoholic cocktails. They could not have been more charmed. Since news of it got out, interest in the several houses for sale on Skerries is said to have been picking up.
To finish his house on budget and install his attractions, Mr Harris admits he has sometimes gone without meals and worked even longer days than those he used to put in back in Wales.
What was driving him? ‘I’ve seen dark days and I know how bad it can get. I know that people can wear a mask and pretend they’re happy and they’re not inside and there’s no place to escape.
‘Sometimes in the winter you may not be able to get off here for weeks because of the weather and cancellations of the ferry. It can get quite daunting, so I thought the cinema would be a good idea.’
But in so remote a place, hasn’t he made it rather a tough challenge to find love again? ‘I’ve been burned badly and I’m not thinking of having a partner for many years,’ he replies.
‘I’m quite happy, I’ve only got me to answer to, and the island is not for everybody but it’s perfect for me.’