The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
‘Charging fee to visit my Devon village paid off’
Toll caused a storm at first but it works well, John Rous tells Eleanor Doughty
On the north Devon coast there’s a stunningly beautiful, authentic village frozen in time. England is not short of such places, the difference with Clovelly is that there are no cars, second home owners are banned – and you have to pay to enter.
Since 1983, the Clovelly estate, which has only been owned by three families since the 13th century, has been the home of the Hon John Rous. At the centre of its 2,000 acres is an 80-cottage, car-free village on a 400ft cliff, complete with visitor centre, car park and gift shop. The model is, as Rous puts it, an “estately village”.
Yes, there is a big house – Clovelly Court, where Rous lives with his family – but this is “not an architectural masterpiece, just a nice home,” and isn’t open to the public. Instead, it is the village that takes the lead.
And it is the fees – £9.50 for adults, and £5.50 for children aged seven to 16, which includes entry to the gardens at Clovelly Court – that maintain the village.
At first, he admits, it didn’t go down well; the Western Daily Press declared it a “tax on tourists”.
“When I announced it everybody jumped up and down because everybody in England hates any change whatsoever,” he says. “The coach companies threatened to blackball us.”
He weathered the storm, and while people do still complain from time to time, he believes that it works well.
“It reinforces the connection between going to visit the village, and contributing towards it staying unspoilt.” Rous, 73, became the first male custodian of Clovelly for 120 years when he took over in the 1980s. A century earlier, his great-great-aunt Christine Hamlyn Fane inherited Clovelly after her only brother, Nevile, died. Back then, the houses were damp and small, and the village had been subject to a recent cholera outbreak.
Christine was the making of Clovelly – capitalising on its burgeoning tourism industry, she redeveloped the village for her tenants, renovating the houses, knocking the smallest together and building on others.
Seeing how popular Clovelly had become, she bought a patch of land at the top of the village on which she built a car park. In 1936, the year of Christine’s death, nearly 50,000 cars and 3,600 charabancs used the car park.
After her death, the estate passed to Christine’s niece the Hon Betty Asquith, who in 1919 had married Arthur “Oc” Asquith, third son of former prime minister Herbert Asquith. Betty agented the estate, and when she died in 1962 it passed, agents intact, to her daughter, Mary, who had married the Hon Keith Rous, later, for four days, 5th Earl of Stradbroke.
When Keith Stradbroke died in 1983, his son John, a chartered accountant, inherited Clovelly, and has run it himself ever since. He has two daughters with his wife, Zeenat, and when Clovelly next passes on, “it will revert to type,” he says, and pass again to a woman, likely his elder daughter, Maha, since “you can’t split it in two”.
Rous interviews prospective tenants personally, all of whom must commit to living there full- time. As cars are banned residents use sledges to move things up and down the hill.
He warns them from the outset that the 150,000 visitors to Clovelly each year are “part and parcel of living here. If you love the sweep of the bay and if you’ve always wanted to live in a traffic-free zone, but you can’t stand tourists, then it won’t work for you”.
The landlord-tenant relationship is a close one; they call Rous, rather incongruously “JR”, which one suspects he secretly enjoys.
It really is a very nice place to visit, with a handful of businesses to peruse, from Clovelly Silk to the four-star Red Lion Hotel on the quay, to the Clovelly Soap Company. Still, it is a slightly unworldly place. It’s a bit like the Postman Pat village at Longleat, in Wiltshire – Clovelly has the same feel of being a kind of toy town. It’s a permanent showroom, albeit a very charming one, an estate doing what it must to survive in today’s world.