The Easternmost House... an interview with Juliet Blaxland

As a companion piece to the third of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – The Easternmost House – we present an interview with Juliet Blaxland...

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade. The house doesn’t exist anymore but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. The Easternmost House was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

I contacted Juliet Blaxland to ask her about her relationship with the sea, her view on the seaside houses and what she misses the most from The Easternmost House.

The book is a love letter to a house that no longer exists. Was it easy or hard to write it?

I found it oddly easy to write The Easternmost House because by the time the idea of a book occurred to me we had lived there for ten years or so, and I grew up in the countryside nearby, so it was very much familiar territory. It seemed sad to me after so much had happened at the Easternmost House, and so many people had known and loved the house, its immediate surroundings of the beach and the farm over the centuries, that one day soon, there would be only empty sky where the house had been, and ‘the people on the beach below will not know’.

I don’t know why it bothered me that ‘the people [of the future] on the beach below’ would not know, but it did, and that became the incentive to write, so that they would know. And now, the people on the beach below, and the people of the future, will know. That is how the book ends, with that image of the empty sky over the beach, where the house and the cliff once was.

What is your understanding of ‘sense of place’? What creates place?

‘Genius Loci’, the Roman religious concept of ‘spirit of place’, is perhaps my starting point when thinking about sense of place. A sense of place can be found in all different environments: desert, farm, city, church, country house, town house, skyscraper, mountain, forest, and so on. What seems to define the ‘place’ to me is some sense of its essential character and ‘spirit’. There is a knack to finding the spirit of a place, but I believe that this can be found in any place, and I also believe that some people seem to be more attuned to feeling that 'spirit of place more instinctively, more easily, than other people. Some don't seem to feel a ‘sense of place’ at all, and nor do they seem to need it. I think most people do feel it and need it, even if they might not be able to pin down exactly what they mean or what they need. Most of us know the feeling of being in our own ‘right place’, literally or metaphorically, and it is a great gift if we can find that place of calm in our minds, as it goes with us wherever we are. 

I am an architect, so I have often thought about the idea of a ‘sense of place’, ‘genius loci’ or ‘spirit of place’, and its uncatchable but knowable feeling still intrigues me, as it has done since I was a student and unwittingly since I was a child. The old house and farmyard where I grew up had a 'sense of place' in spades, and my mother still lives there, so it is still an ongoing preoccupation to work out what it is. 

What do you miss most about the Easternmost House?

What I miss most is the visual emptiness of living right on the edge of the cliff, so that from our windows, from our bed, the view was of the sea, the horizon, and often some 'big' weather, far beyond what we normally experience in more sheltered places or inland.

We have been lucky in that we have moved only a mile or two up the coast, and can still walk to the Easternmost House site, and see it from afar, and we still live only about 500 metres from the sea and the cliff edge, but the sea is now a big field away not 10 metres!

Are seaside houses somehow different from other houses?

To me it is the isolation and the open view that is the difference, not necessarily the sea, although the sea certainly adds a vast and different dimension to everyday living. A ‘seaside house’ in a seaside town, perhaps a holiday place crowded in summer, would to me be less appealing than a isolated cottage on a farm or similar. I don’t mind the inconvenience of living in the countryside, as I grew up with it. The sea adds enormously to the different sounds you hear, and the very different birds and animals you see on the coast, seals, oystercatchers, bitterns etc.

Two of my favourite books are The Outermost House by Henry Beston and Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, both of which describe an extraordinary life in an extraordinary house ‘on the edge’, of the land, on the edge of the norms of society and on the edge of the mass of humanity. Both of these houses were destroyed by natural forces, a storm and a fire, respectively. The Easternmost House having been destroyed by coastal erosion seems a natural companion to these two (the books and the houses themselves). 

We have visited the site where the Easternmost House used to be, and it is strange to see an empty space where so recently we lived. The trees and surrounding landscape is still there and completely recognisable. It is only us, and the house, that has gone. It some ways, it is probably a good thing, to leave a nice, clean, quiet cliff, so that the birds and other wild animals are no longer disturbed by our chatter, and our greyhound, and our just ‘being there’.

What the sea means for you?

I think we all have quite a complex and conflicted relationship with the sea. The sea is mesmerising to be near, or to swim in. It connects us to the rest of the world, and that is one of the things I like about being near the sea. I think islanders tend to be culturally less insular than land-locked peoples, as islanders are constantly look outwards not inwards, and have a history of accommodating those who have arrived or invaded by sea. I am fascinated by the sea and sea people in different parts of the world, different fishing methods and so on, and I love the more remote parts of Venice and the Venetian lagoon. On the other hand, I always feel the enormity and dangers of the sea, and at night when we listen to the BBC Shipping Forecast, your mind tends to wander, to think of ‘those in peril on the sea’ as that famous hymns puts it.

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Read Anna’s essay on the Easternmost House here

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.