1450 home moved 100 miles brick by brick to seaside

In 1969, May Savidge dismantled her own 1450 home in Ware, Hertfordshire, after the council moved to demolish it for a new roundabout. Bulldozers reached her front gate. Savidge, then 58, refused to watch Ware Hall, an Elizabethan house built around 1450, flattened. She bought land in Wells next the Sea, Norfolk, numbered every beam and window, and hauled the house 100 miles north in 11 lorry trips. With an engineering background, Savidge lived in a caravan with her dog while rebuilding it herself. “I just will not have such a marvellous old house bulldozed into the ground,” she said. She erected her own scaffolding and told a visiting TV crew, “You certainly sleep at the end of the day.” Savidge moved into the unfinished house around age 67. Strangers sent money and became lifelong friends. When Savidge died in 1993, she left the house to her niece Christine Adams, who spent 15 years finishing it. The story is now being adapted into a film by director Gillies MacKinnon.