Property News · April 21, 2017

Let’s move to the Isle of Portland, Dorset: ‘It has its fair share of oddity’


There’s a peculiar air to this rock at the end of Chesil Beach, best known for the stone used in buildings all over the worldWhat’s going for it? You come across bits of Portland in the most unlikely of places. Like the UN headquarters in Manhattan, St Paul’s Cathedral or the bank on my high street. Portland stone, prized for its searing whiteness, has been used for centuries to build the most illustrious of architecture. Half of London is covered in it. Which, if you follow the thought to its logical conclusion, means that half of Portland is not. The place is pockmarked with quarries, the lingering sense of something missing adding a peculiar air to a place which already has its fair share of oddity. The position of this gigantic, 500ft-high rock, sticking out into the Channel, with a skein of pebbles connecting it to the mainland, means its streets are bathed in an end-of-the-universe light, as if perched on the prow of a ship. Its quiet small towns, with their dusty, bleached stone cottages, seem, if you squint, plucked from a corner of the Mediterranean. There’s one way in and one way out, unless you’re handy with a sail. And you share the few square miles with inmates at HM Prison Portland. Not put off? Then the Isle, my strange friend, is all yours.The case against Buffeted by weather. Isolation and general weirdness: not for everyone. I miss trees (a precious commodity on this blasted isle). Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Let’s move to the Isle of Portland, Dorset: ‘It has its fair share of oddity’

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