Belle Tout lighthouse

Belle Tout lighthouse stands on the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head in East Sussex, a decommissioned granite tower built to warn ships away from the treacherous rocks. It was designed by Thomas Stevenson in the 1820s and first lit in 1834 with thirty oil lamps. The light was later upgraded to eighteen Douglass burners, flashing every fifteen seconds. After only seventy-four years the lighthouse was abandoned when a lower Beachy Head tower took over the work. The empty building passed through private hands, was damaged by wartime shelling, and restored in the 1950s. Its fame grew when the BBC filmed The Life and Loves of a She-Devil there in 1986, followed by a James Bond appearance the next year. The revolving lantern room became a television studio for Changing Rooms, redesigned by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. A rock band wrote a song called Belle Tout, and the site starred in the film B Monkey. By 1999 the cliff edge had crept within metres of the foundations, so engineers moved the entire 850-tonne building seventeen metres inland on greased steel beams. Visitors now find a six-bedroom guest house with high whitewashed walls and a walled garden facing the English Channel. The lantern room remains a circular sitting area with panoramic views over the sea and the South Downs. The old oil-store cellar serves breakfast, and the restored cottage next door houses a sitting room with deep window seats. A faint railway trace from the Second World War still winds across the hillside below. The lighthouse stands secure, ready to welcome guests who come for the light, the history and the view.