Hello, I'm Simon Garfield, the author of In Miniature and I'm here at Bekonscot
model village with Tim Dunn who is an expert on the place. It was the obvious
choice when I was doing my book I thought okay so I have a little bit of an intro
and then where do we really start, we start at Bekonscot! Because, you
know that's where my first experience of any model village, and probably any
involved miniature experience. The great thing about this is
you are involved with it, it's not just a case of having a bit of Lego in your room
but you are walking around and you're pointing things out and the things that
all I always love are the terrible, you're probably responsible for some of
these, puns. So we walked by Watersmith bookshop.
Watersmith bookshop is a new one. We've gone past Traders of the Lost Art, the local paint shop.
Grocer, Chris P. Lettis
We've got the fishmonger, I. C. Bownes.
And my favourite the butcher, the pairing of the butchers Sam and Ella.
It get's worse, those are the highlights! So we can see
here, I mean all sorts of stuff and it's sort of the 1930s but it's roughly the
1930s and it's sort of how I suppose we'd like our own world be
really. Populated by nice people there's stuff going on all the time. It always
looks like it's happening all at once. It's a moment in time, absolutely frozen in time.
But a fake moment. This is an England that never really existed, never really will.
It's imagined, it's a series of little cameos of stuff going on in a
kind of a Famous Five kind of way. - But it appeals to me because a) there's so much
happening all the time b) you get an idea of where everything is in relation
to each other. That's what I always love about miniature things, you feel that
the scale gives you an insight. That's what I was trying to say in my book, throughout
the book really, that it gives you, by looking from something from on high you
see it as nothing before. So if you're standing at a church door, real
church, you can't possibly get an idea of what it's like at the back at the same
time and where it lies in the landscape. Here obviously you can and that works
beautifully but also that you kind of think I'd like to live in a place a bit like this.
A bit like this but not quite!
There's an element that sort of thinks maybe it's a bit too clean but then you
look closer and you see maybe at the pub there is a bit of an argument going on
you know and the police are chasing someone across the field.
The other thing I find interesting here is that this is an inspiration to
so many other model villages that came afterwards and model worlds. So I went
when I was researching the book I went to Miniatur Wunderland in
Hamburg where my dad was born and that's the biggest model railway in
the world. Ten miles of track, I mean obviously it's not in a line it goes all
over. And that obviously is, they are building the whole world. They thought
okay we'll do Germany and the they thought they''l get bored of the railway
so then they went to America, then they went elsewhere. They
haven't built the UK yet.
That's what happens with these miniaturists, they start on something and they can never stop
you know it becomes this crazy obsession and I speak as one.
Bekonscot started out as a couple of Swiss cottages around the side
of a lake, it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, open to the public and
somewhat ninety years later or there abouts we're looking at seven miniature
towns, a staff about 15 full-time people, and raising money for charities.
I know you have a theory that a lot of modelling in general
and model villages it sort of born out of frustration, wanting to make
the world right. I always think coming here there's a slight
undercurrent of there's something going on, there's a lot of twitching behind the net curtains
You see Midsomer Murders, you know, this is Midsomer
territory, we're in Midsomer territory here.
An episode was filmed here of Midsomer Murders and just up the road
here in the model village there's actually a white dead person's body
marked out where the murder was actually had. And they killed the person in the
Gulliver style in a model village story.
It's the only way to go in my opinion I think.