Lilliput, Dorset

Lilliput is a district of Poole, Dorset. It borders on Sandbanks, Canford Cliffs, Lower Parkstone, and Whitecliff and has a shoreline within Poole Harbour with views of Brownsea Island and the Purbeck Hills. Brownsea Island stands opposite Lilliput's harbour foreshore and is famous as the birthplace of Baden Powell's International Scouting Movement. Lilliput itself was host to a number of early scouting camps. During the second world war at one stage it provided Britain's only civilian air route: Poole Harbour was temporary home to the Imperial Airways/BOAC flying boat fleet, which had its passenger HQ at Salterns.

Well known residents have included modernist writer Mary Butts, a very young John le Carre and disc-jockey Tony Blackburn. Impresario Fred Karno who popularised the custard-pie-in-the-face comedy routine spent his last years in the village as a part-owner of an off-licence, bought with financial help from Charlie Chaplin, and died here in 1941 aged 75.

Mary Butts wrote about the local landscape and her childhood in one of the old mansions at the turn of the twentieth century in her autobiography The Crystal Cabinet - My Childhood at Salterns (1937). Her great grandfather had been a principal patron of the English romantic poet and artist William Blake, and her Lilliput home housed a large collection of Blake paintings (now in Tate Britain). The autobiography was named after one of Blake's poems. She adored the area and was critical of the kind of development then taking place in Lilliput and Poole-Parkstone-Bournemouth which she thought soulless, and far from the 'garden city' it could be. Aside from an enclave behind Evening Hill, a local beauty spot with panoramic views over Poole Harbour, modern development started in the later 1920s as more of the older estates were sold for suburban projects. A number of distinctive art-deco homes were built, including the landmark Salterns Court building at the new shopping parade.

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