Fury over plans to turn Enid Blyton’s favourite hotel into an ‘eyesore’ holiday resort

It was the rural bolthole which inspired Enid Blyton to create her timeless Famous Five stories. 

And now campaigners are showing the same pluck as her young adventurers as they fight to stop the author’s favourite hotel from being turned into an ‘eyesore’ holiday resort.

Blyton stayed at Knoll House Hotel four or five times a year during the 1950s and 1960s, always in Room 40. There, the views over the rugged Dorset coastline inspired some of her most famous works.

Five On A Treasure Island, the first of 21 books in the series, features a ruined castle based on nearby Corfe Castle, and Whispering Island in Five Have A Mystery To Solve is thought to have been modelled on the local Brownsea Island.

Knoll House is now owned by Kingfisher Resorts, which wants to turn it into a spa resort by building 25 villas and three apartment blocks of 38 flats in the grounds. 

Among those fighting the plans is local councillor Peter Bowyer, who said the resort would ‘destroy for ever the attraction of the area’. 

And retired engineer Andrew Parsons said proposed new construction ‘cannot, by any generous stretch of the imagination, have derived any inspiration or reference from its surroundings. It would, however, be quite at home in communist-era Poland or some of the Brutalist buildings in Tower Hamlets.’

The Famous Five were not Blyton’s only creations to have roots in the area. Christopher Rone, a former policeman in the nearby village of Studland, is rumoured to have been the inspiration for PC Plod in the Noddy books, and a balding guest at the hotel provided the basis for Bill Smugs in The Adventure Series.

Knoll House was built as a summer residence for an aristocratic family in the early 1900s. It became a hotel in 1931, attracting guests including Sir Winston Churchill, Roald Dahl and Vivien Leigh. 

Two years ago it was sold by the children of Kenneth and Pauline Ferguson, who had owned it since 1959, to Kingfisher Resorts.

Knoll House is now owned by Kingfisher Resorts, which wants to turn it into a spa resort by building 25 villas and three apartment blocks of 38 flats in the grounds. A stock photo of the current hotel is pictured above [File photo]

The company says the hotel needs modernising and that the new proposed buildings would ‘sit below the ground level of the main hotel’.

Kingfisher also argues that 87 per cent of neighbours say that the proposals present a good opportunity to safeguard the future of the hotel.

But the National Trust, the Campaign To Protect Rural England and the are RSPB are among those organisations which have issues with the plans.

Richard Brown, landscape planning officer of the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership, said: ‘The result of the proposal would be an undue adverse effect on the character of the site and the wider designated landscape.’ 

However, Kingfisher Resorts insisted: ‘We will respect the character and charm of Knoll House while injecting a modern, luxury feel, so that guests and the community can enjoy the hotel well into the future.’