Bekonscot — miniature park
Image by stgeorgemr from Pixabay

Bekonscot

  • 2 min read
  • 51.614° N 0.645° W

Interesting facts

  • Guinness World Records recognises Bekonscot as the oldest continuously operating miniature world, dating its opening to 9 August 1929.
  • The name joins Beaconsfield and Ascot, two places where founder Roland Callingham had lived.
  • As the story goes, it all began when Callingham's wife told him that either his indoor model railway left the house or she would.
  • Callingham, a London accountant, started by setting model houses around the swimming pool of his Beaconsfield garden.
  • The first garden line was about 1,200 feet long; today's almost ten scale miles of track amount to roughly 400 metres in real life.
  • Its miniature residents stand only about 10 centimetres tall, and the whole model world fits into roughly 0.8 hectares.
  • Bekonscot is said to have inspired Mary Norton's The Borrowers Aloft, in which the tiny family is held captive in a model village.
  • Will Self used Bekonscot in his short story Scale, and National Geographic praised its flawless little buildings as early as 1937.

Why it is worth it

Bekonscot is a whole miniature England frozen somewhere around the 1930s, laid out in a garden in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. It opened to the public in 1929 and claims the title of the oldest original model village in the world. Everything is built to one inch to the foot, so an adult walks among church spires and thatched roofs at knee height, looking down into gardens, market squares and railway cuttings as if from a low-flying aircraft.

The village began as the private hobby of Roland Callingham, who built a garden railway and then kept adding a world for it to run through, helped by W. A. Berry. Instead of one settlement there are several invented ones, each with its own character: Bekonscot itself, Evenlode with its new town and colliery, Epwood, Greenhaily, Hanton, Southpool and the seaside Splashyng. Hunt for the small comedies and details: a cricket match in progress, pubs, windmills, a zoo, a cathedral, a castle, an airfield and a cable car, plus a miniature of the modernist house High and Over. The planting matters as much as the buildings, with thousands of dwarf shrubs and trees clipped to scale.

The gauge 1 electric railway is the thread that ties it all together: close to ten scale miles of track and a dozen stations, with trains moving through the landscape all day. A larger ride-on line of 7¼-inch gauge was added in 2001. The novelist Enid Blyton lived in Beaconsfield, knew Callingham and set her story The Enchanted Village here; a model of her house, Green Hedges, joined the village in 1997.

Part of Bekonscot's charm is its long history as a place of pilgrimage. The future Queen Elizabeth II came on her eighth birthday in 1934, and by 2020 more than 14 million visitors had passed through. From the start the takings went to good causes: the village is run by a charitable foundation named after its founder and has given away more than £21 million.

Getting there

Bekonscot is on Warwick Road in Beaconsfield, about 6 km from Amersham. The nearest major airport is London Heathrow (LHR), roughly 20 km away. Chiltern Railways trains from London Marylebone reach Beaconsfield in about 40 minutes, and the village is a short walk from the station; drivers can use the free car park at the church across the road.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in England 93The Most Beautiful Places in the United Kingdom 154The Most Remarkable Miniature Parks 5The Most Curious Places in the United Kingdom 7The Most Curious Places 38

From the encyclopaedia

Bekonscot Model Village and Railway is a model village built in the 1920s in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, UK at a scale of one inch to one foot. It portrays aspects of England mostly dating from the 1930s and contains several fictitious villages featuring replicas of notable local buildings. The model railway has almost 10 scale miles of tracks and in 2001, a 7 1/4 in gauge railway was opened to transport visitors. Bekonscot has become both a popular tourist location and a part of English culture. It is commonly referred to as the oldest surviving model village in the UK and by 2020, had received over 14 million visitors. Authors such as Enid Blyton, Mary Norton and Will Self have been inspired by the village.

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