How Sandbanks became England’s most unlikely millionaire playground
Monte Carlo, Palm Beach, Basel and Sandbanks. A 0.39 square mile peninsula crossing the mouth of Poole Harbour where the average property price last year was £1.25 million, making it the fourth most expensive place to live in the world.
While the rest of the UK frets about house prices and interest rates, Sandbanks stands firm. It appears the wise man really does build his house upon the sand.
Squinting through the winter sun you can understand why it’s been hailed as Britain’s answer to Miami. The sand is white, the sea and sky beatifically blue and the houses, big and brash with glass.
Glance left or right, however, and the setting is unmistakably British. Men and women in warm parkas and Dryrobes march wind-beaten cockapoos along the beach. A woolly-hatted fisherman out on the rocks checks his lines for plaice.
The most expensive property was sold here for £13.5 million last March, but you can park up and enjoy the views all day for a modest £3.50. That anyone can enjoy a bit of Sandbanks is all part of the charm of Britain’s most exclusive postcode.
Far off in the distance are the chalky stacks of Old Harry’s Rocks. It is Harry Redknapp, though, who has become most associated with this unlikely millionaires’ playground. The former football manager was one of the famous residents, until, fed up of being ogled at through his beachfront windows, he retreated to the nearby Canford Cliffs.
“You often see him walking along here,” says a lady out with her cockapoo. “He’s just like anyone else. He’s really nice.”
Liam Gallagher, Rick Stein, Karl Pilkington and Graham Souness are all said to own properties in the area. So how did a wilderness of sand dunes at risk of washing away become the red-hot lobster pot of celebrity it is today?
Formed by sand washed up into vast piles 100ft high by the changing tides, in the late Victorian era Sandbanks was largely deserted. First came a wooden lifeboat hut in 1870. The Haven Hotel followed in 1880. Lord Wimborne, who owned Sandbanks as part of his Canford Estate, realised that without proper groynes and defences, the area would eventually wash away, and so he sold the land to the Poole Harbour Commission with the clause that they had to invest in the coastal protection needed.
As a result, 40 plots of land were auctioned off to pay for it, with the then Mayor of Poole protesting it would ruin the town. Sandbanks was open for business. A road went in after the First World War and over time the wild dunes were tamed and squashed under (mostly holiday) homes. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Palm Beach hype began in earnest.
Arrive by train today into nearby Poole and you’ll feel a little disappointed by the lack of glamour, unless 1960s shopping centres and concrete flyovers are your thing. It may be a hop, skip and jump across the water to the nature reserves of the Isle of Purbeck, but on this side of the bay it’s humans that dominate.
The intensity builds along the four-mile drive to Sandbanks as remodelled homes flash by with increased frequency. Locals have long grown used to old properties being bought, demolished and replaced.
The result is a curious architectural hodge-podge.
“There’s an awful lot of very contemporary properties, but then there’s a lot of New England chalet-style ones, too. Then you’ll get a Georgian one with small pane windows, so there is a lack of consistency,” says a resident of nearby Canford Sands. “Is that good?” she asks rhetorically.
“In some eyes it might be, I’m sure the King wouldn’t think so,” she laughs.
Poundbury, 28 miles to the west of Dorset, Sandbanks isn’t. But then, isn’t an English man’s home his castle? “Or one of their castles,” the lady corrects.
In some ways it remains unshowy. There is no boulevard of boutiques, no Chanel or Gucci. The only food shop is a Tesco Express at the Poole end of Sandbanks Road. The Jazz Café, on sale for £7 million currently, wouldn’t be out of place in Skegness. On Banks Road, a Rick Stein restaurant offers upmarket seafood with views over Poole Harbour. Two doors down ‘Caff’ serves up egg and bacon butties to walkers, and there is, of course, an estate agent.
A lady in her 60s is scrutinising the window.
“I always like to look when I come to Sandbanks,” says the Poole resident. “Especially at whether prices are stalling – that seems not to be the case.”
We both stand and point incredulously at the properties on offer. A six-bedroom early 20th-century mansion on the waterfront advertised as a ‘modernisation project, renovation or rebuild (STTP)’. There’s an apartment for £2.25 million which seems a bit steep. “And you don’t even get a garage,” the lady points out. Although you do get a communal gym, sauna and games room.
“Where on earth do the cleaners and gardeners all live and travel from?”
Three doors down, Rumsey of Sandbanks Holiday Homes are helping second home owners with these very quandaries. Rumsey has 140 holiday homes on Sandbanks and up to Canford Cliffs, all within a mile radius. “Most of them are people’s second homes. We look after it. We will maintain and manage it for them while they’re not here,” says Charlotte Harrison, a managing director at Rumsey.
The second home fever that Covid inadvertently set in motion has only pushed prices higher, although some have since fallen foul of steeper mortgage rates, adds Harrison. “There’s never a slump because people on Sandbanks dig their heels in and hold until the prices go back up again.”
Tellingly, Harrison points out that the same company that has just bought Rumsey, Toad Hall Cottages, has another holiday home company down in Salcombe, that other sky-high second home hotspot.
I wouldn’t recognise the quiet Sandbanks of January with that of the summer, says Harrison. “The traffic can be so bad that I can’t get down to Tesco for milk. I’ve had to cancel dinners with friends because I can’t get off Sandbanks. And then it’s like this in the winter,” she says pointing to the serene vista outside.
On the snaking Panorama Road, a widow in her 70s is walking to the Caff. She and her husband grew up in the Poole area but moved to Sandbanks 12 years ago. Now she’s alone in a “little, old town house”.
“My parents’ generation built tiny bungalows,” she says. “What changed was when one estate agent decided to make this the place in the south of England.”
The prevalence of second home owners doesn’t bother her. “My father-in-law always said the pipes would never cope if everyone who owned a home came down on the same weekend,” she smiles.
Even now she says it’s like living in a village. “It’s very easy and friendly. Not like Monte Carlo at all. I went there a few years ago and I thought ‘this is revolting’.”
And yet, what quaint seaside charm that remains is slowly being erased. Modern mansions are jammed together like fresh sardines. The effect is often amusing; arts-and-crafts hemmed in by modernist styles. You could conceivably cheers your neighbour without leaving your own balcony. Such harmony doesn’t make the headlines however.
Last November, celebrity interior designer Celia Sawyer, the star of Channel 4’s Four Rooms, accused her neighbour of breaching planning rules with his new balcony, after he demolished a £2 million bungalow and replaced it with a modern three-storey house. Sawyer said his new balcony had left her feeling uncomfortable wearing a bikini in her garden.
The tide might finally be turning on the such unfettered building work on Sandbanks.
The city head-hunting tycoon Tom Glanfield who bought the aforementioned £13.5 million property, a rundown Edwardian cottage, has been refused planning permission to demolish and rebuild. Local council officials said the property, which lies in a conservation area, has been nominated for inclusion on the local heritage list, giving it the status of a non-designated heritage asset (NDHA). Meanwhile, a community group is fighting to stop the site of the historic Haven Hotel from being developed and ‘lost forever’.
For some locals, it is too little too late. Mark Ellis, 56, has fished off the beach at Sandbanks his whole life.
“When you sit and look out to sea, you can understand why a lot of people want to live around here.”
But he’s not sure what anybody visiting would find historically to interest them. “They’ve actively tried to turn it into the ‘St Tropez of the UK’ but what they’ve done is kill the history of Sandbanks. There’s nothing really left of it here now.”
