Talking Location With… Caroline McGhie: NORTH NORFOLK

1st October 2025

#TalkingLocationWith … Caroline McGhie, author of The Sitter: North Norfolk.

I was greatly moved one day when I was driving through Melton Constable, a down-at-heel village near my home in North Norfolk. I was struck by how unlike other villages in East Anglia it was. Where were the picturesque flint cottages with front doors turned away from the winds blowing off the North Sea? I was surrounded instead by tiny brick terraced houses that would be more at home in Sheffield or Grantham. Vast disused warehouses lurked behind them and a tangible sense of loss hung in the air. I discovered it had been built solely to serve an enormous railway hub called The Works which had closed in the 1930s. I seemed to have stumbled on a forgotten railway village.

I was like Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling into a rabbit hole. How could I find out more about this extraordinary place? I met an old lady called Phyllis Youngman who was the self-appointed keeper of memories for the area. When the railway itself shut down in 1959 she gathered all the memorabilia she could lay her hands on, from old photographs and documents to whole railway carriages. She shared her collection with me and one evening she invited descendants of the railway families to come and tell me the stories their parents and grandparents had passed down to them. I had found a wonderland to set my novel in.

Melton Constable then, Briston Road

I re-imagined it as Swanton Stoke and turned the clock back to 1900-1901. I invented a superintendent, a manager, upholsterers, trimmers, clerks, coal shovellers, engine drivers, a gang of boys, a tramp, a mysterious newcomer and started the trains running again. I could see it as it once was with gas lamps glowing in the streets, sounds of men scraping and clanging, the blowing of whistles, hissing of steam and roar of engines.

Narrow house in Melton Constable where Jack Stamp might have lived

The inhabitants of these narrow houses, with indoor lavatories on one side of the main road and outdoor lavatories on the other, bought their bread from the local baker off his cart each morning. Their lives were ruled by the coming and going of the trains, railway hierarchy and Methodism but also the constant presence of class and empire. The more I looked into it, the more other-worldly the place became.

In the background lay the rest of North Norfolk, a monumental storybook landscape of huge skies, marshes, dunes and windmills. In the clifftop town of Cromer, which I re-named Highcliff, I found the hard lives of the fishermen who doubled as lifeboatmen (none of whom could swim). The town was turning from a remote fishing settlement into a popular holiday resort so I could have fun with bathing machines and the opening of the new seaside pier.

My two main characters Jack Stamp and Rosie Etherington, are to some extent outsiders. Jack Stamp, the baker’s son in Swanton Stoke, developed a crush on Rosie when she arrived broken-hearted from London after a relationship with a well-known cartoonist. Jack didn’t feel part of the railway community because he knew he would always be a baker’s boy, never an engine driver.  Jack and Rosie’s viewpoints allowed me a sharper look at the locations I had chosen. Jack brought a sense of wonder and humour. Rosie brought new ideas about art, science and morality that she had picked up in London, intimations of the seismic changes in society that would develop in the 20^thcentury.

Stafford Terrace interior

Where would I find locations full of these ideas in London? I visited Linley Sambourne House at 18 Stafford Terrace in Kensington and instantly wanted my seducer cartoonist to live there. Every room was a riot of wallpapers, paintings, friezes, stained-glass windows, all competing for attention with the furniture, vases, clocks and ornaments. Like my cartoonist, Sambourne took an interest in early photographic pornography. By virtue of his job he too was interested in art and the goings-on between artists and their models.

When I was a student at London University, I had an Easter job selling ice-creams at London Zoo so I knew it well. Back in 1900 it was pioneering in its approach to the animal kingdom, new species such as the okapi were being brought back from around the empire, new methods of animal care were being tried out. I saw it could be a kind of Eden for Rosie and the cartoonist to wander in, free from society’s strictures, surrounded by animal nakedness. The head keeper summed up his novel approach. “It is a wonder. In any other age we would have persecuted these creatures. But in this time of new and great ideas, in this new century, we have decided to keep them for pleasure and for study.”

Back in North Norfolk, Jack’s Letts diary told him that experts were busy classifying animals according to class, order, genus, species and variety and he couldn’t help noticing that humans were prone to do the same to each other. “Here in Swanton Stoke I am of the big group called railway people, but I am also of the very small sub-group baker’s son.”

Caroline McGhie is a multi-award-winning journalist who has written for The Sunday Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, and was part of the launch team for The Independent on Sunday. She has written columns for The Financial Times, The Standard and Country Living.

The Sitter by Caroline McGhie (Waterland Books, £12.99) is available from TripFiction and all good book retailers. 

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