A few weeks ago on our way to a John Lewis to buy a sofa we noticed a tourist sign on the highway notifying people about the miniature village Bekonscot. So on our return we stopped and had a lot of fun exploring the miniature village and the surrounding town. The history of Bekonscot:

The paths may be narrow and the buildings 77 years old, but Bekonscot remains an intriguing, unique and eccentric folly.  It was the vision of an archetypal English gentleman wanting to create something unlike anything seen before.  Bekonscot is not just remarkable to the millions who have visited and fallen under its whimsical charm, but also the countless thousands who benefit from its fundraising.

Bekonscot began as a hobby for Roland Callingham, a London accountant.  He bought a meadow of several acres next to his home in Beaconsfield in the mid-1920s to expand his garden.  The high society and gentry of London would come to garden parties and tennis games held in the grounds.  In the mid-1920s, he and his head gardener Tom Berry built some model houses as a feature of the alpine garden to the simple scale of one inch to one foot (1:12 scale, now the accepted size for dolls houses worldwide). 

Wikipedia writes:

Bekonscot in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, is the oldest model village in the world.

It portrays aspects of England mostly dating from the 1930s. Bekonscot has been run by the Church Army since 1978 and donates large amounts of money to charity. It has raised the equivalent of £4,000,000 so far and has hosted 14,000,000 visitors.

Bekonscot is acknowledged to be the inspiration for many other model villages and miniature parks across the world, including Babbacombe, Madurodam, and Legoland Windsor. As such, it is regarded as the "grandfather" of the model village and miniature park movement.

What is amazing about this village is the ingenuity and complexity. To engineer a village of this magnitude in the early 1900’s and then to automate it must have been quite the feat. Part way through the town you come across the control center which is fascinating. A few computers now run the system but all around the room are the original controls, levers and systems that were used to automate the village. The best way to describe it is to think of how big mainframes were in the 1970s and how small they are now. You can read more the village on the official website.

I found the sign at the entrance quite interesting, more than 14M visitors!

The history of the village and the ChurchArmy is also interesting. Note, not to be confused with the Salvation Army …

The detail is remarkable. Every few minutes, this house would smoke!

A view over the lake. Note the smoking house in the background.

Bekonberry Castle, even miniature villages in the UK have more than one castle!

And how they love their Guinness. These are WW II signs. I would suggest a minor wording change ‘Guinness provides the perception of strength’.

Good fun. Glad we stopped.