From Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, 13 April, 1935.

THIS HOUSE SPOILT THE VIEW.

So it is being pulled down.

THREE years ago a house of substantial proportions was built at Hawkinge: on Friday last week men started to pull it down.

It is a bid “to preserve a bit of the real England” by Mr. and Mrs. H. D. S. Leake, of Maypole Farm. Hawkinge.

They have bought the house for the sole purpose of having it demolished!

Mr. and Mrs. Leake came to live at Maypole Farm three years ago. They discovered that the Elizabethan farmhouse had formerly been a smugglers’ inn and that under wallpaper and matchboardlng there were heavy beams, wide, open fireplaces and old staircases

MELLOWED BRICKS.

They had the house entirely restored and purchased an old house in another part of the country, bringing the mellowed bricks and tiles to Hawkinge to build additional wings to Maypole Farm, doubling the number of rooms.

They installed central heating and electric light, and had water laid on, they turned the cowsheds into a garage, a dog-kennel and a summer house and, with the bricks left over from the other house they had bought, built a small house on the opposite side of the road.

At the back of the house the fields have been turned into smooth lawns.

In front there is a garden complete with a pond and on the opposite side of the road there is a large stretch of land which Mrs. Leake has had planted with trees and wild flowers. At the village end of the house there is a field planted with daffodils and trees. On all three of these sides the horizon is bounded by trees.

Soon after Mr. and Mrs. Leake had purchased Maypole Farm, a house was built just up the road, between Maypole Farm and the equally ancient Maypole Cottage which Mr. and Mrs. Leake have since purchased.

The new house was quite an ordinary house, by modern standards. Square, straight, high, with a plain roof, a red brick front and cream sides it would probably accommodate quite a large family in comfort.

But it does not fit in with the surroundings created by Mr. and Mrs Leake. So they have bought it, and under their instructions it is being demolished.

That house has spoilt the view for three years," Mrs. Leake told me when she showed me over Maypole Farm, writes a "Folkestone Herald" reporter.

She took me out into the road just below her house and pointed up the road towards Maypole Cottage.

“Isn’t that a bit of old England- If you can cut out that other house?" she said.

"If you want to build in the country, buy up an old house and use the old bricks and tiles, it’s no more expensive. Country houses are being sold now because people cannot afford to keep them going.”
"That’s not a selfish garden,” she added, referring to her plantation of trees and wild flowers, “anyone can come along and enjoy looking at them.”