The extraordinary story of a woman who moved her home brick by brick 100 miles away to the seaside is being made into a film.
May Savidge started the ultimate DIY project when her historic home, Ware Hall in Ware, Hertfordshire, built in about 1450, came under threat of demolition. In 1969, the council wanted to get rid of the Elizabethan home to make way for a new roundabout - with bulldozers even making it to her front gate.
But determined May, then 58, refused to let them destroy her home and instead transported the 15th century house, brick by brick to a plot of land she’d bought in Wells-next-the-Sea, in Norfolk. It took her a year to dismantle her home and 11 lorry trips to Norfolk after she had numbered all the beams and windows like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
May, who had an engineering background, then lived in an old caravan with her dog, as she started rebuilding it like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
“I just won't have such a marvellous old house bulldozed into the ground,' she said at the time of her mission.”'I've got nothing to do all day, so I might as well do the job myself.” About her work, including erecting her own scaffolding, she told one visiting TV crew: “You certainly sleep at the end of the day.”
The retired draughts woman moved into her uncompleted home, around the age of 67. Strangers sent money to help her - and many became life-long friends. 'Yours is the spirit that once made Britain great,' wrote one.
When she died in 1993, she left the house to her niece, Christine Adams. The house was still not completed at the time, but Ms Adams spent 15 years putting it back together and is still finding work to do, to finish her aunt's project. She wrote about her aunt’s remarkable efforts to save her home and the story is currently being adapted into a film by director Gillies MacKinnon based on the book.