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Published 25th February, 2011
Island life, an hour from London
The approach to Osea Island is a strange mix of the mundane and the surreal. The island is not signposted and having negotiated the ring road of Maldon and a never-ending series of mini-roundabouts, I stop the car to ask a passer-by the way. He stares at us blankly. “Never heard of it.”
Eventually I spot a sign for Osea Island caravan park and turn into a narrow lane lined with mobile homes. I follow the road to the sea wall, where it ends abruptly. There’s a small wooden sign: “Private island, No unauthorised access”. Ahead, a mile-long rocky causeway snakes across the forbidding black mudflats to the island, green and inscrutable. This rudimentary road, built by the Romans, is exposed at low tide for just four hours in every 12. According to the tide timetable I have been sent, our window of opportunity closes in just seven minutes and I can already see the sea water creeping towards the causeway from both directions as redshanks hop about on the seaweed-covered rocks. There’s no time to hesitate, so I wind down the windows, inhale a lungful of sea air and start the bumpy ride across the river bed.
If I were a wealthy music mogul with £6m to spend on a private island, I think it’s fair to say that the Blackwater Estuary is not the first place I’d look. Some far-flung outpost of the Caribbean maybe, a forgotten Mediterranean archipelago, a romantic, windswept corner of Scotland, even. A melancholy tidal marsh in Essex would not be top of the list. But when record producer Nigel Frieda, brother of hairstylist John Frieda, first visited Osea he was captivated by its unspoilt beauty and what he describes as “the romance of discovering a hidden gem, that somehow time had completely passed by”.
In 2000 Frieda bought the 350-hectare isle and it soon became a magnet for aristocrats, rock stars and city high-rollers, who would arrive by helicopter and pay £10,000 a week to stay here. But this was no playground for the rich and famous. Until last year it was home to one of the country’s most exclusive rehab centres, The Causeway Retreat, offering programmes for everything from depression to drug addiction. Just a 20-minute flight from Battersea Heliport (or an hour by train and taxi from Liverpool Street Station), it combined peace and privacy with proximity to London and attracted a string of high-profile “guests” (nobody called them patients) including singer Amy Winehouse, actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Prince William’s Eton schoolmate Nicholas Knatchbull. Following the start of the financial crisis of 2007, burned-out bankers apparently made up 60 per cent of the clients.
It wasn’t the first time the island had been put to such use. In 1903 Frederick Charrington, heir to the Charrington brewing business, conscience-stricken about the ill effects of alcohol on society, joined the temperance movement and opened the world’s first treatment centre for opiate addicts and alcoholics on Osea. It continued until 1917 when the island was requisitioned by the Navy and turned into a secret torpedo manufacturing base.
Mystery has shrouded Osea for much of its history. I have lived in Essex half my life and had no idea of its existence until stories started appearing in the press last year about the Causeway Retreat. The centre closed following an investigation by the Care Quality Commission, the official regulator for healthcare in England, and in November the company that ran the clinic was fined for unlawfully treating patients without a licence.
In the space of just three months the island has undergone a remarkable transformation and was relaunched earlier this month as an upmarket holiday retreat, open to the public for the first time in 100 years.
Having made it across the causeway with minutes to spare, I drive on to the island to be greeted by ... well, nothing. No signs, no fanfare, no reception, no sign of habitation, just a gravel road that I follow with mounting anticipation to a small hamlet of weatherboard cottages surrounded by picket fences and overgrown gardens. There’s an old bicycle propped against a wall and the only sound is that of birdsong.
I don’t know what I expected. Something more slick, more clinical, perhaps. But this looks more like the film set from a period drama than the Betty Ford Clinic. After a couple of minutes, Joanne Day, Osea’s marketing manager, emerges from one of the cottages and takes me to meet Frieda. She says it’s been a frantic rush to get the resort ready but bookings are trickling in, with enquiries from as far afield as Hong Kong.
Dressed in jeans and walking boots, Frieda is softly spoken and, like the island itself, very low-key. Despite his music industry credentials – he founded Matrix Studios and has worked with the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music and Oasis – there is nothing rock ’n’ roll about this place. No hot tubs or walls lined with gold discs. Frieda has added a well-equipped gym and a yoga room but, other than that, Osea looks much as it would have in Charrington’s day.
There are eight cottages to choose from in the village, plus two beach houses and an imposing Edwardian manor house. They are all charming and full of character, from the 17th-century Old Farmhouse, with its wonky floors and huge inglenook fireplace, to the Sweet Shop, a romantic cottage for two with a four-poster bed. But the pièce de resistance is the turreted Manor House, which sleeps 20 and has spectacular river views and its own saltwater swimming pool – and a recording studio, should the urge to cut a record suddenly overcome you. Prices range from £189 for a winter weekend in the Sweet Shop to £6,547 for a week at the Manor House in summer. All the houses have open fires or woodburning stoves and have been kitted out with leather Chesterfields or linen sofas, white wooden shutters, sailing prints, oil paintings, antique furniture and roll-top baths.
There are no shops and no pubs, so guests must bring supplies or hire one of the island’s resident chefs, who can cater for anything from a beach barbecue to a banquet for 100. In the summer there will be a café serving meals in a converted chapel. There’s a “club house”, which is a somewhat grand description for a barn decked out with battered leather armchairs, a pool table, record player and an impressive collection of vinyl LPs, and an adjacent screening room with comfy armchairs.
Frieda takes me on a quick tour, outlining his plans and pointing out some of the island’s secret corners: a Bedouin tent, an overgrown orchard, a tennis court which has seen better days, a ruined seaman’s chapel overlooking the river. There is nothing polished about this place, in fact it’s a little unkempt, but for many this will only add to the magic. Osea has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and is a haven for birds and wildlife, and the only place where all five species of British owl can be found. It has never been commercially farmed and many 18th-century hedgerows and copses are intact. In summer the bushes are laden with berries and Frieda says he hopes guests will feel free to help themselves to fruit from the orchard and to forage in the salt marshes.
But if the simple pleasures of birdwatching and beachcombing start to pale, there’s a long list of activities that can be pre-arranged, from sailing the estuary in historic Thames barges to fishing. This is oyster-farming territory, and the island of Mersea, famed for its seafood restaurants, is a 20-minute boat ride away. There are also plans to run retreats for yoga, art, creative writing and cookery. Hire the whole island and you can do pretty much whatever you want, within reason. But mostly, Frieda hopes people will come here to unwind. “I used to arrive here on a Friday evening, completely stressed out,” he says. “By Sunday night I felt like I’d been here a fortnight. Time seems to elongate here.”
It’s not every day you discover a secret island where time seems to have stood still. But to find such a place within an hour’s commute of London is a rare thing. I stay that night in one of the beach houses, a beautifully light space with views of the river at the front and a huge lawn at the back where rabbits hop around. In the evening I walk to the pebbly beach and disturb a flock of Brent geese, which fly away, honking. As they disappear, a deep silence settles. And though I can see the lights of the mainland twinkling across the water, the real world feels much further away.
Below is a copy of the article written By Joanne O’Connor and featured in the Financial Times 'Travel' section.
To read the article, as published on The Financial Times website, click here.
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