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Battle for the soul of Burnham Market? Locals in the Norfolk village known as 'Chelsea-on-Sea' say they can't afford to buy a house after wealthy ......
Mar 11, 2024
The pharmacy on Market Place in Burnham Market, a pretty, chocolate box village near the north Norfolk coast, closed its doors five years ago.
The business had been part of the local community for almost 200 years, gaining notoriety for selling arsenic to murderesses Frances Billing and Catherine Frary, who killed three people and were hanged at Norwich Castle in 1835.
When the pharmacy's previous owners, Sue and Brian Symonds, passed away in December 2018, their children tried in vain to sell the building, with locals hoping another pharmacist might move in.
But property prices in the tiny village, which has just 724 residents, had shot up, spiralling by 230 per cent in two decades, so – unsurprisingly – no buyer was found. Enraged locals, fed up with the influx of wealthy second-home owners which has led to their village being dubbed 'Chelsea-on-Sea', decided to make their views known, erecting a fake English Heritage blue plaque on the former pharmacy's brick façade.
'The Pharmacy, 1830-2019,' it read. 'Burnham Market: a dying village, poisoned by wealth. Finally dispensed with. RIP.'
Five years later, the ire bubbling behind the Farrow & Ball-hued doors of this picturesque parish has not died down.
Far from it: indeed it's perilously close to boiling point right now.
Not only have house prices spiralled further – in 2022 the average cost of a property was £1,808,700 according to Zoopla (compared to a Norfolk average of £299,087), making this one of the most expensive places in the country to buy a home – but a series of recent developments have cleaved deep divisions in the 17th century village.
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