A ‘fairytale house’, buried beneath wilderness for 40 years, has suddenly emerged from its slumbers on a suburban road.
Before it sold last year at auction, the three-bedroomed detached property with a 250-yard back garden was invisible to anyone walking down the road in Gedling, Nottinghamshire.
It was rumoured to have been ‘abandoned’ but was in fact home to a world famous beekeeper, David Kemp.
He lived in the property from 1974 until shortly before his death in February 2022 and turned it into a paradise for wildlife.
He would occasionally emerge from his wild habitat wearing an immaculate suit and often a dickie bow and head off to inspect bees, give talks to local groups and even make a radio series about bees for the BBC.
Locals were stunned when a fairytale home belonging to David Kemp emerged from behind heavy shrubbery in Gedling, Nottinghamshire
The shrubbery covered the house and has since been cut away revealing the period features of the red brick home.
Before and after pictures show how the home was covered in bushes (left) before they were cut away by its new owner (right)
The house was rumoured to have been ‘abandoned’ but was in fact home to a world famous beekeeper, David Kemp (pictured)
But for many locals his home, which sold at auction for £455,000, simply didn’t exist.
Dog walker Cheryl Wood, 57, had stopped to take a picture: ‘I have been coming down this road for 47 years and can’t ever remember seeing this house. It was just trees and overgrowth.’
Lynda Glover, 71, who lived next door to David for 22 years, said she missed her ‘unique neighbour’.
‘He just turned it over to wildlife,’ she said. ‘We set up a camera in our garden to capture it all. It was incredible – foxes raising their cubs in his broken down shed, deer, badgers and an owl that lived in a grand old oak tree and hooted every evening.
‘Our dog Willow, a Jack Russell cross, would go through the fence sometimes and hang out with the foxes.
‘He was a lovely chap and always very well dressed in a suit. It is a real shame to see it all go. David would be upset but it’s inevitable.’
Now neighbours are unsure of what will happen next.
The last two months have seen dozens of trees cut down, the house exposed to the road and lots of rumours.
‘We’ve heard they are going to knock it down and build one big house and we’ve heard they are planning on several bungalows. It shouldn’t be that because we are on greenbelt.’
When potential buyers got a look at the property they found a tree growing out of the attic, a fireplace, stained glass windows, several pairs of old shoes and a copy of the Daily Express from 1983.
An aerial view reveals the drastic work underway to clear the land around the property
The home was almost completely hidden to locals in Gedling before the work
Neighbour Alison Cooper (pictured), 68, described Mr Kemp as a ‘lovely bloke’
The garden, now without its shed or its many beehives, remains a mess with honey jars all over the ground and an old barrel of Woodpecker cider.
Other neighbours have mixed feelings about what will happen next.
Software engineer Jeff Lofts, 55, said: ‘I would not want lots of houses down there. It has been a wild space and it was nice to have wildlife so close.’
Craig Howkins, 36, a commercial manager, added: ‘I used to wonder how anyone could live there. It was covered in ivy from head to toe but when you saw him he was always very smart.
‘I would see him sitting in his white van with a suit on. He was certainly one of a kind.
‘I think it is good for the area to keep developing. If they are looking to build one of those grand design homes it might add value to the area.’
Another neighbour, aged 80, who asked not to be named, said: ‘He once came to my WI (Women’s Institute) group to do a talk on bees and he came in a dickie bow.
‘He was very well turned out and it was hard to believe he’d walked out of that house. You simply could not see it.
‘We once had thousands of bees in our garden and my late husband went to ask him about it and he just said, ‘That’s what they do…they move around’.
Alison Cooper, 68, said: ‘He was a lovely bloke, really nice. We had a nest of bees in our front garden once and he came over in his bee keeping outfit and smoked them out and put them in his hive.
‘The only downside was you couldn’t hang your washing out because his bees would fly over and drop yellow pollen on everything.
‘His front garden had so much holly growing in it that people would stop their cars at Christmas time and pick some.
‘Over the last two months people have kept turning up and more would disappear and now we can see into the valley.
An aerial view shows the thick shrubby still covers almost all of the home
Mr Kemp lived in the property (pictured) from 1974 until shortly before his death in February 2022 and turned it into a paradise for wildlife
‘No-one knows what they will do with it next.’
Another local, also a housebuilder, said: ‘We’ve been here for 30 years now and it was like living in a time warp really.
‘The bees were something of a problem, especially if you had a white car – they would drop that much poop.
‘David moved out towards the end of his life but his nephew would bring him back to sit in the front garden. He loved it here. He was one unique neighbour.’
David was a regional bee inspector for several decades, originally employed by the Ministry of Agriculture and was the leading figure in the Nottinghamshire Beekeepers’ Association.
As a young man, he spent a decade tending the bees at Buckfast Abbey, a monastery in Cornwall, before moving back to his native Nottinghamshire.
Author Steve Donohoe, who wrote an obituary about David, said: ‘I spent a lovely afternoon with David in the summer of 2017 at one of his favourite pubs in Kelham, Nottinghamshire.
‘He was an incredible character with an endless supply of stories, laughter and enthusiasm for life and wildlife.’