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Jonathan Creek (Click for Jonathan Creek Gallery)
Shipley Windmill is the fictional home of the hero of the BBC Television series Jonathan Creek.
The BBC filmed parts of 22 episodes at the mill.
The star of Jonathan Creek is comedian Alan Davies, who plays the eccentric inventor and sleuth, with Caroline Quentin and Julia Sawalha as his reporter sidekicks.
When the BBC comes to film they bring with them a team of around 40 people, with a fleet of vehicles; catering wagons, wardrobe, dressing rooms, toilets and generators, plus a vast quantity of equipment.
The mill is dressed both inside and out to fit the story-line.
The Meal Floor becomes Jonathan Creek's study, with plum-coloured walls and a matchboarded dado, and is filled with furniture and properties so that little of the mill can be seen.
The ground floor is turned into his kitchen, with pine dresser, sink unit, cooker and washing machine, with a farmhouse table in the centre.
While the first floor becomes his bedroom, with a double bed flanked with Egyptian-style pillars.
Outside the mill is surrounded with foliage and other assorted properties, while scaffolding springs up and camera cranes swing about.
Shipley Windmill has also appeared in a number of other television programmes.
It doubled as Wimbledon Windmill in the comedy drama The Wimbledon Poisoner, and has featured in a number of programmes about the countryside. Hilaire Belloc
Hilaire Belloc, the writer, poet politician and historian was born in France in 1870. His father was a lawyer and his mother was of Anglo-Irish descent.
After the death of his father, his mother moved to Slindon in Sussex, and sent her son to the Oratory school. From there he went to Balliol College, Oxford, gaining a first in history.
In 1896 he married an Irish-American girl, Elodie Hogan, and he become a naturalised Englishman in 1902.
In 1905, he and Elodie bicycled to Shipley, and found the house, Kings Land. They decided at once to buy it, together with the mill cottage, the windmill and five acres of land.
(See History of Shipley Mill)
The Bellocs moved into the house in 1906, and Hilaire lived there until his death in 1953, about 40 years after his wife.
Belloc served in Parliament as a Liberal MP for 4 years, from 1906 to 1910, when he resigned, disillusioned with politics. During his lifetime he wrote nearly 150 books, ranging from historical biographies to The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Cautionary Tales for Children.
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