The BBC’s second adaptation of E. F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia books is being produced in the streets of Rye through the summer. Whole streets have been been given a 1930 make-over and turned into film sets. E. F. Benson was Mayor of Rye for three years from 1934. He wrote the Mapp & Lucia stories while living in Lamb House and made Rye the template for the town of ‘Tilling’. The first series, first screened in 1984, was an outstanding success. Let us hope that the amazing efforts of those involved in creating this series, and the people and businesses of Rye, some of whom were very inconvenienced during the production, will be rewarded by a set of programmes to equal those produced in 1984. E. F. Benson lived in Rye until his death in February 1940. He died just five months before his beloved ‘Garden Room’, where he wrote many of the Mapp & Lucia stories, was destroyed by German Bombs on 18 July 1940.
From the August 2013 issue of “Rye’s Own”
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