Burnham-on-Sea High Lighthouse, PC: Wikipedia
Sources differ slightly on its height, with figures ranging from about 30 metres to 33 metres, so it is safest to describe the tower as around 110 feet tall. In 1996, it was put up for auction, where it failed to reach its reserve. When the lighthouse was marketed for sale in 2018, Country Life reported that it was being operated as a holiday let with an occupancy rate of around 90 per cent and an annual income of about £50,000. Those figures belong specifically to the 2018 property listing and should not be treated as current earnings. The property was listed for £575,000 by Country Life, while other contemporary reporting gave a guide price of £525,000.
Standing on Berrow Road in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, Burnham High Lighthouse looks more like a giant white chimney than a house. Built for Trinity House in the 1830s, the circular brick tower was designed by Joseph Nelson to work alongside Burnham’s Low Lighthouse and guide ships through the shifting waters of the Bristol Channel. By the 1990s, its working life was coming to an end. The lighthouse was deactivated and sold by Trinity House, eventually passing to a member of the Rothschild family. Patrick O’Hagan, then a young television journalist who had been sent to cover the sale, became interested enough to investigate the building himself. He eventually bought it and began the much more difficult task of turning a former lighthouse into a home. O’Hagan’s unusual conversion eventually turned Burnham High Lighthouse into a property that could earn money as well as provide a place to stay. At the time, the eight-storey home was being offered with its original lighthouse character intact, including the lantern room and views across the Bristol Channel towards South Wales and Exmoor. What makes Burnham High Lighthouse unusual is not simply that an old lighthouse became a house. It is that the building’s original form dictated almost everything about the home that came after it. The tower remains narrow, circular and vertically organised, with its former navigation equipment and exterior appearance still recognisable. The structure that once helped ships navigate the Bristol Channel is now a private residence and holiday property, but it has not been stripped of the features that made it a lighthouse in the first place. Nearly two centuries after it was built for Trinity House, Burnham High Lighthouse continues to stand as a landmark on the Somerset coast only now, people climb its stairs to reach a bedroom or a Victorian-style bath rather than to tend a light.
The lighthouse had originally been designed for keepers rather than as a conventional residence, and its compact circular floors meant that almost every aspect of the building had to be reconsidered before it could become a home.
The Standard, recounting O’Hagan’s story from his earlier Guardian account, describes the building at the time as an empty shell, with its floors connected by vertical steel ladders. The tower that O’Hagan acquired was very different from the finished house seen today.