The History of Beach Farm — Over a Century of Coastal Hospitality

I love telling this story, because it is genuinely one of the most remarkable pieces of living history on the Norfolk coast. When people arrive at the mYminiBreak site at Heacham South Beach and pitch their tent or step inside a shepherd’s hut, they are standing on ground that has been welcoming travellers and holidaymakers for over a century. The fields, the old farm buildings, the embankment by the sea — all of it carries the fingerprints of the people who came before us, and I think that deserves to be told properly.

This is the story of Beach Farm. Or Staithe Farm, as it was known for many years. Or Raines Campsite. Or Camping at South Beach. We have answered to quite a few names over the decades, and every one of them is part of the same long, extraordinary chapter of Norfolk coastal hospitality.

The Plumb Family and the Birth of Coastal Tourism

Our story begins around 1915, when a young family called the Plumbs made the move from Swaffham out to this stretch of the Norfolk coast. They became tenants of an area of land and a farm building in the locality — the very same land that today forms the heart of the Wild Ken Hill rewilding project, which sits right on the border of our campsite. There is a continuity in that fact that I find genuinely moving: the land those early farmers worked is now being returned to nature, and the two projects — the heritage campsite and the rewilding scheme — share a boundary that has existed for over a hundred years.

The timing of the Plumbs’ arrival was, in hindsight, inspired. The Edwardian era and the years leading into the First World War had seen a remarkable surge of interest in outdoor holidays. The National Camping Club was founded in 1906 and grew quickly. Books and articles celebrating camping as a wholesome pursuit were being published all over the country. For the working and middle classes, the idea of escaping the city for a week by the sea — fresh air, open skies, the sound of waves — was becoming more than a dream. It was becoming a realistic short break.

The Plumbs, positioned right on the coast at Heacham, were perfectly placed to ride that wave. They began hosting early-style gypsy caravans on the land — simple, mobile, wonderfully characterful — and in doing so became among the first operators on this stretch of coastal Norfolk to build a business around the emerging tourist economy. There was no sea embankment then. The sea came right to their doorstep. And people came anyway, because that was precisely the point.

Digging for Victory: How the War Shaped the Land

The Plumbs’ entrepreneurial spirit did not waver during the Second World War. In response to the government’s Dig for Victory campaign — which encouraged every available patch of land to be turned over to food production during strict wartime rationing — the Plumbs bought additional land situated between South Beach and North Beach Road in Heacham. This was largely wasteland and saltmarsh, land that had never been productively farmed. They levelled it, drained it, and grew crops.

It was a remarkable act of wartime industriousness. The land they reclaimed and worked during those years forms part of the landscape you see today — testimony to the effort and determination of a family who kept building, even in the hardest of times.

After the war, with rationing easing and the British public hungry for minibreaks and holidays again, the Plumbs made a pivotal decision: they converted their newly developed land into a caravan park. That enterprise became what is now known as Heacham Holidays, which continues to this day under the stewardship of Stephen and Estelle Plumb, running four holiday parks in the area. Their dedication and entrepreneurial legacy stretching over more than a century is quite something to stand back and appreciate.

In shifting their focus to the new caravan park, the Plumbs sold their interest in Beach Farm — and that is where the next chapter of our story begins.

Thomas Raines and the Making of Staithe Farm

The man who bought Beach Farm from the Plumbs was Thomas Raines, a farmer and entrepreneur who clearly had an eye for what this part of the Norfolk coast could offer. Raines continued to run the site as a camping and caravan destination, and it was under his ownership that it became formally known as Staithe Farm.

The name Staithe Farm carries real historical weight. A “staithe” is an old Norfolk word for the inlet of an estuary where fishermen would land their catch — a reminder that this part of the coast, before the sea embankments and drainage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a working waterfront, shaped by tides, saltmarsh, and the daily rhythms of the fishing trade. Naming the farm after that inlet was not just a geographical description; it was an acknowledgement of everything that had happened on this shoreline long before the first holidaymaker arrived.

Raines developed the site steadily. We know that the campsite has been in continuous operation since 1934 — making it, with some justification, one of the oldest campsites on the west coast of Norfolk. And in 1936, Raines took a step that has left a permanent mark in the historical record: he applied to the water board for a permanent fresh water supply for the campsite. That application is preserved in the National Archives — a founding document that ties this site directly into the fabric of Norfolk’s administrative history. Every time a guest on our site turns on a tap, they have Mr Raines to thank.

Raines was not alone in seeing the opportunity. His neighbour Mr Jennings developed what is now the Jennings Caravan Site from 1935. Another enterprising local started a site at North Beach which took its name from a blend of “beach” and “Heacham.” This stretch of the Norfolk coast was becoming a genuine destination, built one campsite at a time by a generation of local entrepreneurs who trusted that people would keep coming to the sea if you gave them somewhere decent to stay.

The 1953 Floods and Why This Site Was Different

On the night of 31 January 1953, a catastrophic North Sea storm surge swept the east coast of England and the Netherlands. In Norfolk, entire communities were submerged. Hundreds of people lost their lives. Caravan parks, farmland, and coastal properties across the region were devastated.

Staithe Farm survived largely unscathed. The reason is geological. The site sits naturally approximately two metres above the surrounding marshland — a quirk of the local landscape that the early farmers must have understood instinctively, even if they could not have named the precise reason. When the floodwaters came, they flowed around the farm rather than through it. The high ground that made this land attractive to fishermen as a landing point centuries earlier was the same high ground that protected the campsite from one of the worst coastal disasters in British history.

A Historic England aerial photograph from 1953, taken the same year as the floods, shows the site in full swing — caravans packed in, clearly busy, clearly thriving. It is one of my favourite pieces of evidence for just how long this place has been doing what it does. There it is, captured from the air, decades before I was born, full of people on their Norfolk short break.

From Farmland to mYminiBreak: The Modern Chapter

After the Raines era, the site continued its long life as a campsite, operated in various forms alongside the surrounding farms and caravan parks that grew up around it. For a period it functioned primarily as a camping ground for farmhands, the main farm being in the hands of a local farmer who maintained the working agricultural character of the land.

In 2012, the farmer sold the land, the house, and the stables. The site sat through a period of transition before I came across it. In 2016, I bought the property at auction. I will be honest with you, the state of it was not exactly glossy. There was the dilapidated farmyard, the old barns, a field with a history stretching back nearly a century of camping and caravanning. But that history was precisely the thing that drew me to it.

I spent the following years redeveloping the site properly. The old farm barns became self-catering holiday cottages. The farmyard became glamping. The fields — those same fields that the Plumbs first opened to gypsy caravans over a hundred years ago — became the camping meadows of mYminiBreak. Shepherd’s huts, bell tents, pitches with proper hook-ups, B&B rooms: all of it designed to offer the kind of Norfolk coastal minibreak that this piece of the coast has always been suited to providing.

The Wild Ken Hill Connection

One detail I find particularly special is the relationship between this site and Wild Ken Hill. The land that the Plumbs originally tenanted around 1915 is now at the heart of one of the most celebrated rewilding projects in England — a BBC Springwatch filming location, home to beavers, white-tailed eagles, and extraordinary coastal wildlife. The two projects share a fence line. Guests at mYminiBreak can walk from their pitch along the King Charles III England Coast Path and directly into the Wild Ken Hill rewilding area on foot.

The Springwatch production team have stayed with us when filming at Wild Ken Hill. That connection — between the ancient farmland, the modern rewilding, and the coastal hospitality that has run unbroken through this site for over a century — is, for me, what makes this place unlike anywhere else in Norfolk, UK.

A Name with Roots: What “Staithe” Tells Us About This Coastline

I keep coming back to the name Staithe Farm, because it says so much about what this coastline has always been. Before the embankments were built, before the saltmarshes were drained, before the caravan parks and the holiday cottages, this was a working shoreline. Fishermen landed their catch here. The tide came and went through channels and inlets that have since been managed or filled. The name “Staithe” — rooted in the Old Norse for a landing place or harbour — survived all of that change. It survived the Plumbs, Thomas Raines, the war, the floods, the auction, and the redevelopment.

It still feels right when you stand here and look out at The Wash, because you can still sense what this place was before any of us arrived.

That is the history of Beach Farm. Over a century of the same basic human impulse: come to the Norfolk coast, breathe the air, let the sea do its work, and go home a little bit restored. We are just the latest chapter. And we intend to keep writing it.

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