Agatha Christie

Residence 1

📍Barton Road, Torquay, Devon TQ2 7NS, United Kingdom

“Ashfield was the world before the world began. My mother Clara bought the Victorian house on Barton Road before I was born, and it was the only home I knew until I was twenty-four. I had no formal schooling — my mother believed formal education harmed children — so I read, walked the garden, and invented. The garden had a beech tree I climbed regularly, and from its upper branches I could see as far as the bay. I wrote my first detective story — a challenge set by my sister Madge, who thought I could not sustain a mystery over a full novel — at the kitchen table at Ashfield. Hercule Poirot appeared in that manuscript, fully formed, already Belgian, already arranging the little grey cells. The house was demolished in 1968, which I found difficult to accept even at seventy-eight. I bought Greenway partly as compensation — another Devon house, another large garden, another room of one's own beside a river. But Ashfield was first.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Agatha Christie

Residence 2

📍Greenway, Galmpton, Churston Ferrers, Devon TQ5 0ES, United Kingdom

“Max found Greenway while I was excavating in Syria and brought me here to look. The moment I saw it — the Georgian house above the Dart, the kitchen garden, the boathouse that had been a ferry crossing since the Middle Ages — I knew it was the place. I bought it for six thousand pounds in 1938 and it became my haven for thirty-eight years. The detective plots were hatched in London or the Middle East. Here I simply breathed.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Agatha Christie