THIS week in Down Memory Lane we visit Billet Lane in Stanford-le-Hope, to remember 116 years ago Thurrock’s most famous author Teodor Josef Konrad Koreniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad, moved house!

In October 1896 he and his new wife moved to a new twin villa in Victoria Road, close to Stanford-le-Hope railway station.

He did not like the property for several reasons, describing it as “a damned Jerry-built rabbit hutch”.

In less than a year, having discovered the river and landscapes of the area, he found a better setting for undertaking his writing in a medieval timber framed farmstead in Billet Lane known as Ivy Walls, pictured, and moved in on March 12, 1897.

At Stanford-le-Hope Conrad completed Karain, The Return, Youth, Lagoon and Outpost of Progress and began Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness perhaps his most famous novel, upon which the graphic surreal Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now is based.

It is also interesting to note that Thurrock features in this novel with the opening lines: “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.

“The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.”

This reflected on the use of his own small boat Nellie, which was moored in one of the creeks close to the house and as a sea captain he was aware of navigating the Thames and the wonderful natural riverscapes he had witnessed.

His son Borys was born at Ivy Walls in January 1898 and in October of that year the family moved to Stanford in Kent.

A Thurrock Heritage Plaque marks the site of the Ivy Walls farmstead in Billet Lane.