Osea island, Essex: weekend retreat and party destination

Through a locked gate down an unsignposted lane, the road abruptly ends on a shingle beach by a muddy channel. For four hours at low tide, a twisty, seaweed-fringed track is exposed, winding its way to the mysterious island of Osea.
The Essex coast is as long as that of the Netherlands, and full of surprises. Osea is, perhaps, the biggest. A tidal island in the Blackwater estuary, it has had a strange, sometimes scandalous past, and is experiencing an equally interesting present.
In 1903, Frederick Charrington, a repentant brewing millionaire, founded a “home for inebriates” on the island,... read more