The cooing of wood pigeons and distant peal of church bells could easily lull visitors to the picturesque Hampshire village of Nether Wallop into thinking the residents of its thatched cottages have little more to worry about than the issues raised at recent Parish Council meetings.
With discussion of forthcoming celebrations for the 80th anniversary of VE Day and the problem of moles digging up the village green, the minutes hint at the slow pace of life in a community so quintessentially English that it became famous as the location for the BBC TV series Miss Marple back in the 1980s.
Even today, fans of the show pose for photographs outside the cottage that doubled as the home of Agatha Christie’s heroine Jane Marple, the spinster sleuth who once opined that, having observed human nature as much as she had, ‘one gets not to expect very much from it’.
Worldly though Miss Marple was, even that keen knitter might have dropped a few stitches in surprise at the news that has seen the fictitious St Mary Mead’s real-life counterpart back in the spotlight of late – for all the wrong reasons.
Unlikely though it seems, new figures show Nether Wallop and the surrounding villages in this rural idyll enjoyed the dubious honour of having the second highest rate of unsolved burglaries in the UK last year. Of the 98 burglaries logged by local police in 2024, they managed to solve the grand total of… er… none.
That was only narrowly beaten by Bradford’s Buttershaw estate, known as one of the most run-down areas in West Yorkshire and the setting for a rather different 1980s drama, Rita, Sue And Bob Too. There were 99 burglaries recorded in 2024 and, again, none were solved.
It is, of course, a pattern depressingly familiar. In 2023, when the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) pledged that officers would attend every home burglary in England and Wales, the Police Federation warned that its officers were already ‘stretched beyond human limits’.
That appeared borne out by figures showing that, in the three months leading up to June 2024, police failed to clear up a staggering 31,980 burglaries, three in every four.
As becomes clear on visiting Nether Wallop, it’s not for want of neighbours looking out for each other (Pictured: DAVID LEAFE outside of Miss Marple’s cottage)
The idyllic Miss Marple village of Nether Wallop was hit by 98 burglaries last year… and not a single one was solved
‘People who have come to do work on our house have had their vans done,’ says 60-year-old Karen Addison, who runs a clothing business
In an area like Buttershaw, known for its deprivation and violent crime, the low clear-up rate might not seem so surprising. But how, in this pocket of rural Hampshire, have we reached the stage where burglars can apparently break into people’s properties with impunity?
As becomes clear on visiting Nether Wallop, it’s not for want of neighbours looking out for each other. Along with the other two Wallops, Over and Middle, and places with such delightful names as Mottisfont, Michelmersh and King’s Somborne, Nether Wallop is part of a group of tight-knit villages with the cathedral cities of Salisbury and Winchester as neighbours.
They have schemes whereby volunteers drive the elderly to hospital, a community spirit that saw the streets of Nether Wallop lined with tables to celebrate the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and their own versions of Neighbourhood Watch. In short, there’s not much that escapes locals’ notice.
But reporting incidents to the police is one thing and getting the culprits apprehended is quite another. One problem is the NPCC committed officers only to attend burglaries of people’s homes, not outbuildings – suggesting the loss of a spade from a shed is less invasive and upsetting than someone entering your house. Probably so, but two-thirds of burglaries here do concern sheds and garages.
One parish councillor, one of many who asked not to be named for fear they might be targeted by burglars, recalls the theft of his ‘wacker-plate’ – a tool used for levelling ground – three years ago.
‘It was worth around £200,’ he told me. ‘I kept it in the old air-raid shelter in my garden. One morning I discovered it was gone. When I rang the police, they told me they only came out if there was blood.
‘The only reason people do is to get a crime reference number so they can claim on their insurance. But there’s no point in expecting anything else because they’re just not going to turn up.’
Recently, an intruder broke into his shed around 2.30am. A neighbour, woken by noises outside, saw a car parked with its engine running and the balaclava-wearing accomplice at the wheel.
‘She very bravely went down and took photographs,’ he says. ‘They drove off without managing to take anything but even though we had their registration number on the pictures I sent to the police they still didn’t catch anyone.’
Back in the village itself, even the inhabitants of the cottage supposedly occupied by Miss Marple, played in the BBC series by Joan Hickson (pictured), are taking matters into their own hands
The Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner promised increases in council tax and funding will see the recruitment of 90 officers, bringing the total in Hampshire to 815, the highest in a decade
Like others, he has gone to extreme measures to protect his property. ‘I keep my strimmers and chainsaw in my utility room.’
It’s a similar story for a local farmer who has lived just outside Nether Wallop all his life and remembers when you could leave the keys in your car’s ignition and the doors unlocked. ‘Those days are long gone,’ he says sadly.
In recent years, he has suffered the theft of some £3,000 worth of tools from his outbuildings and two Polaris Ranger off-road buggies, worth £25,000 each. ‘When they were taken, they sent out three police cars and a forensics chap but, in the end, all we got was a crime reference number and I never got the buggies back.
‘Thieves know you’ll replace it. The Polaris I’ve got now, I’m nervous about. When we put it away at night, I take it to the barn, ram fertiliser bags around it to block it in and turn the electrics off so they can’t get the roller doors up.’
Back in the village itself, even the inhabitants of the cottage supposedly occupied by Miss Marple, played in the BBC series by Joan Hickson, are taking matters into their own hands.
‘People who have come to do work on our house have had their vans done,’ says 60-year-old Karen Addison, who runs a clothing business. ‘I’ve got a van in the car park and whenever we put anything in it everybody has to block it in with other vehicles to stop anybody from going in there.
‘Every time I go and look at my van I expect it to be broken into. When it’s not, I think, “Oh they haven’t done it today,” but I’m sure they will eventually.’
Two miles away in Over Wallop, Kate Dixon, chair of the Parish Council, says the new pavilion, opened after decades of fundraising and home to the cricket club and youth football team, has been broken into five times in the past year. Building tools were taken and the Parish Council has now installed an intruder alarm, security screens and CCTV. These measures cost £15,000.
Although no one was brought to book for those break-ins, Ms Dixon was happy with the response.
‘They took it really seriously, taking fingerprints, but burglars are so forensically aware these days, covering their faces and wearing gloves, so what can the police do?
‘They’ve been clear even if we think nothing is happening, they are compiling information, creating profiles and patterns, so at some point there’ll be a breakthrough and they’ll get someone.’
Others are more sceptical.
‘I think they have bigger fish to fry than rural burglaries,’ says Mrs Addison. ‘I don’t think they have the capacity to deal with them.’
That was certainly the experience of the family of 89-year-old retired farmer Richard Osmond when farming tools were taken from one of their outbuildings.
‘My son reported it straight away and nothing happened. Three months later he got a call to ask if he wanted any counselling because he’d had a burglary.’ That’s something you can’t imagine in the days when PC Con Harper patrolled the three Wallops on a bike. Now 98, Con, who served between 1959 and 1980, recalls his reasons for keeping crime down.
‘You wanted to for your own self-esteem,’ he explains. ‘But also if you didn’t, they would move you to another beat. I had a young family and we wanted to stay in Nether Wallop.’
The Harpers lived in a police house in the village and Con’s daughter Wendy recalls her father’s devotion to the job.
‘He’d be out for hours, on and off duty,’ she says. ‘He used to say he usually knew who’d done something even before they’d done it.’
Today the nearest police station to Nether Wallop is in Andover, seven miles away. Even that’s open only on weekdays from 8am to 4pm. Many locals couldn’t remember the last time they saw a police officer in the village.
‘The village bobby knew who was who, and what was what, and who was likely doing something they shouldn’t,’ said 86-year-old Celia Grover as she takes a break from repairing kneeling-pads at St Andrew’s church.
While it’s unlikely forces will return to the sort of village reminisced about, the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner Donna Jones recently promised increases in council tax and Government funding will see the recruitment of another 90 officers, bringing the total in Hampshire to 815, the highest in a decade.
The Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary say, while they managed to attend 98.8 per cent of burglaries of dwellings in 2024, they recognise ‘for non-dwelling burglaries, more work needs to be done’. They also say ‘there are still ongoing investigations that may improve our figures over coming months’.
Maybe so but, in the meantime, the people of Nether Wallop and surrounding communities can be forgiven for indulging in the kind of wishful thinking expressed by Celia Grover from the porch of her chocolate-box cottage.
‘All these burglaries make you think that maybe we should get Miss Marple back,’ she says. ‘She’d know how to solve them.’
