The gym was fairly unpleasant this evening. I went for a swim, but it turned into a brief splash from one end of the pool to the other several times over, then retreating to the jacuzzi as the hippo women clustered around the tape player that appeared on the pool side, like piranhas clustering at feeding time.

Somehow, my swims seem to coincide with aquarobics every time I try.

Anyhow, I wasn’t that disappointed. I was too tired to do much, so it was a good excuse to sit around relaxing. I’d spent the rest of the day walking back and forth between Frinton and Walton, taking pictures of the beach huts, which all seemed to have bizarre retro names: Shalimar, gazump, Jabba the Hutt…

I didn’t realise until I had got as far as the pier and sat around for half an hour drinking tea in a cloud of chip fat fumes that you can actually see Sealand from Walton, which must make it one of the closest bits of the UK mainland to another sovereign nation.

It’s something like 11km off the coast, and a bit of a legal anomaly, being nothing more than a Second World War gunning platform. It’s issued its own passports, stamps and currency, though, and been recognised as a separate nation by several international bodies. It even fought off the British military some years ago, and ever since has been a bit of a legal embarassement to the UK government.

Now it’s home to Havenco, the world’s most secure web hosting company. Wired did a big feature on it a couple of years back, summing up the place in one chunky paragraph:

HavenCo’s onboard staff will come and go on helicopters and speedboats. Four security people will be on hand at all times to maintain order; six computer geeks will run the network operations center. The security personnel, heavily armed and ready to blast anybody who shouldn’t be around, will make sure that unauthorized boats and aircraft keep their distance. The geeks will perform maintenance tasks like replacing failed hard disks and installing new equipment. These routine chores will be a little more challenging than usual, given the maritime setting and Sealand’s obsession with privacy. Fall over the edge of Sealand’s deck, for instance, and you’ll probably drown. Simply entering one of the machine rooms will require putting on scuba gear, because the rooms will be filled with an unbreathable pure nitrogen atmosphere instead of the normal oxygen mix - a measure designed to keep out sneaks, inhibit rust, and reduce the risk of fire. (Source: Wired (pdf))

Forty years ago, well before the Internet was little more than imagination, the platform was a base for Radio Essex, the pirate station, which started test transmissions in October 65.

During the Second World War, it had been necessary for the government to build a number of these defensive structures around the coast. Essex faces Europe, making it a prime candidate for attack from either sea or air, and so a good number of these forts were concentrated around the county’s shores. One such tower was Fort Knock John, and it was this that one-time British major Paddy Roy Bates selected as a base for setting up a local radio station, having visited several such constructions around the coast and Thames Estuary. Between the time of finding it and moving in, though, it became occupied by rival station Radio City. It didn’t take much to persuade them that they should leave and once that had done so Bates and his Radio Essex team moved in to take their place.

Two wartime generators left in the fort were brought back into use and the team built a studio in one of the storerooms using a variety of salvaged kit. By the end of October, test transmissions had begun on 1351KHz and by the end of November the station was broadcasting to Essex and the surrounding area every day around the clock on 222 metres. It was the UK’s first pirate radio station to broadcast 24 hours a day.

Within a year, though, they were in trouble. The Post Office, who still controlled the UK airwaves, summonsed Bates on 28th September 1966 to appear in court on charged of using a radio transmitter without a licence. Bates conducted his own defence and claimed that the British legal system had no jurisdiction over his activities since Fort Knock was outside of British territory. Unfortunately this cut no ice in court and he was fined

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