The Three Cups at Lyme Regis is a beautiful Georgian building. It was where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’. Celebrated literary figures such as GK Chesterton visited there and it was the scene in 1981 of several film sequences of the iconic ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’. This building has been shut by the owners, and left empty, for a period of nearly twenty years. The building continues to dilapidate and has become an “eyesore”.