Just six nautical miles off the coast of Suffolk lies Rough Towers, one of four Maunsell Sea Forts originally designed to protect the Thames Estuary during the Second World War. Installed in 1942, at it’s busiest, Rough Towers had some 300 Royal Navy personnel stationed there. By 1956 all full-time crew had been removed, and that have would be the end of this sea based oddity, if it hadn’t been for the pirate radio broadcaster Paddy Roy Bates.

Owner of pirate station Radio Essex, Bates occupied the sea fort which lay outside the then boundary of the UK’s territorial waters, but never actually broadcast from there. Instead, on the 2nd of September 1967, Bates declared the independence of Rough Towers, named it the Principality of Sealand, and made himself Prince Roy and his wife Princess Joan.

Although not recognised internationally, the Principality of Sealand has at various times in the following fifty years had its own constitution, national flag, national anthem, postage stamps and passports. It even issued its own currency, although despite claims that it has parity with the US dollar, it’s impossible to spend it away from Sealand.

The redrawing of borders, the renaming of countries, alliances and pacts, wars and conflicts. The desire of one group to rule another and take their territory, or for one clan or tribe to fight for freedom and their own lands has caused the rise and fall of kingdoms the world over for hundreds of years.

The desire to be free from control, to follow our own way, live by our own rules and to be masters of our own destiny are themes that run through much of human history.

Which is why living under the Kingship of God is all the more radical.

In this place where all are shown welcome, for those that want to live their lives as his, they are not admitted as citizens, but adopted as children of the King. This is a place where the flag is the cross on which the risen Jesus died, the anthem is the singing of the saints, and the currency of this kingdom is love.

(September 2017)