For 48 years they watched the sun go down from the same Norfolk garden. Now she can’t leave her bed, so the old sign-maker built her a sunset she can pull down herself.

Ewart Pell spent fifty-one years making the lit signs along the Hunstanton seafront. The last light he made hangs at the head of his wife’s bed. He has 248 left, and in January the workshop where he makes them will belong to someone else.

Old Hunstanton, Norfolk. Most of Ewart Pell’s workshop is dark. At the far end, an old orange arcade O, taken down off the seafront decades ago, still glows above his workbench. Below it, on plank shelves, sit rows of square boxes that each glow like the last ten minutes of a day.

Pull the black ball on the right and a white sun rises out of a dark horizon. Pull the red ball on the left and it sinks again, slowly, from gold to orange to a last red ember, until it slips under the line and is gone.

These are not night lights. Each one is a sunset small enough to hang beside a bed, made by a man who spent his life making lights for strangers. He made the first one for the only person he ever watched the sun go down with: his wife, Thelma, who can no longer get to a window that faces west.

So he brought the sunset to her.

Now the cottage is sold to pay for her care, and the workshop goes with it. What Ewart decided to do with the lamps still on his shelves has families writing to him from all over the country.

Nine hundred signs, and one more light

In 1968 Ewart started Pell Signs in a rented lock-up in King’s Lynn, with a borrowed ladder and a glass-bending torch bought on hire purchase. Over the next fifty-one years he made or rewired 912 signs: chip shop signs, arcade fronts, bingo halls, pub signs, the lights that told families coming up the A149 they had finally reached the sea.

“A sign has one job,” he says, turning a screwdriver in fingers that are slower than they used to be. “Somebody’s been in the car since Leicester with three children in the back. You’ve got three seconds to tell them they’ve arrived. You don’t do that with words. You do it with light.”

These days he drives to King’s Lynn every afternoon and sits with Thelma until she falls asleep. Then he drives home, walks past the dark cottage and goes straight down the garden to the workshop. “It’s the only place I don’t keep listening for her,” he says.

Each lamp is a slim steel box with an acrylic face, and Ewart paints every sky on it himself, with the same brushes he once used to letter arcade signs: pale gold at the top, then orange, then the deep red that sits over the Wash in October, then black for the land. No two come out exactly alike.

Behind the painted sky sits a warm light that does the moving. Pull the black cord on the right and the sun climbs a little higher. Pull the red cord on the left and it sinks a little lower. Let go, and it stays exactly where you left it. Every lamp burns on the bench overnight before it gets a box. “Not fast,” he says. “It’s supposed to give you time to say something.”

Ask him why a man who spent his life on seafront signs would spend his eighties making sunsets, and he points at a photo propped up on the shelf.

Two deckchairs facing west

Thelma taught at the infant school in Hunstanton for thirty years and kept the books for the sign business at the kitchen table. She and Ewart married in 1967. Ten years later they bought the cottage, and the family joke is that they bought it for the garden. It faces due west over the Wash, one of the only spots on the east coast where the sun sets over the sea, with nothing between the lawn and the horizon.

Every evening after tea they carried two mugs out to two striped deckchairs. When the sun touched the water, Thelma always said it first: There she goes. And Ewart always answered: Right on time. Their children learnt early not to interrupt. “You don’t talk while it’s going down,” Thelma told them. “You can talk after.”

She kept a notebook by the back door for the sunsets she rated a ten. In forty-eight years she wrote down 212 of them. Ewart still has it.

A window that faced the car park

In March 2025 Thelma had a stroke at the kitchen table. The cottage, with a steep staircase and every bedroom upstairs, no longer worked. In May she moved into a care home in King’s Lynn. The staff were kind and the room was bright, but her one window looked east, over the car park.

“She never complained about that room,” Ewart says. “But around six o’clock she’d get restless. She’d look at the window, then at me. I knew what she wanted, and there wasn’t one thing out there I could give her.”

He tried a calendar of sunset photographs. He framed a picture of the garden and put it on her chest of drawers. She thanked him and looked at the window anyway. “A picture doesn’t do anything,” he says. “The sun moves. You sit there and you watch it go. That’s the whole thing.”

“There she goes”

So he made her one that moves. It took him most of June, and he painted her sky from memory: the view from their garden on an October evening. He left out the switch, because Thelma’s right hand can still grip but can no longer manage anything small. Instead: two cords with round balls, red on the left to bring the sun down, black on the right to bring it back up.

He drove it to King’s Lynn wrapped in the crocheted blanket from their settee and didn’t tell her what it was. That evening he put the red ball in her hand. She pulled, and the sun slid down the panel, gold to orange to ember. When it touched the line, she said it. There she goes.

“And I said right on time,” Ewart says, and stops for a moment. “First time since March.”

It became their evening again. While the sun goes down, Thelma tells the old stories: the night the old lighthouse caught the last light and glowed like a candle, the summer the grandchildren slept in a tent on the lawn. “Some nights she tells me about that garden as if I wasn’t there,” Ewart says. “I just let her.” Most nights she is asleep before the sun is all the way down. The night carer started timing her rounds so she could stand in the doorway for the last part.

Within weeks, a retired fisherman two doors down the corridor asked his son to “find out about the sunset,” and a daughter from Fakenham rang the cottage. By October, Ewart was back in the workshop every night, making them for families he had never met.

Why everybody goes quiet at the same spot

“Nobody really looks at a light,” Ewart says. “They look at what it reminds them of.”

Most “sunset lamps” throw a flat orange circle on the wall or cycle through party colours. Ewart’s does the one thing a real sunset does: it moves, and it takes its time. Warm light, never blue, no glare, no hum. It is the most relaxing light you can have in a room.

What makes Ewart’s lamp different

Closing day is in January

Thelma’s room costs more each month than the sign business made in a good summer. To keep her where she is, the cottage had to go. It sold in September. He is moving into a flat in King’s Lynn, six minutes from her room.

“I don’t mind about the house,” he says. “A house is bricks and mortar. The garden I minded, until I worked out I’d already taken it with me.” He nods at the shelves. “It’s in every one of those.”

His granddaughter Tamsin, a student nurse in Norwich, asked the question nobody else wanted to: what happens to the lamps when the workshop belongs to someone else? She found out what a sign-maker would charge to make a lit box like this, £200 to £320, typed up a price list and suggested £89. Ewart read it, folded it once and slid it back across the table.

He crossed out £89 and wrote £69: enough to cover the steel, the paint, the wiring, the cords and the box, and nothing on top. No shops, no middleman, and no second batch once the shelves are empty.

Letters from the first owners

After tea Ewart spreads the photos people send across the kitchen table, the way he used to lay out sign drawings. He expected bedrooms in care homes. He also got a grey corner sofa in Leeds, a reading nook in Norwich, a child’s bedroom in Cambridge, many of them from people in their twenties and thirties.

“Turns out young people miss the evening too,” he says. “Thelma always said a room needs one thing in it that isn’t in a hurry.”

When the shelves are empty

What’s on the shelves is everything Ewart made after Thelma moved to King’s Lynn. In January the keys go to a young family from Peterborough, and the bench goes with the workshop.

There is a second reason there won’t be more. Ewart’s hands have started to shake. The small connectors take him twice as long as they used to, and some nights Tamsin holds the torch while he solders. “These are the last ones these hands are going to make,” he says. “I’d rather they hang somewhere they’re needed than sit on a shelf.”

Tamsin packs every order in the workshop by hand, and after January she will carry on from the flat until the last lamp has gone. Each lamp is dispatched within one to two working days and comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. “If it does nothing for the person you bought it for, send it back,” Ewart says. “I’ll understand. I just haven’t had to yet.”

If someone in your life has evenings that have got long, or if your own window faces the wrong way, this is the last chance to hang one of Ewart’s sunsets on the wall.