In the 1970s the Coutts Bank building in central London was partly remodelled to a design by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd. A new glass entrance was designed to replace the columned central section of the facade on the Strand. As work progressed Gibberd salvaged some of the redundant masonry to reuse at his Essex home. There he indulged in what the Architects’ Journal called ‘that virtuous activity’ of building follies.

Sir Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) was the Master Planner of the new town created at Harlow, in Essex, from 1946. Needing to be close to the works, he bought a small cottage on Marsh Lane. He remodelled the house and developed the extensive garden, which had plenty of space for the sculpture and architectural salvage Gibberd collected with his second wife, Patricia (they married in 1972).

Gibberd decided to use some of the redundant masonry  from Coutts to create a ‘Roman’ Temple in the garden. His colleagues on site were apparently disgruntled by this decision, as removing the columns Gibberd had chosen was time consuming work – they would have preferred to smash the whole lot to bits.

The masonry was delivered the following year, and as Gibberd wrote ‘a huge lorry equipped with a crane drove down my lane, demolished three trees and dumped a pile of huge fragments in a ditch opposite my entrance gates’. The stone was dragged to the prepared site on a sledge with steel runners.

Three men with a crane and a digger were recruited to construct the folly. Two Portland stone columns and a section of frieze were to be erected in the form of a temple inspired by ancient Roman models. Steel rods were inserted in the columns to give support and one of the men sat in the bucket of the digger to guide the stones into place. The crane driver was asked to drop a third column, so that it would appear to have fallen and broken. The bewildered man exclaimed ‘They’ve come all the way from London and I’m to drop one of them?’, and apparently demanded the instruction in writing so that he couldn’t be held responsible for the damage.

It was, Gibberd concluded, a ‘very expensive folly’, but it brought him great pleasure. When passers-by paused at the gate and asked what the structure was, Gibberd enjoyed telling them it was a fragment from an ancient Roman temple discovered during the development of a nearby industrial estate.

Four urns from the Trafalgar Square facade of the bank, which Gibberd believed to be made of Coade Stone, were mounted on a plinth and placed at an angle to the temple to create a pleasing ensemble.

Although Gibberd claimed to have no masterplan for his garden, he did draw an exquisite plan and elevation of the temple and its garden setting. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1981 as ‘Roman’ Temple (Gibberd was elected RA in 1969).

The Architects’ Journal thought the whole of the bank’s facade should have been retained, or at least reused at another building, but as their reporter concluded, at least Gibberd had ‘tried to atone and Freddie’s folly promises to become a well-loved landmark in Freddie’s own New Town’.

Gibberd died in 1984 and left his house and garden to Harlow for the benefit of the people of the town, although initially it remained home to his widow and there were only occasional open days. Complications over his will left the garden vulnerable (a long story), but there was strong local support and in 1995 the Gibberd Garden Trust was formed to maintain the site and welcome visitors. Lady Gibberd remained closely involved until her death in 2006.

Gibberd said that the half a mile approached road gave his garden ‘a quality of remoteness’. Modern housing now stands close to the track, but is still an adventure to drive down the long lane, wondering if you have perhaps taken a wrong turn, only to suddenly spot the eagle-topped gateposts.

Gibberd’s comments on making the garden are from his lecture notes On Making Gardens and Landscapes which are in the Gibberd archive at the Garden Museum.  Sir Frederick and Lady Gibberd were early supporters of the museum where you can see a small display celebrating Gibberd’s work. The account of the bemused lorry driver is from oral histories collected by Annalise Taylor and published to mark 25 years of the Gibberd Garden Trust.

The Gibberd Garden reopens for the 2026 season on Wednesday 1 April. There’s more here.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to share any thoughts please scroll down to the comments box. You can find it at the bottom of the page.

Belchamp Walter, in Essex (but very close to the Suffolk border) is the quintessential English village with a manor house and church at its heart. But on a field boundary behind the hall stands a less common feature – a curious, and very clever, folly facade.

The folly stands on a public footpath, and approaching it along the field edge one is surprised to find a very narrow structure, but stepping back the full facade can be appreciated. The design is ingenious: the light falling on the walls, which break in and out casting shadows, gives the folly the appearance of a more substantial ruined structure when seen from even a short distance.

The history of the folly seems a little difficult to establish. The Historic England list entry (grade II) keeps things vague, calling it a ‘nineteenth century’ eye-catcher. Frustratingly, it is not mentioned at all in the two-part Country Life article published in 1959. The present owner of Belchamp Hall, Charles Raymond, believes it to have been erected by his ancestor John Mayne St Clere Raymond (1814-1893) in around 1879.

Maps don’t give any answers as cartographically the folly seems not to exist. It is not shown on the beautifully detailed tithe map of 1846, or an estate plan of 1867, so the initial assumption is that it was not there at that date. But neither can it be found on the Ordnance Survey map published in 1880, or the updated map issued in 1924, or indeed the modern map. All that is marked on all of the maps is a slight deviation in the field boundary, as shown above.

If the folly was erected in the 1870s then a possible contender for the designer of the folly is the architect Woolmer Robert Firmin (1847-1885), who lived in Belchamp Walter where his father farmed at Fishers Farm. Firmin is known to have designed the village school for John Mayne St Clere Raymond in 1870, with work complete in 1872.

One legend attached to the folly suggests that it was built to stop light reflecting off the glasshouse at Over Hall, a few fields away, and annoying the occupants of the drawing room at Belchamp Hall. It’s a great story attached to a most mysterious folly.

Belchamp Hall will be familiar to readers who remember the television series Lovejoy, which was broadcast from 1986 to 1994. The hall was home to Lovejoy’s friend, Lady Felsham.

The Flâneuse is happy to report that the folly has been consolidated and will remain a landmark for many years to come.

A note on location: Belchamp Walter stands in Essex, but its postal town is Sudbury, only a few miles away in Suffolk. The village council solves this identity crisis with the snappy tagline ‘Belchamp Walter, Sudbury, Suffolk. A village of Braintree District, Essex’.

The Flâneuse is amazed to find that this is her 350th folly story. So an extra big thank you to all who read her weekly ramblings. There’s a comments box at the foot of the page where you can share any observations, and further information is of course always very welcome.

In the Victorian age, many churches were rebuilt or renovated in the very latest taste. One of these was St Augustine’s at Hedon, east of Hull in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Here, the architect G.E. Street oversaw the work, part of which included the replacement of the window in the south transept. But the ancient traceried window removed during the works was to get a second and even a third life elsewhere…

The history of the window was far from transparent, but guest blogger the Garden Historian has gone to great pains to establish the facts and enlighten readers.

The story starts with William Thomas White (1822–1888), who, by 1857, was managing the family firm of fruit brokers in Hull (founded by his father in 1837) and had moved into a property in Hedon (pronounced head-on) that would later become Lambert House, so-called after his late mother’s maiden name. 

At some point White developed an interest for things antiquarian. When the historic Citadel at Hull went out of use and was subsequently demolished, many of the ‘Very Valuable Materials’ were sold at auction from January 1863. One of these was an entrance arch from the time of Charles II (the keystone has his cypher), which White acquired.

White was active in local and parochial concerns, and in 1866 a scheme was set in motion to restore the town’s only remaining medieval church. The initial phase of work, which involved fitting a new window in the south transept, took place between 1867 and 1869 and the old window made its way to White, no doubt helped by the fact that he was active on the church’s Restoration Committee.

By 1874, both the arch and the window had been re-erected in the garden of Lambert House, as noted by The Hull Packet and East Riding Times which reported on the parish church school festival that summer:

‘The procession wended its way to the beautiful grounds of Lambert House, and passing through the ruined arches into the croquet lawn, the children were seated on the raised terrace which surrounds it’.

Croquet hoops aside, other embellishments were added in the grounds, some from uncertain sources but all in keeping with White’s antiquarian leaning. When he enlarged the house, various stones and smaller architectural fragments that he had collected were incorporated into a room, ‘The Dungeon’, which remains today. 

Lambert House descended through the family until it was sold in 1931, but by that date the garden features had been removed by one of White’s grandsons, Joseph Dalton White (1881-1974). He had purchased Lea Hall, near Hatfield Heath in Essex, and it was there that he re-erected the two ‘arches’, plus another piece of salvage that may have come from Hedon (all listed Grade II).

And there they remain. When visited in 2023, Lea Hall looked like a building site, probably because that’s exactly what it was due to major restoration and renovation work taking place.

The grounds and its features are part of the Lea Hall refurbishment plan, and so are likely to delight and cause curiosity for many years to come.

Other salvaged windows have likewise become features in gardens across the country, and it has to be said that the town of Hedon has more than its fair share of architectural remnants used in such a way… but these are stories for another day.

Lambert House is now a guest house and function venue, but is usually open for Heritage Open Days in September.

Thanks to the Garden Historian, aka Dr Michael Cousins, for researching these garden ornaments and giving the Flâneuse a week off. And thank you for reading. Please scroll down to the comments box to share any thoughts.

In 1765 Charles Raymond built a tower on his estate at Valentines in Ilford, Essex. Money was not an issue, for Raymond had grown wealthy in business, and in particular shipping, having started his career in the employ of the East India Company. The prominently-placed sham fortification was an eye-catcher that announced his status to all who passed by. It was intended as his family mausoleum, but things didn’t quite go to plan.

Raymond (c.1713-1788) bought the Valentines (sometimes Valentine’s) estate in 1754. He renovated the house, and filled it with treasures from his travels and curiosities brought home on his ships. His garden was home to a menagerie with exotic birds, and in 1771 one Captain Rogers returned to England from China with a sampan to sail on the estate’s lakes.

Sir Charles Raymond (he was created a baronet in 1774) died in 1788. His plans for a grand mausoleum had been abandoned when the Bishop of London apparently refused to consecrate the tower. In his will Sir Charles stipulated a more conventional funeral plan: he wished to be ‘buried in as private a manner as may be’. He was laid to rest at St Margaret of Antioch in Barking, where he is commemorated by a monument in the church.

Daniel Lysons noted the tower in his Environs of London, published in 1796. He described it as being built in 1765 as a burial place, but noted that ‘it was never put to that use’. The little further information we have comes from the Ilford historian George Tasker. He wrote about Cranbrook Castle, as it became known (the Cran Brook runs nearby and gives it name to the area), in the local newspaper, and in 1901 published Ilford Past & Present. Tasker was privy to information from a descendant of Raymond, described as an ‘impeachable authority’, who stated that the intended mausoleum had cost £420 to build, and that the disagreement with the Bishop had led to the plans being dropped. Tasker had explored the tower, and wrote that outlines of the fourteen semi-circular niches for coffins could still be traced on the walls of the vault, which was built within the mound on which the tower stands.

Throughout the 19th century Cranbrook Castle had been rented out as a dwelling house: tenants in the second-half of the century included the local milkman, his wife and four daughters. Tasker described how the ground floor chapel had been divided into two rooms, and the room above had been converted into four apartments. Another writer thought it made an odd home, as the spiral staircase from the chapel to the roof took up much of the space. The tower, which was ‘conspicuous several miles round’, remained a popular local landmark, and featured on countless picture postcards.

During the First World War Cranbrook Castle was taken over by the Admiralty and became ‘the most important observation station’ near London, giving ‘very valuable information during air raids’. After the war the tower deteriorated and became a target for vandals bent on ‘wanton destruction’. By this time the land around the tower was in demand for housing, and new homes on the 45 acre Cranbook Castle Estate were advertised from the start of the 1920s.

Alongside the housing the Port of London Authority was building a new recreation ground, and locals became aware that their tower was under threat. There were proposals to turn it into a museum, or to incorporate it into the new pavilion needed for the sports ground, but ‘the authorities ordered its removal for causes not determined’. The strongly-built tower did its best to resist, with 12 strong men with ropes being needed to pull down the turrets in 1923. But soon not a trace remained, and the site was developed.

The Valentines estate was bought by the local authority in 1912: the mansion became council offices and the grounds became a public park. With help from the Heritage Lottery Fund and an active Friends group the house and parkland were restored in 2007-08. The house is now open regularly, with furnished period rooms on view, and also operates as a wedding venue. The gardens can be visited daily. Read more https://valentinesmansion.com

For the work of the Friends see https://valentines.org.uk

The castle is remembered in Ilford in the names and logos of Cranbrook Castle Lawn Tennis Club and Cranbrook Castle Montessori Nursery.

Thank you for reading. There is a comments box at the foot of the page – please do get in touch if you have any thoughts or further information.

In 1959 the inhabitants of Matching Green, east of Harlow in Essex, were horrified by the appearance of a 6 foot 3 inch statue of a naked lady in a village garden. The figure was the work of Horace Saville, the village blacksmith, and he claimed it was a model of how he wanted his future wife to look.

The statue had originally stood 5 feet high on Saville’s lawn, but after ‘somebody’ knocked it down he rebuilt it on a sturdy concrete plinth. The outraged locals included Mrs Harold Smith who thought the statue a ‘hideous monstrosity’ and Mr George Burnett who lived next door to Saville. He worried that the statue would attract day-trippers who would come to ‘gawp’. And presumably that is exactly what happened when Burnett spoke to the Daily Mirror and the paper published a photo’ of the statue. Saville was unperturbed and told the reporter that he was a ‘genuine bachelor’ who didn’t really know what a lady looked like ‘without her clothes’.

Saville (1904-1980) was 54 when he erected the statue of his dream wife and it doesn’t seem to have found him a partner. Nine years later he was still single, and it seems doubtful that his latest wheeze would attract suitors: he had taken to moulding his own dentures in concrete and coating them in a secret formula to make them sparkle.

The statue of a naked lady was soon joined by some other garden ornaments. In the years after her appearance Saville had sculpted a whole range of figures with no apparent connection. By 1973 there were statues of the Queen, Prince Philip, General de Gaulle, the broadcaster Cliff Michelmore, the Earl of Avon (presumably former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden), the devil waving a top hat and Horace Saville himself. One of best records of the garden found to date is this sketch which Raymond “Tim” Fieldhouse sent to his friend Jones in 1973. Fieldhouse had met Saville in Matching Green and described him as ‘a great old Essex character […] every bit as weird as one of his own creations, a real old eccentric’.

Further statues included a policeman, a racegoer, a huntsman, an army officer, a horse and jockey, and a gorilla with a bunch of bananas. Smaller sculptures could be found in the long grass of Saville’s wild garden, all with piercing blue eyes made from marbles.

Saville was very serious about the project to which he had dedicated his retirement, and a sign in the garden announced his creations as ‘Concrete Art’.  Horace could often be found at his gate chatting to visitors and showing the tools of his trade – an old table knife and a saucepan. A Mr Tyle who was given a tour of the sculptures in 1966 wrote to a local magazine to say that ‘anybody who has not had the pleasure of viewing these fine works of country art is missing a unique exhibition’.

Whilst perhaps not always popular in the village (they became known locally as ‘Horace’s Horrors’), today the body of work would be celebrated as Outsider Art, defined by the Tate as ‘art that has a naïve quality, often produced by people who have not trained as artists’.  But sadly there is nothing left to see: after Saville’s death in 1980 the statues were swept away*.

You can at least see the man himself – here he is promoting margarine in 1954.

* UPDATE September 2024: Huge thanks to the many people who have shared their memories of Horace and his garden (see the comments below). Particular thanks to Patrick Streeter for the very exciting news that one sculpture does survive – and it is the head of the man himself, as seen bottom left in one of the photographs above. Horace can be found in the garden of the Feast Room by Matching Church.

And thanks to Sarah Sage for sharing an example of Horace’s personal stationery complete with autograph and what is presumably a self-portrait.

UPDATE OCTOBER 2025: Thanks to Richard Keil for sharing these two images from his family’s collection. Both are dated 1967.

Does anyone remember the garden and statues? Your thoughts and comments are warmly welcomed – please scroll down to the foot of the page to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

With St Valentine’s Day approaching, the Folly Flâneuse wondered which were the most romantic garden buildings. The most famous expression of love in an architectural form is surely the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan as a tomb for his favourite wife. But closer to home are three equally enchanting buildings built as monuments to lost loves – two real, and one imaginary, and each likened to the marble mausoleum in India. 

Near Abergavenny in Wales is the Clytha estate. In 1787 William Jones retired there following the death of his wife, Elizabeth, who was buried in nearby Llanarth churchyard. A long inscription on her monument in the church was composed by her ‘most afflicted and grateful husband, as a feeble effort to do justice to the memory of the best of wives’.

A few years later Jones began work on another ‘memorial to my wife’, but this time on a monumental scale. Work began on the ‘Castle’ in 1790, with Jones project-managing the construction himself, and a plaque records that:

This Building was erected in the Year 1790 by
WILLIAM JONES of Clytha House Esq
Husband of ELIZABETH […]
It was undertaken for the purpose of relieving a mind
sincerely afflicted by the loss of a most excellent Wife
whose Remains were deposited
in Llanarth Church Yard A:D: 1787
and to the Memory of whose Virtues
this Tablet is dedicated.

Only a few years later Sarah Anne Wilmot, who was touring Wales in 1802, was shown around by the ‘pensive owner’. She wrote in her journal that the Castle was a ‘united mausoleum and gazebo to his late wife’. Having been taken on a complete tour of the grounds, her party was treated to fine fruit from the hothouse, but nothing could lift the ‘air of melancholy’ which Sarah Anne felt pervaded the house and garden.

The Monmouthshire historian William Coxe also visited soon after completion, and he too admired the ‘ornament’, and admitted that he could not ‘retire from the building without sympathising with the regret, and applauding the gratitude, affection, and taste of the owner’.

Writing about the grade I listed Clytha Castle in Follies: A Guide to Rogue Architecture (co-written with Wim Meulenkamp and published in 1986), Gwyn Headley memorably called Clytha the ‘Taj Mahal of Wales’, which set the Folly Flâneuse wondering if other British buildings had been given a similar epithet. Two notable examples came to mind…

James Williamson, 1st Baron Ashton (1842-1930), fabulously rich from the production of oilcloth and linoleum, built the Ashton Memorial in the early years of the 20th century. His architect was Sir John Belcher (1841-1913), who was president of the Royal Institute of British Architects at the time of the commission. Belcher was a prolific architect of domestic and municipal buildings in a flamboyant Edwardian Baroque style. His works included Colchester Town Hall and London’s elegant Mappin and Webb building, which was controversially demolished in the 1990s to enable the development of No.1 Poultry, but a hilltop palace for a client with very deep pockets is unsurprisingly unique in his oeuvre. As Pevsner wrote in the 1969 edition of his volume on Lancashire, Belcher was ‘put into the position of designing the most sumptuous building in all his career for no utilitarian purpose whatsoever.’

The building is said to commemorate Ashton’s 2nd wife, Jessy, who died in 1904. A plaque actually dedicates the building to all of his family, but the people of Lancaster have always maintained that the loss of his wife was the driving force behind construction on this mammoth scale, and it was quickly dubbed ‘The Taj Mahal of the North’ (although less romantic Lancastrians prefer to call it ‘The Structure’).

Opened in 1909, the monument stands in Williamson Park, the public space created by Lord Ashton, and his father before him, for the people of Lancaster. At around 50 metres high the memorial can be seen from miles around, and whilst Ashton himself was said to be shy and shun the limelight, the same can not be said of the Ashton Memorial.

Meanwhile overlooking the Stour estuary in Essex, there’s a much more recent cenotaph, but this time to a fictional lost love. In 2010 Living Architecture’s Creative Director Alan de Botton met artist Grayson Perry and the idea for A House for Essex was born. Perry worked with architect Charles Holland (then of FAT Architecture) to bring the project to fruition, and it was completed in 2014.

Essex-born Perry created Julie Cope, an ‘Essex every-woman’, whose story is told through a series of artworks in (and on) the House. In brief: Julie finds herself pregnant and marries when still young, she divorces, and when the children have grown she gets the qualifications she missed out on as a teenager. She meets new love Rob, and settles into a comfortable middle-class life. Her life ends abruptly in a tragic accident, and Rob builds the house at Wrabness as her memorial, or as Perry puts it ‘a Taj Mahal upon the Stour’.

You too can stay in the monuments to Elizabeth Jones and Julie Cope, as both properties are holiday homes. Clytha Castle was restored by the heritage charity The Landmark Trust, and The House for Essex is a property of Living Architecture, which exists to create thought-provoking houses which inspire discussion about modern architecture. The Ashton Memorial is open to the public, and to continue the theme of romance, is a popular wedding venue.

There’s more on Clytha Castle here https://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/clytha-castle-6088/#History

And for A House for Essex see https://www.living-architecture.co.uk/the-houses/a-house-for-essex/overview/

The Ashton Memorial is freely accessible https://www.lancaster.gov.uk/sites/williamson-park/ashton-memorial

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On recent sedate tours of Britain The Folly Flâneuse was intrigued to find two pairs of pavilions which had sadly lost their principal part. Near Towcester in Northamptonshire are the Palladian pavilions that once flanked a fine house. Meanwhile at Mistley in Essex the twin towers of a Robert Adam church have long since lost their linking nave. The surviving pairs are, however, far from forlorn and seem to be throughly enjoying their independence.

The mansion at Stoke Park  was built for Francis Crane in c.1630 and is attributed, with some authority, to Inigo Jones. It is claimed as the first house in Britain to use the Palladian model of a central villa with two flanking pavilions linked by colonnades. This is of course ironic, as the main block was destroyed by fire in 1886 leaving only the pavilions. Curiously, when a new house was built a few years after the fire, it was constructed on a virgin site behind the eastern pavilion rather than on the footprint of the lost house. Stoke Park was requisitioned by the military during World War Two, and allowed to fall into decline when the war ended.

Robert Duff Chancellor became the saviour of Stoke Park when he bought the estate in 1954. He demolished the derelict Victorian house, leaving only a very pretty service wing, and put all of his efforts into restoring the pavilions, with one being converted into a private home. The setting, with ornamental pond and overflowing borders is fabulous.

Until 1928 the estate had stayed in the hands of the same family for around 300 years, but had never once passed from father to son.  Stoke Park then had a number of commercial owners until Robert Chancellor bought it in 1954. He bequeathed it to his nephew, Alexander Chancellor, and as he and his wife Susanna have only daughters the pattern looks set to continue for another couple of generations at least.

At Mistley in Essex two elegant towers look out across the estuary of the River Stour, close to the border with Suffolk. These towers are also the work of a major architect, in this case Robert Adam who designed only one other church: Gunton in Norfolk.

Robert Rigby of Mistley Hall had grandiose plans to turn Mistley into a spa and attract prosperous visitors to the area. The mediaeval church was not considered an attraction so Rigby asked Adam to come up with something a little more modern and elegant. Sadly, Rigby’s plans came to nothing, and by the mid 19th century Adam’s design was in turn considered dated.  Another new church was built nearby, but the towers of the Adam church were remodelled to make them symmetrical and left standing as seamarks for ships on the river.

The towers were sold to local families who planned to use them as mausolea but this plan also failed*. The pavilions were restored in the 1950s and are now in the care of English Heritage.

The Stoke Park Pavilions are used as a stunning wedding and events venue, but are open to the public from 24 July to 20 August 2019 between 3pm and 6pm. Don’t miss this chance to visit. http://www.stokeparkpavilions.co.uk

The exteriors of Mistley Towers can be visited at any time, and the key to one of the towers is available locally, for more information see https://www.englishheritage.org.uk/visit/places/mistley-towers/

* There is however a very curious black granite mausoleum in the churchyard, the resting place of the Norman family.