Surrounded by a twentieth century housing estate in south London, this classical building comes as something of a surprise. The Orangery, as it is known today, was once a feature of the pleasure grounds of Robert Thornton’s house on the edge of Clapham Common.

Thornton (1759-1826), an MP and businessman, had inherited a substantial fortune from his merchant father, John Thornton (1720-1790). Robert’s house stood in a small landscaped park with lakes, and in around 1792 he added this elegant building. Over the door is an inscription from Virgil which gives a clue as to the purpose of the fine structure: HIC VER ASSIDUUM ATQUE ALIENIS MENSIBUS AESTAS, which translates as ‘Here is eternal spring and summer in months not her own’, or ‘Tis here eternal spring and summer all the year’: the building was a greenhouse, where tender plants could be kept alive in the colder months of the year.

The artist Joseph Farington visited in 1806, with his friend William Wilberforce, and noted in his diary that the Orangery was built to a design by Dr Burgh of York. William Burgh (1741-1808) was Irish-born, but lived in York for many years. He doesn’t seem to have a history as an amateur architect, but he was a friend of the poet and garden designer William Mason, and wrote a commentary to accompany the 1783 edition of Mason’s poem The English Garden. In this text Burgh wrote that Mason’s lines about a greenhouse ‘where rare and alien plants/might safely flourish’ was inspired by the French writer and landscape designer René Louis Girardin. Girardin published De La Composition des Paysages in 1777, in which he suggested that a greenhouse with a background of trees would form a ‘jolie tableau‘. Girardin’s concept and Mason’s lines were brought to life in Clapham.

Long since lost is a marble tablet which was inside the building. It was inscribed with an extract from William Cowper’s poem The Task, including these lines which echo the quotation from Virgil on the frieze:

Unconscious of a less propitious clime,
There blooms exotic beauty, warm and snug,
While the winds whistle, and the snows descend.

The pediment is decorated with what are believed to be Coade stone ornaments. In the engraving (above) the central plaque appears to feature a profile, but if that was the case it has disappeared, and it is not known who or what it represented (by the mid-20th century the oval space was a window which lit the attic behind the pediment). The Greenhouse, as it was originally known, had a view of a serpentine canal and lawns and then over a haha to the meadows and another serpentine lake beyond. The Greenhouse was originally furnished with huge sash windows, with curious glazing between the columns – rather like stretcher bond in brickwork (see the photo’ below).

In 1808 Queen Charlotte, the Princesses and the Dukes of Cumberland and Cambridge visited the Thorntons at their ‘Clapham Villa’, and were shown the Greenhouse, but soon after Thornton got into financial difficulties. The Thornton Estate was offered for sale in 1810 when it was described as a ‘most superb villa’ with gardens full of native and exotic species ‘now in the highest state of cultivation’. The map in the sales particulars shows the ‘Greenhouse’ overlooking one of the serpentine lakes.

The estate was on the market again in 1851 when the ‘beautiful conservatory of Portland stone’ was described as ‘commanding views over the pleasure grounds and rich meadow land, which presents the appearance of a small park’.

The estate was bought by a Belgian order of nuns who established the Notre Dame convent and school on the site. New buildings were added, playing fields and tennis courts were laid out, and the girls could row on the serpentine lake and ride ponies in the grounds.

The convent closed in 1939 but its name lives on in the Notre Dame Estate, which was developed on the site of the convent and former Thornton gardens soon after the Second World War.

All that remains today of the pleasure grounds is the Orangery, which serves as an elegant backdrop to a recreation ground in the middle of the Notre Dame Estate. In the early 1950s the writer E.M. Forster, whose great-aunt Marianne was a Thornton, visited Clapham and found ‘no Thornton memorial except a dilapidated Orangery’. He was saddened that the site had been cleared ‘at a time when development was unusually ruthless’.

Unsurprisingly, the windows were the first casualty when the building stood empty, and today the rather forlorn building stands behind security fencing.

The Orangery has been largely without a purpose since the estate was constructed. Drawings by the Borough of Wandsworth Engineer, Surveyor and Architect show that the building was consolidated in 1955 when it was listed at Grade II, and it has had occasional remedial works ever since. The Orangery is on Historic England’s Buildings at Risk Register and, despite much debate and local support, a viable future for the structure remains to be found.

Update October 2025: Private Eye’s architecture correpsondent, ‘Piloti’, wrote about the orangery in the edition dated 17-30 October 2025. More than half of the roof has collapsed and Lambeth Council are seeking external funding to pay for repairs estimated to cost £100,000.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and observations are very welcome – scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page to get in touch.

Tucked in woodland off Sydenham Hill in south London sits a sham ruin. Although it is now hard to imagine, it was once a feature of the ‘beautiful grounds’ of Fairwood, an elegant newly-built villa. This area of London was very much in vogue in the middle of the 19th century, after the arrival of the relocated Crystal Palace put it on the map, and Sydenham Hill became home to a number of distinguished family homes.

Fairwood was built in the early 1860s for David Henry Stone (1812-1890), a businessman, attorney and solicitor who played a significant part in civic life as a magistrate, an alderman, and eventually as Lord Mayor of London. The substantial villa was built to a design by the architectural practise of Banks and Barry: Charles Barry (1823-1900), son of the great architect Sir Charles Barry, worked extensively in the Dulwich and Sydenham area of London, and himself lived a few doors away on Sydenham Hill. The house, stabling and conservatory at Fairwood cost just over £5775 pounds to build, the architects attributing the high cost to the quality materials used and also the ‘large excess of London prices over those prevailing in the country’.

Stone commissioned the garden designers and artificial rock specialists James Pulham & Son to create a ‘Rocky Stream’ in his grounds, as well as what were simply described as ‘Ruins’. A pamphlet written by James Pulham sometime around 1877 records this work being executed in 1863 and 1866, but sadly little other information has survived. Pulham designs often featured local stone, but when unavailable they used brick or rubble coated in their proprietary cement, which could be modelled to perfectly mimic natural rocks. The brick core of part of the Sydenham folly can clearly be seen in the photo’ above.

James Pulham himself described the role such ruins played in a garden or landscape: ‘Emotions of sublimity or beauty are awakened in the mind by castles or other ruins; also by other picturesque objects, as a portion of which may be consistently added to the scene – as an ancient tower on a precipice, forming a portion of the ruins of an old castle – or may be the ruins of an abbey, church, or ancient bridge; all such objects, which, by themselves, strike the imagination as picturesque’.

Stone was elected Lord Mayor of London in 1874 and, with the Mansion House at his disposal, sold Fairwood that same year. The particulars described it as a ‘a very superior family residence’, which had been decorated in the very best taste, ‘regardless of cost’, with all the latest fashions such as decorative Minton tiles. The house was set in over one and a half acres of ‘pleasure grounds’ with a terrace and ‘beautiful woodland walks’. The house changed hands again in 1908, when it was illustrated in the press:

Stone died in 1890 at St Thomas’s Hospital, where he was Treasurer and had an official residence. The houses on Sydenham Hill were mostly held on 99 year leases granted by the landowners, Dulwich College: after the Second World War there was little interest in taking on the leases, and the houses were almost all demolished.

Today, Sydenham Hill Wood is managed by the London Wildlife Trust and is a very popular amenity. The foundations of the grand villas are lost under a blanket of ivy and shrubs, with only the occasional glimpse of a piece of masonry poking through the undergrowth. Only the folly stands as a reminder that part of this woodland was once suburban gardens in the very latest taste.

There’s more on the woodland here https://www.wildlondon.org.uk/nature-reserves/sydenham-hill-wood-and-coxs-walk

David Henry Stone’s cousin was the Portsmouth MP William Henry Stone, who came into possession of follies when he bought Leigh Park (now Staunton Country Park) in Hampshire https://thefollyflaneuse.com/the-shell-house-leigh-park-havant-hampshire/

Thank you for reading and please scroll down to the bottom of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or comments.

Sir Christopher Wren died 300 years ago on 8 March 1723. The Folly Flâneuse thought she would mark the anniversary by looking at a two examples of his work that served as garden ornaments – once surplus to their original requirements.

In 1829 the churchwardens of St Antholin on Budge Row, rebuilt to a design by Wren after the Great Fire of London, were informed that the church was in need of repair, and that it was ‘indispensably necessary to take down and rebuild the upper part of the spire’. The Bishop of London was petitioned for permission to borrow the £1,000 needed to cover the cost of repairs to the church, and an appeal was then launched allowing work to begin. An entirely new spire was erected, leaving the old one in need of a new home…

The original spire was bought by a wealthy printer called Robert Harrild (1780-1853) and re-erected as an ornament in the garden of Round Hill, his villa at Sydenham in south London. Here he was laying out ‘extensive grounds’ on land he had reclaimed from ‘wild common’. And happily there it has remained, despite much of his former estate being developed for housing in the 1960s. The spire is listed at grade II and was restored in 2019.

St Antholin’s replacement spire, as erected in 1829, did not have such a happy ending. Despite a public outcry, and an initial promise to leave the tower and spire standing, St Antholin’s was demolished in its entirety in 1875 to enable the construction of Queen Victoria Street. The tower and spire were sold to a building contractor for 5 Guineas and according to contemporary accounts he recouped his investment by selling the stone at 3 shillings a barrowload. This plaque originally marked the site of St Antholin’s on Budge Row, but was moved a short distance to the wall of St Mary Aldermary early this century.

Temple Bar, completed in 1672, was one of the city gates designed by Wren. It stood on Fleet Street for two centuries, and was the last surviving city gate until it was taken down in 1878, with the carefully numbered stones being taken into storage.

The masonry was acquired a decade later by Sir Henry Bruce Meux, who had the gate rebuilt as a feature on his estate at Theobalds in Hertfordshire. The move was unpopular, and throughout the 20th century there were appeals that it should be returned to the City of London. In 1911, following the death of Lady Meux, it was proposed to make the gate the centrepiece of a grand garden in front of the Adelphi Terrace, and in the 1950s the architectural practice of Seely and Paget proposed re-erecting it on Ludgate Hill. The eminent photographic studio of Bedford Lemere & Co. worked with the architects to create a photomontage of how the arch would look in its new location.

Each proposal failed until The Temple Bar Trust was established in 1976 with a new determination to save the deteriorating structure. With the support of the City of London Corporation, Temple Bar was eventually re-erected as part of the Paternoster Square development in 2004.

You can read more about the Wren300 programme of events here https://wren300.org

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts are always welcome – please scroll down to the comments section below to get in touch.

Although initially mocked in some quarters as Prince Albert’s ‘folly’, the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park was a triumph. But the agreement had always been that the great glass gallery, which had become known as the ‘Crystal Palace’, would be removed after the fair was over, and the parkland setting then restored. But as the Earl of Carlisle wrote when that time approached, ‘the destruction of the Crystal Palace would be as perverse and senseless an act of vandalism as could be perpetuated’. Moving the building to an ‘open and accessible spot’ outside the city seemed the most sensible solution, but one man had other ideas…

In May 1852 The Builder magazine ran a feature entitled ‘Proposal for the Conversion of the Great Exhibition Building into a Prospect Tower 1000 Feet High’. The author was Charles Burton, who called himself an architect, although he seems to have made his living as an artist. Burton proposed that a tower could be constructed from the materials of the Crystal Palace, giving an opportunity to erect a ‘gigantic tower at so comparatively trifling a cost’. There would be a conservatory at ground level, and four ‘carriages or ascending rooms’ would run on a steam-powered ‘vertical railway’ to take visitors to the top. The tower terminated with a glazed gallery as well as an open platform for the more adventurous.

Burton had produced lithographs giving aerial views of the Crystal Palace, having developed a passion for bird’s-eye views after travelling by balloon over London, and also over the Niagara Falls when he lived in America.

It is not clear how seriously anyone took Burton’s idea, but it was widely discussed in the newspapers. The Kendal Mercury informed its readers that the tower ‘would be as high as St Peter’s, St Paul’s and the Nelson Column, one stuck on top of the other!’.

Burton ended his proposal with the important note that ‘Messrs Fox and Henderson have expressed their conviction that the project could be carried out’. Fox and Henderson were the civil engineers who constructed the Crystal Palace, and who were contracted to take it down. They were presumably pleased that Burton’s plan was rejected, for they received the lucrative contract to rebuild the vast structure at Sydenham (they also received knighthoods).

Revisiting the story some decades later in 1889 a Birmingham Weekly Mercury reporter thought an opportunity had been missed to create a ‘marvellous and beautiful sight’ and he was clearly miffed that France had taken the glory when Gustav Eiffel proved that ‘these giant edifices were possible’. The patriotic paper concluded that ‘it stands to reason that if there are to be great towers in the world England must have one, but a chance of leading the way was lost in 1851’.

Charles Burton remains something of a mystery. He does not seem to appear as an ‘architect’ anywhere except in connection with the tower, and the Charles Burton (1805-1866) who called himself ‘artist’ in the census returns of 1841-1861 is probably our man. When the tower proposal was published in 1852 he was newly-returned to England after a period in the United States. Ironically, his ideas for a building 1,000 feet high might have been better received in America, which in only a few decades would become famed for the development of skyscrapers.

Of course England did later become home to a number of Eiffel Tower lookalikes, of which only the grade I listed Blackpool Tower, constructed in the last decade of the 19th century, survives.

Built in the same period was the tower at New Brighton on the Wirral Peninsula. It was the tallest building in Britain at that date, and built atop a grand Cheshire chateau housing a ballroom. The tower was taken down after the First World War, and the ballroom sadly destroyed by fire in 1969.

Also contemporary, and by far the most ambitious, was the tower planned by Sir Edward Watkin to attract people to the developing London suburbs. This was the first of the British responses to the Eiffel Tower when work began in 1891. The tower was to rise to over 1,000 feet, deliberately out-doing the Parisian original, and it was to be the centrepiece of a grand park. But work was abandoned after only the lowest section was complete, and the site is now home to the Wembley Stadium. The story of the tower featured in Metroland, John Betjeman’s celebration of the suburbs, produced by Edward Mirzoeff. Serendipitously, the film is being shown on BBC4 on Sunday 26 February 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of its first broadcast. There’s more here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cyyqw

Looking at the London skyline today Charles Burton was clearly a man way ahead of his time – the Shard, London’s tallest tower, is 309.6m, or 1016′ high, and was completed around 160 years after Burton’s proposal.

Thank you for reading. Comments are always welcome: please scroll down to the foot of the page to share any thoughts or further information.

In 1947, the British Government decided to mark the 100th anniversary of the Great Exhibition of 1851 with a Festival of Britain, scheduled to open 100 years to the day since the launch of the Great Exhibition, on 3 May 1951. The focus was an exhibition in London, and the area we now know as South Bank was chosen as the venue for the celebration of British achievements past, present and future. A little upriver at Battersea were the complementary Festival Pleasure Gardens. Whilst the tone on the South Bank was ‘intellectual seriousness’, at Battersea all was colour and whimsy, and a highlight was the sparkling grotto, sponsored by Schhh, you know who…

A site at Battersea comprising of ‘thirty-eight acres of allotments […] and a cricket pitch’ was chosen as the venue for the Pleasure Gardens. The project was overseen by James Gardner, a noted exhibition designer, who beat Oliver Messel to the job. He recruited designers, including Osbert Lancaster and John Piper, to help create the gay scene in ‘the English tradition of elegant follies’.

Gardner gave the commission for the proposed grotto to Guy Sheppard (1912-1990), a set and costume designer, who also created the site’s Riverside Theatre where Leonard Sachs presented ‘old-time Song-Saloon shows’. The company set up to run the Pleasure Gardens approached major companies for their support, the best remembered deal produced the famously wacky Guinness Clock, by design partnership Lewitt Him. Drinks manufacturer Schweppes were approached to sponsor the Grotto, perhaps suggesting some rather creative thinking by the team, as the festival had promised to be ‘a tonic to the nation’.

The Grotto consisted of chambers, representing the four elements of Wind, Fire, Earth and Water. In the ‘Temple of the Winds’ Sheppard engineered breezes blowing in from the four points of the compass, accompanied by appropriate sounds. So the north wind carried the tinkling of sleigh bells and the howling of wolves, whilst that from the east brought the chiming of temple bells. The south wind brought the sounds of the jungle, and the west the boom of fog horns to conjure up vast oceans. Completing the sensory experience were aromas wafted in on the moving air – pine from the north, flowers from the south, rich spices from the east, and seaweed from the west. These olfactory delights were provided by ‘Atkinsons’, presumably the long established Mayfair perfume house.

A ramp led to the ‘cave of Fire’, where a bridge carried visitors over what seemed to be the crater of a volcano that bubbled and boiled with molten lava, and next was the chamber dedicated to Earth, where carefully designed lighting shone on stalactites and glittering minerals, whilst a musical fountain glowed ‘pale phosphorescent blue’. Finally there was the ‘magical luminous world’ of Water, built as a coral reef where fish and sea creatures glowed in pools. Passing beneath a waterfall the visitor exited the ‘wonderfully eerie grotto’ in another part of the gardens. Echoing the 18th century experience of the beautiful and the sublime, visitors remembered being enchanted one moment, and then fearful the next as they passed from a gaily lit chamber onto an apparently rickety bridge over a fiery pit.

A note about historic grottoes also appeared in the guidebook. It mentioned Pope’s Grotto at Twickenham, Goldney’s Grotto in Bristol, and the grottoes in the parks at Wimborne St Giles, Stourhead, Pain’s Hill [sic] and Oatlands. One must wonder if this information came from Gardner’s friend Barbara Jones, also busy on both festival sites with ‘various capers’. At that date she was accumulating the information that would appear in Follies and Grottoes only 2 years later in 1953*.

This potted history concluded with a prominent plug for the sponsor: ‘But, as we see in the Pleasure Gardens, the spirit that built and enjoyed these grottoes, the cave-dweller in each of us, still Schweppervesces’ (Schweppes was at this date running an ad campaign with the slogan ‘Schweppervescence lasts the whole drink through’).

The Pleasure Gardens were scheduled to open with the main Festival site on 3 May 1951, one hundred years to the day since the launch of the Great Exhibition, but bad weather delayed the installation, and the gardens did not open until later in the month. The project was a great success with Country Life writing: ‘here is the festive spirit realised with a mixture of landscape, fantasy, flowers and fun which really delights’.

The grotto was a huge draw and visitors were happy to pay the additional 6d to enter (at the end of the 1951 season the proceeds of £9,300 were donated to the National Playing Fields Association). Celebrity visitors included the actor Douglas Fairbanks, and the Yorkshire cricket team, who called in for a visit before playing Surrey at the Oval (it was a draw). But surely the greatest praise came from the British Speleological Association (in brief: people who like caves), whose journal recommended that ‘all cave explorers make an effort to see this […] masterpiece of ingenuity’.

The initial estimate of visitor numbers was 6,000,000, and this figure was comfortably passed with 7,750,000 people enjoying the gardens in 1951. The gardens were originally to be dismantled at the end of the festival, but the public enthusiasm was such that it was agreed to keep them open for another two years, and legislation had to be passed to allow this. In 1952, the soon-to-be architectural historian John Harris found employment manning the entrance to the grotto, and recorded in his memoirs that the then operators were somewhat lacking in scruples, and that perhaps not all the entrance sixpences found their way to the management. In 1953 private operators took a 21 year lease on the gardens, which operated for a number of years before becoming run down, and tarnished by tragedy when a ride collapsed with fatalities in 1972. Thereafter the gardens were gradually diminished until little remained.

An exact date for the demolition of the grotto has not been found, and sadly few photos survive. What a wonderful, vivid experience it must have been. Sadly this post has been rather monochrome, and fails to do justice to the gardens, so to cheer everything up here is the joyous cover of the Festival Guide.

UPDATE February 2023: The Folly Flâneuse was absolutely delighted to hear from Peter Maggs who remembers visiting the Festival Pleasure Gardens on more than one occasion as a child. Here he is in the grotto, and his memories can be found in the comments section at the foot of the page.

* Gardner would continue to talk follies with Barbara Jones, and the second edition  of Follies & Grottoes, published in 1974, featured his drawing of the root house at Spetchley.

For the Guinness Clock see https://www.guinness-storehouse.com/Content/pdf/archive-factsheets/advertising/festival_clock.pdf

Thank you for visiting The Folly Flâneuse. Your thoughts are always welcome, please scroll down if you would like to comment.

Tucked in between towering glass office blocks in the city of London, this diminutive kiosk is an unexpected Turkish delight only moments from Liverpool Street Station. That it has survived in one of the most densely developed parts of London is astonishing, and its history is as colourful as its exterior.

In 1861 a London newspaper announced that ‘Turkish baths are coming rapidly into popularity in the metropolis and in the provinces’. There were a number across London, including one on New Broad Street in the City owned by brothers Henry and James Forder Neville. In 1893, looking for an edge over their competitors, the brothers decided to demolish the existing baths and start over.

Architect George Harold Elphick (1851-1924), whose office was practically next door to the site, designed a flamboyant structure in a Moorish style, cleverly using only a very small footprint at pavement level, with the baths below ground. Elphick also designed the tiles for the interior; based on a pattern used in the Alhambra Palace, they were manufactured by Craven Dunnill in Shropshire. The new facilities, Nevills Turkish Baths, were opened 125 years ago in February 1895 and were widely admired.

The fashion for Turkish baths waned in the 20th century and many were lost; the New Broad Street baths closed in the 1950s. For a decade the building was used for storage, and would surely have been lost to developers had a new use not been found. The building’s saviour was Josef Mourat, a Turkish entrepreneur, who started with a coffee shop in his native country before moving to London and setting up progressively more upmarket dining establishments.

In January 1967 he opened Gallipoli, a ‘definitive Turkish restaurant’, where the very finest cuisine was on offer. After being greeted by a ‘massive doorman dressed in gorgeous attire’ guests could dine before the ‘sensual entertainment’ began at 10pm and 1am prompt. Reviewing the restaurant for the Kensington Post in March 1967 ‘Trencherman’ was impressed by the food and, clearly also an expert on all things terpsichorean, described the cabaret as ‘the best belly dancing this side of Cairo’.

Gallipoli was succeeded by further restaurants and clubs and the Turkish kiosk continues to offer hospitality. It is currently known as the Victorian Bath House and is available for private hire, or you can book a table for exotic cocktails on a Friday evening. But do please invite The Folly Flâneuse to join you. More here https://www.victorianbathhouse.co.uk.

Thanks to friends old and new for the two wonderful illustrations. The Shoreditch Sketcher, aka Phil Dean, and The Folly Flâneuse go back a long way and it is great to feature his work. Find out more here https://www.theshoreditchsketcher.com

The Folly Flâneuse was introduced to the work of Eleanor Crow through her beautiful book Shopfronts of London: in Praise of Small Neighbourhood Shops (Batsford, 2019), and the associated exhibition of her watercolours at the Town House in Spitalfields. See more of her work here http://www.eleanorcrow.com

There’s a brilliant website with a full description of this and other Turkish baths of the period here http://www.victorianturkishbath.org

1814 saw the centenary of the ascension of the House of Hanover to the British throne. Although it was only a few years since George III had celebrated a reign of 50 years, it was decided that a grand national fête would be held in August to mark the occasion, an event which would also commemorate ‘General Peace’ and the anniversary of the ‘Glorious Battle of the Nile’.

The whole of the pageantry in St James’ Park was superintended by Sir William Congreve M.P.; his prowess developing rockets for warfare in the earlier years of the century presumably qualifying him to design the pyrotechnics. The centrepiece was a vast stage-set ‘castle’ which thanks to painted transparencies, lighting and fireworks dramatically transformed from a martial fortress into a Temple of Concord, illustrating Britain’s path from war to peace. The vignettes above illustrate the spectacles and festivities that drew huge crowds to the park.

Another showpiece was the ‘beautiful Chinese bridge’ that was built over the canal. On it was constructed an ‘elegant and lofty pagoda, consisting of seven pyramidal stories’. It was illuminated with gaslights and formed the centrepiece of a huge fireworks display ‘both fixed and missile.’ The canal was the scene of mock naval battles, and there were also pleasure craft in which the public could view the scene from the water. Bands played, and there were food stalls and magnificent marquees in which to dine. Such was the excitement around the celebrations that publishers took presses to the park to issue some prints on the spot.

Sadly timber buildings, fireworks and flaming gas lamps are not good companions, and as midnight approached the pagoda went up in flames, causing two deaths and a number of injuries to the men who were supervising the display. By the time the fire was extinguished the tower was reduced to only one storey and had become ‘a melancholy wreck of its former elegance’. Print makers were quick to issue a reworked view showing the conflagration.

The pagoda was not rebuilt, the bridge was taken down a few years later, and the temporary structures were largely forgotten until the late 1960s when the artist Barbara Jones was asked to design a mural for a new cafe in St. James’ Park. The Cake House, which replaced an earlier cafe of the same name, was designed by Eric Bedford of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, and the cafe deliberately echoed the shape of the marquees erected in 1814.

For the interior Jones created a design for a mural based on the history of the park, with the ornamental buildings of the Grand Jubilee playing a major part. Another of the themes was cows, which traditionally had been kept in the park to provide milk for visitors.

According to Building magazine the mural was executed in ceramic tiles by ‘Richard Parkinson Associates’, presumably the Richard Parkinson better known as a creator of ceramic figures in partnership with his wife, Susan. This company name appears only in this magazine feature of 1970, so the associates were probably Parkinson, Jones, and her assistant Tony Raymond. They were apparently credited in the cafe, but like the rest of the mural this is long gone. The thick file on the building of the cafe, now held in the National Archives, contains a memo which notes only that the interior wall is to be ‘finished in blue mosaic tiles’. No designer or contractor for this work is mentioned.

The refreshment pavilion was officially opened by Mary Wilson, wife of Prime Minister Harold, in February 1970 (apparently she took daily walks in the park whilst resident at No. 10). The blue and white tiles were accentuated by white pedestal tables and fashionable polypropylene stacking chairs in charcoal, light grey and deep blue. Featured in The Daily Mirror a few days after opening the mural was ignored, although the exterior (‘looks like a rather gay tent’) was admired. The queues for the new-fangled self-service system did not go down well, and the reviewer was not impressed by the ‘lukewarm’ soup, or indeed the gateau which was ‘a bit mushy’.

The Cake House survived for more years than the pagoda, but by the end of the 20th century it was considered outmoded with ‘insurmountable functional and structural issues’, and was demolished to make way for Inn the Park, which opened in 2004.

Building within a historic park has always led to criticism. In 1969, as the Cake House was under construction, the Architects’ Journal thought the structure ‘far too intrusive’ for its location in the gardens. In 1998 Sir Michael Hopkins designed its replacement, Inn the Park. The Architects’ Journal reported that it too was ‘wholly unsuited to the site’ but thirty years on, fashion being fickle, the old Cake House was now remembered with fondness for fitting into ‘the landscape as a folly or surprise’.

Big thanks to artist Ed Kluz whose recent show at the John Martin Gallery in London featured the Pagoda bridge and awakened my interest. Read more here https://www.jmlondon.com/exhibitions/facades-by-ed-kluz/

Barbara Jones’s series of designs for the Cake House mural can be seen at Neil Jennings Fine Art’s forthcoming show of works of art on paper by Twentieth Century British women artists at Fisher London, Grays Inn Road Wednesday 20th November- Saturday 30th November 11am-6pm (closed Sunday). For further information follow Neil on instagram @neiljenningsfineart or email neiljennings20@gmail.com

For more on the history of London’s public parks there’s a new show at the charming Garden Museum from 20 November 2019 https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/play-protest-and-pelicans-a-peoples-history-of-londons-royal-parks/

Inn the Park remains but is now a branch of the Benugo chain https://www.benugo.com/partnerships/public-spaces/parks/st-jamess

If there’s one thing you can guarantee about 18th century towers, it is that they will be described using words and phrases that were just as fashionable as the buildings themselves. A tower will always be ‘lofty’ and it will almost certainly ‘command rich and extensive views’. Severndroog Castle was built in 1784 and early descriptions follow this unwritten rule. The panorama today is even richer than it was when the tower was built, with two centuries of London development on show.

The curiously-named tower takes its title from the island fortress of Suvarnadurg, around 80 miles south of Mumbai. In 1755 the stronghold was captured by William James, a Commodore in the service of the East India Company, putting an end to attacks on the company’s trading vessels by the Tulaji Angre and his people. In 1759 James returned to Britain, rich with the booty of his years at sea. Widowed whilst abroad, he now married Anne Goddard, and bought the Park Farm Place estate at Eltham, south of London (but then a parish in Kent). He was given a baronetcy in 1778 but died only a few years later in 1783.

A plaque on the tower records that it was built ‘by the representative of Sir William James.’ This was his wife, Anne, and the tower was initially called ‘Lady James’s Folly’, before becoming known as Severndroog Castle, the anglicised form of Suvarnadurg. The plaque states that it was erected in 1784, immediately after Sir William’s death, although some accounts suggest that work began in his lifetime. The architect was Richard Jupp, surveyor and architect to the East India Company, of which Sir William was a director. Three stories high, with a viewing platform on the roof, the tower was used for banquets and as a museum for the weaponry and trophies he had brought back from his travels.

The tower quickly became a tourist attraction, and only a few years after completion was celebrated in the poem ‘Shooter’s Hill’ by the (then) popular poet Robert Bloomfield:

This far-seen monumental tower
Records th’achievments of the brave,
And Angria’s subjugated power,
Who plundered on the eastern wave.

The estate was sold by Lady James’s descendants in 1812 and then had a succession of owners, many of whom allowed public access. In 1829, with the fashion for folly towers on the wane, it was described as ‘nondescript’ and a few years later faced destruction. In 1847 the Duke of Wellington sanctioned a plan to demolish the tower and in its place construct a ‘grand cemetery and mausoleum’, with 10,000 catacombs for the remains of officers of the British army and navy, as well as those in the service of the East India Company. Happily for Severndroog Castle the scheme was never implemented and in the 1920s the London County Council bought the estate and opened it as a public park.

The LCC opened a popular tea-room on the first floor and charged one penny to climb the tower and take in the view. For a period Severndroog Castle flourished, but as the decades passed there was little investment and the tower started to look a little sorry for itself – a Country Life article in 1984 said that ‘a large question mark now hangs over its future.’ With the demise of the LCC (by now Greater London Council) Severndroog Castle passed into the care of Greenwich Council in 1986, and access was severely limited.

There was hope of salvation in 2004 when the BBC television programme Restoration featured Severndroog, but it didn’t win the vote. Galvanised, the local community pressed on with fundraising, and in 2014 the Severndroog Building Preservation Trust succeeded in reopen ing the folly to the public and offering refreshments and a series of special events. Check the website for opening times of the tower and the cafe https://www.severndroogcastle.org.uk

A footnote…

Big thanks to Twentieth Century Posters for permission to use the poster featuring Severndroog. Explore the wonderful works they have for sale here https://www.twentiethcenturyposters.com

Writing in Tatler magazine in 1961 the writer, and champion of the British countryside, Ronald Blythe, questioned why follies were common in the countryside, but seldom found in the city. Long before the ‘concrete and glass’ that constituted the cities in Blythe’s mind, costly and extravagant ornamental structures could be found on the streets of the capital. These were the triumphal arches built to celebrate the coronation of a new monarch.

Three arches, created as part of the pomp and pageantry surrounding the coronation of James I, feature in a new exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Ed Kluz. Facades, his new show at the John Martin Gallery in Mayfair, looks at London and includes ‘reconstructions’, in paper collage and oil, of the arches. Always intended to be temporary additions to the London streets, they were built in wood and then plastered, painted, and peopled with ‘engines’ – automata animated from behind the scenes.

The James I coronation pageant was a cause for particular celebration, as it had been postponed due to an outbreak of plague. The 1603 epidemic, coming soon after James I had inherited the throne, caused devastation in London and further afield. The festivities were held over until the following year, when they also marked the city’s recovery and resilience.

Stephen Harrison, architect of the arches, thought his designs would live on only in ‘the tongues and memories of men’, but he hadn’t counted on London’s flourishing print trade. The James I arches were recorded for posterity in a series of annotated engravings, thus allowing Ed Kluz’s programme of ‘rebuilding’ in 2019.

The tradition of building temporary triumphal arches continued over the centuries, as did the publishing of plates:

©Victoria and Albert Museum, E.424_1898. Triumphal arch designed by William Kent. Erected and painted on the West End of Westminster Stall for the Coronation of his Majesty King George the Second and Queen Caroline. October the 11th 1727.

A new take on the genre was Eric Bedford’s design for illuminated steel arches across The Mall at the coronation of the Queen Elizabeth II.

To see Ed’s vibrant works and learn more, you will need to visit the John Martin Gallery on Albemarle Street before 5 October. As a further incentive other works include palaces, pleasure pavilions and pagodas.

https://www.jmlondon.com/exhibitions/facades-by-ed-kluz/

James Wyatt produced plans for a ‘Saxon Hexagon Tower’ for the 6th Earl of Coventry in the last years of the 18th century. After his death in 1809 it was sold and over the following centuries it became the home of a printing workshop, a retreat for members of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and a farmhouse. In 1974 it became the centrepiece of a country park, and it remains so today.

Of course nothing you have read above is news. Broadway tower is one of the best loved follies in Britain, having appeared in countless films and tv programmes. The very flexible tower has even featured in a recent advertisement for property developer Aldermore.

The reason The Folly Flâneuse is featuring it here is because without this tower there would not be the book that is by every folly-spotters side: Follies, Grottoes & Garden Buildings.

Broadway Tower captured Gwyn Headley’s imagination as a child and he remained passionate about the subject, first publishing a book about follies in 1986 with Dutchman Wim Meulenkamp as co-author. In FG&GB they updated their original research and presented it in a gazetteer format, so that the book is fabulously user-friendly. 2019 sees the twentieth anniversary of its publication, and The Folly Flâneuse thinks this is a cause for celebration. Cheers!

Gwyn is shown above, aged 5,  looking loathe to leave Broadway Tower. Wim’s introduction to the genre came aged 13 when he was intrigued by the sham wooden bridge at Kenwood, near London.

When studying at Utrecht University in the 1970s, Wim took a module on the English landscape park and headed to the library to write a paper on Rousham. On the shelves he discovered Barbara Jones’s Follies and Grottoes and he too was hooked.

His doctoral subject was Mad Jack Fuller, creator of these wonderful follies at Brightling in Sussex, and he recalls that ‘whilst everyone else did their postgraduate theses on colour schemes in Siennese painting 1535-1560, and the like, we actually had inordinate fun.’

A mere two decades later Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp are working on a new book – good things come to those who wait. In the meantime, you can hear Gwyn and Wim talk at an event organised by The Folly Fellowship in London this autumn. Final details are to be confirmed but keep checking the website for details http://follies.org.uk/index.php/this-year/

More on the Broadway Tower here https://broadwaytower.co.uk

The sham bridge at Kenwood has just emerged from restoration https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/environment/kenwood-house-sham-bridge-restoration-almost-finished-1-5874808

Ed Kluz, who kindly shared his photos of Brightling is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work often features follies. Visit his website or follow him on instagram @edkluz https://www.edkluz.co.uk. He will reappear in these pages before too long.