In 2006 the Royal Mail issued a set of commemorative stamps featuring ‘Modern Architecture’ in England and Scotland. Benham of Folkestone, the ‘independent collectables retailer’, spotted a link between these new buildings and some structures that might have been thought just as radical in their own day – follies. The company issued a set of first day covers juxtaposing the Modern Architecture stamps with examples of The British Folly.
The company linked each modern building with a folly in the same general area and called the series Architecture: the changing face of Britain. The brief summary of follies on the back of the envelope ended with a sentence with which readers of these posts will concur: ‘The British love of the eccentric statement of individuality still, thank goodness, thrives’.
The 1st class stamp featured 30 St Mary Axe in London (architect: Sir Norman Foster), better known by its nickname of The Gherkin. This was paired with the Chinese pagoda in Kew Gardens.
Next up was the 42p stamp with a photograph of Maggie’s Centre in Dundee (architect: Frank Gehry), a specialist cancer care centre. This was pictured alongside the tower and temple on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.
Birmingham’s new Selfridges department store (architect: Future Systems), clad in silver buttons, shared an envelope with Perrott’s Folly in Edgbaston, Birmingham and the 44p stamp.
The Downland Gridshell (architect: Edward Cullinan Architects) at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, near Chichester in Sussex, was paired with the Nore Folly on the first day cover for the 50p stamp.
On the 64p stamp was An Turas, a ferry shelter/landscape ornament (architect: Sutherland Hussey Harris) on the Isle of Tiree, and this was shown alongside McCaig’s Tower in Oban.
Finally, the 72p stamp showed The Deep, the aquarium in Hull in Yorkshire (architect: Sir Terry Farrell). This was paired with a folly many miles away, but still in Yorkshire: the sham Stainborough Castle at Wentworth Castle near Barnsley.
The text on the Royal Mail’s own first day cover for the Modern Architecture collection suggested that ‘buildings now can shimmer like beetles, wriggle like serpents, rise above the clouds. Anything that can be imagined can be built’. But as the structures pictured on Benham’s covers show, folly builders have been doing just that for centuries.
The advantage of writing about modern architecture is that the architect is known. Of the follies featured here the pagoda at Kew is by Sir William Chambers; the tower on Carlton Hill in Edinburgh was begun to a design by Robert Burn but completed by Thomas Bonnar and the Greek-inspired National Monument is by C.R. Cockerell and W.H. Playfair. The designers of the other structures are yet to be identified with any certainty.
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