Earsham Hall stands near Bungay in Suffolk, but is actually just over the county boundary and in Norfolk. In the later years of the eighteenth century it was home to William Windham and within the grounds stood this elegant classical pavilion, which terminated a vista. It was originally built as a greenhouse, but in 1784 the architect Sir John Soane was asked to convert the building, which had a front ‘enriched with columns, niches and other ornaments’, into a ‘music-room’.

Arriving at Earsham in August 1784, John Soane quickly sketched out the proposed alterations to the greenhouse. Windham (c.1706-1789) must have been happy with the new design as the masons were quickly instructed to start work. Soane made eight further visits to check on progress, before submitting his bill in 1786.

Soane published a section of the building in his Plans, Elevations and Sections of Buildings Erected in the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Hertfordshire et caetera [sic] of 1778. Plate XLV shows the interior and the text gives a comprehensive picture of the Music Room when work was complete: ‘The ceiling is highly finished with stucco ornaments in compartments, as are also the circular ends; the walls are stuccoed and decorated with paintings in chiaros oscuro and other enrichments. The chimney-piece is of white marble, and the floor is paved; it being with the possessor to have the building as elegant as possible.’ The paintings are gone, and the fire surround removed, but the beautiful plasterwork and paved floor survive.

Frustratingly, Soane’s published description is ambiguous – he notes that the building was ‘intended for a greenhouse, and completed for that purpose’. Was the greenhouse also a Soane design, or is it the work of another architect? Soane did not publish an elevation of the building, although his bill to Windham notes that he made a drawing of the ‘outside’. Greater minds than the Flâneuse have failed to reach a conclusion, although all can agree that the building we see today is an absolute delight.

The estate was maintained into the early years of the twentieth century, with the gardens, then owned by Captain Meade, being opened for fetes and flower shows. Regular readers will know that the Flâneuse loves a diversion, so she was intrigued to discover that one of the ‘well-known floriculturalists’ who exhibited was Mr H. Rider Haggard, better known as the author of adventure stories. In the 1940s the estate was dispersed, with the house being sold to a school. Captain Meade retained ownership of the Music Room, which gradually disappeared inside an overgrown shrubbery.

In 1953 Ian Nairn, soon to become admired as a journalist and broadcaster, was an RAF officer stationed in Norfolk. During flights he looked out for anything of architectural interest: spotting the pavilion from the air, he returned to explore on foot. He shared his find with Dorothy Stroud, the ‘Inspectress’ of the Sir John Soane Museum in London, and she included the Music Room in her article on Soane’s early works published in the Architectural Review in 1957 (as Gillian Darley has noted, Miss Stroud did not acknowledge Nairn’s discovery). It was probably at the instigation of Nairn and/or Stroud that the National Buildings Record commissioned photos of Earsham in 1954, showing that the building was then being used as a rather elegant junkroom.

One of the Directing Editors of the Architectural Review was Nikolaus Pevsner. In 1959 he visited Earsham to see the Music Room and, having fought his way through the shrubbery to reach the building, he described it as ‘going to rack and ruin’. Concerned for the future of the building, he suggested it might find a new home at Portmeirion, the Welsh village where Clough Williams-Ellis was rehousing architectural waifs and strays. The elegant garden building was described by Pevsner as a ‘little gem’ and a ‘peach for Portmeirion’, but before any further action could be taken the building was listed at grade I in December 1959, ending any question of moving the structure.

The school closed in 1973 and a few years later Earsham Hall became home to the Derham family. The house is their home, and they run a number of businesses from the former stables and ancillary buildings.

The Music Room remained with the Meade family, and in the 1990s work began to convert it into a holiday let. Renovation was not fully complete when the buildings, adjacent workshops in various stages of conversion, together with the overgrown kitchen garden, were brought to the market by Savills. Happily the Derham family was the purchaser, and the properties have been reunited with the house, offices and pleasure grounds.

The house and gardens are private, but open for occasional tours. The courtyard is home to an antiques centre, shops and tearooms and you can glimpse the house as you drive in. Their is currently no public access to the Music Room, but the plan is for it to be available as a holiday rental in due course: the Flâneuse is grateful to the Derham family for permission to see this gorgeous garden ornament. You can read more about the businesses and special events at Earsham Hall here.

Williams-Ellis missed out on a second music pavilion. In 1957 it was suggested that the facade of the Music Room in Lancaster might find a home at Portmeirion. Happily, that too was saved to remain in situ, and it now houses a Landmark Trust apartment, with magnificent plasterwork in the principal room.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are welcome, as is further information. Please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch.

Henry Wyatt lived at Farmhill, an estate on the edge of Stroud, in Gloucestershire. In 1834 he built an arch at the end of a new drive to his house, with an engraved stone tablet announcing that the memorial was erected to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the British Colonies. His house is gone, and the land developed but, after some near misses, the arch survives.

Wyatt (c.1786-1847) was described as ‘Banker’ on the 1841 census return and he also served as a magistrate in Stroud. Little more is known of his life, although he was described in 1871 as having lived in ‘great esteem and usefulness’. He may have been present at the meeting of the Stroud Anti-Slavery Association in the summer of 1832, when a number of ‘eloquent speeches’ were given, and we know for certain that in 1838 he demanded the ‘complete emancipation’ of enslaved apprentices in the British Colonies.

The full inscription on Wyatt’s arch, seen as one entered his grounds, reads:

ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE THE ABOLITION
OF SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH COLONIES,
THE FIRST OF AUGUST, A.D.MDCCCXXXIV

On the inner side are the words:

DEDIT DEUS LIBERTATEN
DETUR DEO GLORIA
(God gave freedom. Glory to God).

In December 1932 it was proposed that Farmhill House, which had stood empty for some time, be demolished. The estate was to be ‘divided into suitable plots for the erection of good class residences’. In 1933 it was announced that Council houses were to be built near the arch at Paganhill, and indignant local residents protested that this would ‘greatly depreciate’ the value of their homes. The local newspaper reported bluntly that the Council took ‘no action’ in response, and a housing estate was soon under construction near the arch.

By 1958 the arch was under threat. A local newspaper announced that it was ‘definitely to come down’ after the local authorities agreed that the ‘expense of repairing it was not justified’, and that it should not be a burden on taxpayers. Stroud Urban Council’s Finance Committee agreed to contact the Ministry of Works, asking them to remove the arch from the list of buildings of special architectural interest. The council then planned to pull down the arch and, in a rather paltry act of recompense, ‘erect a plaque in lieu’.

As discussions continued into 1959 it was clear that there were divisions within the powers-that-be. Councillor Stephens thought it a ‘monstrosity’ that ‘stuck out like a sore thumb’, but Councillor Horsfall thought it a ‘matter of history and tradition’ that the town should be proud of.

The ’eminent architect’ Clough Williams-Ellis was contacted by the Ministry of Housing, which body thought he might be able to give the arch a home at Portmeirion, the village he had created in North Wales. Clough agreed that it sounded a ‘most eligible inmate’ for his ‘Home for Fallen Buildings’, but his first wish was that it should remain in Stroud. In a letter to the Times he proposed moving it away from the ‘pedestrian’ housing estate and re-erecting it as the entrance to the town’s park. Clough began to lobby the Ministry of Works, asking Robert Cooke MP to do a ‘little wand waving’, but the Ministry declined to offer a grant. Gloucestershire County Council raised no objections to demolition and the arch seemed doomed.

If the arch was condemned, Clough announced that he was willing to give the ‘little pet of classical elegance’ a home. He had in mind a ‘superb position’ for it at Portmeirion, where it would stand at the head of the broad harbour steps. There, he wrote, it would ‘have the company of other distinguished but slighted monuments’.

Meanwhile, the city of Hull was celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of abolitionist and local boy William Wilberforce (1759-1833). The story of the arch reached the council and, horrified at the potential loss of the important monument, Hull’s Town Clerk wrote to Stroud Urban Council asking that they did not ‘destroy the arch’ before Hull’s councillors had discussed the possibility of dismantling it and re-erecting it in the garden of Wilberforce House.

With no grant support forthcoming the Chairman of Stroud District Council began to lose his patience, stating that ‘as the organisations who were so interested in its restoration appear to have no funds’ there would need to be a public appeal. He was perhaps surprised by the strength of local support for the arch, and after a £500 donation from an anonymous resident, the monument was granted a reprieve. It was restored in 1960-61, and subsequent work over the years, including a recent thorough renovation, has kept the monument in good condition.

One mystery which the Flâneuse has not been able to solve is what happened to the fine iron gates which were still in situ in 1959. Historic England documents give contradictory information – the listing record notes that the gates are now at ‘Doddington Hall’ but the 2013 publication Slavery and the British Country House states that they are now at ‘Dodington House’. Please get in touch if you have further information.

Today the arch has an extra level of protection. In 2007 its listing status was upgraded to II* as part of a programme to recognise historic buildings associated with the slave trade. The arch is believed to be the earliest memorial built to commemorate the abolition of slavery.

A stylised view of arch is also the logo of the adjoining Archway school which was built when Wyatt’s park was developed for housing.

For more on Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion, his Home for Fallen Buildings, see this excellent new publication Portmeirion: The Architecture of Pleasure by Sarah Baylis.

Thank you for reading. Comments are always welcome. You can get in touch via the comments box at the foot of the page.

In 1953 Barbara Jones published Follies & Grottoes, a ‘handsome book on a fascinating subject’. It was the first book to look at follies in any depth, and was well-received. Almost twenty years later it was announced that there would be a revised edition, for whilst the first edition was remembered as a pioneering book, it was ‘not a comprehensive survey’. Upon publication in November 1974 (fifty years ago this week) the new edition was judged ‘double the size and more than twice as good’.

Constable & Co. commissioned the first edition after Jones and Ralph Arnold, one of the directors of the publishing house, had become friends – Arnold had given Jones one of her first jobs in illustration in 1938. In February 1953 Bookseller magazine announced that ‘Barbara Jones has completed her long-expected work on Follies and Grottoes – a blend of melancholy, horror, genial extravagance and elegant conceits’.

In 1972 Jones was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to allow her to ‘revise and extend’ two of her books: The Unsophisticated Arts (1951) and Follies and Grottoes. The funding allowed her to travel across the nation to revisit follies and explore the many new ones which she had been made aware of since 1953. The book was originally to be published in 1973 and Constable & Co. plugged it as forthcoming in November 1972, but Jones had so much new material to work with that it would be November 1974 before the book was in the shops. It was priced at a then substantial £10: the reviewer for the Birmingham Daily Post wrote that the ‘mammoth’ book was ‘surely the last word on the subject’* with the caveat ‘as it should be at that price’.

One criticism of the 1st edition was the paucity of images, with Clough Williams-Ellis in The Spectator describing Jones’s ‘rather scratchy sketches’ as ‘starvation rations’. As well as including more follies, the 2nd edition also featured many more illustrations, although all are printed in black and white. These were mainly by Jones herself, but there are a handful by artist friends such as Mary Adshead (above), James Gardner, Bill Howell and Raymond Fieldhouse. Reviewing the new edition for the Times Literary Supplement, Julian Barnes summed up what Jones had achieved: ‘It is wholly thanks to Barbara Jones that the wider public knows about, let alone cares about, the towers, ruins, grottoes, tunnels, and other architectural oddities which adorn the countryside’.

Follies & Grottoes was featured in The Times in November 1974 as one of their recommendations of ‘Lovely presents for lovely people’, and the article was illustrated with one of Jones’s ‘dramatic ink drawings’: a view of the conical folly at Barwick Park (above). The Scotsman gave the book a mention, clearly delighted to find the Pineapple at Dunmore on the cover of the new edition.

Follies & Grottoes has long been out of print, so look out for a second-hand copy if it isn’t already on your bookshelves.

*Apparently not.

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When Barbara Jones published Follies and Grottoes in 1953, she made no mention of the coastal village that architect Clough Williams-Ellis had been creating at Portmeirion since 1925. Reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, Laurence Whistler thought this was a ‘curious’ omission as he believed the whole conception could be described as folly.

Clough, as he was always known, had bought a hillside site on the Welsh coast and extended an existing house as a hotel. On the slope down to the sea he developed a village of houses and pavilions in a variety of architectural styles. Some of the buildings were rescued from houses facing the wrecker’s ball and Clough himself described the place as a ‘home for fallen buildings’.

Laurence Whistler’s description of the site in 1953 perfectly catches the atmosphere of the village:

‘In gaiety of colour, in exuberance of design, in its complete indifference to the surrounding slate-grey Puritan world of the mountains (and in the frivolity of some of the materials employed) Port Meirion is a folly on a generous scale, expressive of the cultured Briton’s perennial craving for Mediterranean warmth.’

Jones took note, and Portmeirion featured in the 1974 2nd edition where it was described succinctly as ‘a complex of hotel buildings and ornamental conceits, new and re-erected, most beautifully arranged around a small bay’. She was particularly interested in the Bristol Colonnade, a structure added to Portmeirion in 1959, but which she had written about in its previous incarnation.

The Bristol Colonnade started life in the middle of the 18th century as a garden building housing a cold bath. It stood in the grounds of Arno’s Court at Brislington near Bristol, the seat of William Reeve, an iron smelter.

Reeve’s estate featured a number of other fanciful buildings including a triumphal arch and battlemented stables known as the ‘Black Castle’, but as Barbara Jones scrawled in her research notes, the ‘Bath House’ was ‘Mr Rs most charming whim’.

By the 1830s the ‘gardens and cold baths’ were being operated by a Mr Clark as a ‘delightful retreat for the Gentry and Public in general’. In 1912 the antique dealers Little & Barber took over the Black Castle as a showroom for their wares. Visitors could explore the surrounding lawns and gardens where a ‘special feature’ was the classical building with bath.

The elegant building contained a central chamber with sunken bath, and a fine plaster work cornice and ceiling. In August 1939 Lord Derwent, Chairman of the Georgian Group of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (the group would later become a charity in its own right: the Georgian Group) wrote to The Times asking that ‘this unique building be scheduled’. Sadly, world events got in the way and the bath was damaged by bombs during the Second World War.

Jones described it in the 1954 edition of Follies & Grottoes as ‘delicate and pretty’ with plasterwork that was a ‘wreathing of waves and masks, shells and dolphins’. She concluded it was all of the ‘greatest elegance’ and regretted that by then the  building was only of interest to the local vandals.

The photographs in her files show that the plasterwork was already badly damaged when she was researching for her book, and by the time it was published she had to describe the decoration in the past tense ‘for a later visitor reports that now the plaster is down.’

A 1954 article on the follies at Arno’s Castle (prompted by the publication of Jones’s Follies and Grottoes) warned that the building needed ‘attending to very soon’ or it would be lost. But, despite protests from the Council for the Preservation of Ancient Bristol, the local council decided to demolish the scheduled ancient monument to allow a road-widening scheme.

Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) came to the rescue. After negotiation with the building’s then owner, the Bristol Tramway and Carriage Company, the Ministry of Works agreed that the facade of the bath house could be moved to Portmeirion to join what the writer Jan Morris called the ‘merry architectural jumble’.

In 1957 Clough commissioned ‘devoted’ Bristol architects Burrough and Hannan to produce a plan and elevation of the ‘Arno’s Bath House’, with each stone carefully numbered. The exterior masonry was taken down stone-by-stone by a builder who specialised in church restorations and taken to Wales. Clough chose a site in the heart of his village for his new acquisition, and then stood back and admired the work of his Master Mason, William Davies, as he turned the ‘intimidating stone heaps’ into what became known as the Bristol Colonnade. The building was complete in October 1958 when the Bristol Evening Post sent a photographer to capture the ‘really magnificent’ colonnade. It was officially opened in 1959, and was listed at Grade II* in 1971.

As Portmeirion grew to its ‘intended size and shape’ with Clough’s ‘imagined picture being gradually filled in and realised’, the guidebooks were constantly updated. They were just as colourful and charming as the village itself.

The Bristol Colonnade was only a little over a decade old when it appeared in two television broadcasts. Bird’s Eye View: the Englishman’s Home was first shown in April 1969 and was filmed entirely from a helicopter. The commentary, in verse and prose, was by John Betjeman who asks ‘What fair Mediterranean port is this, stumbling to the sea?’

Producer Edward Mirzoeff had so much material from filming the Portmeirion section that he created a ‘little spin-off using the trims and out-takes’. This was shown on BBC2 in June 1969 with a commentary by Clough himself. The good news is that both are available to watch today, as is a later tribute by musician and folly-fan Jools Holland.

For Bird’s Eye View: the Englishman’s Home see https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p013ypx0/birds-eye-view-the-englishmans-home

And for Bird’s Eye View: Portmeirion visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUufnXCSrVQ

And equally enchanting is Jools Holland’s 2002 film with boogie-woogie soundtrack https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p03lwzhl/afoot-again-in-the-past-portmeirion

Thank you for reading and do please share any thoughts in the comments box at the foot of the page.

Sir Clough Williams-Ellis is best remembered for the enchanting fantasy village of Portmeirion in North Wales. But not far away is Plas Brondanw, his own home, where he created an intimate garden, and high above the house constructed a magnificent folly.

Williams-Ellis married Amabel Strachey in 1915. He was at that date serving in the Welsh Guards, and his Commanding Officer suggested that perhaps a silver salver might be an appropriate wedding gift from his fellow soldiers. Williams-Ellis politely suggested that he would prefer a ruin, and went on to explain that he had the perfect site on a ‘rocky eminence’ above his house. The baffled Commanding Officer agreed to the request, but concluded gruffly ‘it’s an odd sort of wedding present, I must say.’

Hurray for the Commanding Officer, for lovely as a silver salver might be, what better wedding gift could there be than the wonderful sham ruin which Williams-Ellis designed for the hilltop, and which stands as a monument to its designer (the ‘other great Welsh architect’ as he would call himself, pointing to a statue of Inigo Jones in his garden).

The Williams-Ellises began to plant the hillside  on which the tower would stand when on leave from active service (Amabel was a nurse), but they had to wait a little longer to see their wedding present become reality. The tower was eventually built by the estate team between the wars  – work was fitted around remodelling the house and garden at Plas Brondanw, and the creation of the wonderful colourful confection that is Portmeirion.

Across the road from the house are gates from which a path ascends past the ‘Brondanw Pagoda’, a little Chinoiserie pavilion painted in the yellow and blue favoured by the architect across his small estate.

The steep climb is rewarded on arrival at the Brondanw Tower (aka Castel Brondanw or Pentwr) which stands on what Williams-Ellis described as the ‘rocky glacier-scarred summit of the mount’. Christopher Hussey, writing in Country Life in 1957, described this part of the garden as ‘entirely Picturesque’, and in the spirit of the great Regency landowners who ‘turned their estates into landscape pictures’.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Williams-Ellis was disappointed to be turned down for military service on account of his age (57). He later grumbled that his ‘second world war service amounted to no more than undistinguished membership of my local home guard’. The folly however did see active service as a decidedly dramatic lookout tower.

Trees and shrubs now surround the ruin, but a climb up to the battlements brings you above the tree-line for magnificent views of Snowdonia and to the sea. The Folly Flâneuse was a little unlucky with the weather…

Plas Brondanw is open for visits and, even in the drizzle, is a complete delight  https://www.plasbrondanw.com

Thank you for reading. If you have any comments on the tower, or any other landscape ornament, please scroll down to the comments box below.