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.

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.

Hail, Castle Howard! Hail, Vanbrugh’s noble dome
Where Yorkshire in her splendour rivals Rome!

Thus wrote John Betjeman in a poem composed for Bird’s-Eye View: The Englishman’s Home, a documentary scripted and mellifluously-narrated by Betjeman, which was first shown on BBC2 in April 1969. Many great houses are featured in the film, but a highlight for the Folly Flâneuse is Castle Howard, in North Yorkshire.

The ‘bird’s-eye view’ was from a helicopter, an Alouette 3, which the BBC had rented for three years for use by programme makers. The first flight didn’t get off to a good start: it was misty, and the intercom failed, leaving the team unable to communicate. Betjeman soon found he was not at all keen on being airborne. Ever resourceful, he passed producer Edward Mirzoeff a note which said ‘Please can we go home now?’ He remained largely desk-bound from then on.

Mirzoeff worked with editor Ted Roberts to create the films (there was a whole series of Bird’s Eye Views), which Betjeman then watched before writing the commentary, often in verse. When he needed peace and quiet to write he retreated to a glorified cupboard, used for making tea, which he called his ‘composition cell’. It was in this spartan space that the mock-heroic ode ‘Castle Howard’ was written.

In the film, the helicopter swoops over the rooftops of the mansion before lingering over the magnificent mausoleum, built to a design by Hawksmoor in the early 18th century, whilst Betjeman drawls in his inimitable sombre style:

But what are wealth and pomp of worldly state?
To yonder mausoleum soon or late,
Up those broad steps will go great Howard’s dust –
A journey no man makes before he must.

‘Castle Howard’ was first published in The Listener, 2 June 1977. It was recently republished in a Betjeman anthology, Harvest Bells: New and Uncollected Poems, edited by Kevin J. Gardner, Bloomsbury, 2019.

Thanks to the wonderful BBC iplayer you can watch Bird’s-Eye View, and hear the poem in full. Castle Howard is about 17 minutes in, but watch the whole film for glimpses of Stowe and Hadlow Castles, Stourhead, Blenheim, Portmeirion and much more https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p013ypx0/birds-eye-view-the-englishmans-home

The house and landscape at Castle Howard need little introduction, but you can read more on the website, which gives the latest information on visiting. There is also some more recent stunning aerial footage of the house and mausoleum https://www.castlehoward.co.uk

Mirzoeff’s recollections of working with Betjeman were published in Standpoint magazine. You can read the whole article here https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/january-february-2015/text-january-february-2015-travels-with-john-betjeman-edward-mirzoeff-metro-land/