In the 18th century Bank House in Wisbech became home to the Peckover family, and as well as providing a family home it housed their banking business, which became a great success. Over time they acquired further land and extended the gardens behind the adjacent properties, and built garden buildings including this striking summerhouse. In 1943 the house and grounds were given to the National Trust by the last surviving descendant, and the property was renamed ‘Peckover House’ to commemorate the family.

An exact date for the summerhouse seems hard to find: the National Trust guidebook simply states that it was built in the 19th century. It was extant by 1877 when the summerhouse, and its associated garden layout, are clearly shown on the Ordnance Survey town plan of Wisbech published in that year.

The summerhouse was described in that entertaining annual compendium of words and pictures The Saturday Book. In the volume for 1959 Olive Cook (1912-2002) wrote an article on follies in which she wrote that the Palladian temples ‘with which our island is so thickly strewn’ were too rational to be classed as follies. At Peckover however she found the quirky garden pavilion to be ‘a true folly’. The article was accompanied by photos taken by her husband, Edwin Smith (1912-1971), many of whose works are now in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Cook wrote of the pavilion that its ‘outline suggests the Orient’, but it was the interior which particularly caught her attention: ‘inside there is a grotesquely rusticated pedestal table in stone, with a gigantic stone melon fastened to its top’ (no, it doesn’t look like a melon – keep reading). Cook wrote that the setting too was impressive, with palm-trees, incongruous in the ‘icy winds of the Fens’, making ‘a mad attempt to substantiate this dream of the East.’

Although the exotic planting around the arbour was lost in the 20th century, historic photographs of the garden can be found in the National Trust Collections. They can’t be reproduced here for copyright reasons, but this 1904 view of a Dracaena australis in flower at the family’s neighbouring property of Sibalds Holme gives an idea of the specimens the family collected.

Barbara Jones (1912-1978) doesn’t mention the summerhouse in either edition of her Follies and Grottoes, but she did sketch the building, possibly because she always intended a companion volume on ‘Garden Temples and Pavilions’. Sadly this was never realised as Jones died after a short illness in 1978, just as she had begun to focus on the project. Her drawing includes the grotesque stone table, and the mystery table-top object.

The gardener and writer Graham Stuart Thomas redesigned parts of the grounds for the National Trust and in 1979 he described the garden in his book Great Gardens of Britain. The piece is accompanied by his own pencil sketch of the ‘painted summerhouse’, and although the curved bench can be seen, there is no further furniture. The garden writer Arthur Hellyer admired the ‘amusing little pavilion’ in a Country Life article in 1980 and compared the green and white painted arbour to a ‘gay booth at a fair’, but again there is no mention of the table.

The ornate wooden bench around the interior of the shelter remains today, but the current team at Peckover were unaware that the table had ever existed, and sadly no records seem to survive to account for its disappearance. Peckover’s Senior Gardener, the nominatively-determined Louise Gardner, did however have some interesting thoughts on the so-called ‘melon’. She thinks it looks like a coco de mer, the world’s largest seed, something the Peckovers ‘may well have had an interest in considering their foreign seed collection and general interest in exotic plants’. But sadly it too has disappeared without trace.

The arbour is not listed, but the gardens at Peckover House are listed at grade II on the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. The listing gives the briefest of mentions of the ‘wooden painted loggia’.

Wisbech is an incredibly handsome Georgian town, and well worth a visit. For more on Peckover House, which reopens in the spring, see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/cambridgeshire/peckover-house-and-garden

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On high ground above Creech Grange, near Wareham in Dorset, stands a battlemented and pinnacled arch which looks like the entrance to an estate. But no road passes through it, and the structure exists simply to catch the eye and ornament the landscape.

The arch was built by Denis Bond (1676-1747) to terminate a vista from his Creech Grange home. From the arch he could look back to his mansion, and in the other direction was a view out to sea. It was designed by Francis Cartwright, and his original design, dated 1740, is in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

In the mid-20th century the arch was a popular subject for artists. Edwin Smith, best known as a photographer, made an engraving of the folly, and John Piper’s photographs of the folly are in the collection at Tate, as are a number of photo’s by Paul Nash.

Nash (1899-1946) had spent holidays in Dorset as a child and had lived in Swanage in the early 1930s, including the period when he researched and wrote the Dorset volume of the Shell Guides, published in 1936. In September 1937 his hosts were the Barnards of Furzebrook House, and they drove him to see Creech Arch. He was fascinated by the ‘utterly mad gateway’ and took lots of photographs with a camera his wife had bought him (his ‘new toy’ John Piper called it). He also painted a wonderful watercolour, Folly Landscape, which featured in his solo show at London’s Leicester Galleries in 1938. It was originally owned by Nash’s fellow artist (and briefly student of his brother John) Enid Marx, and is now in the collection of Bristol Art Gallery.

Writing about the watercolour in Country Life that year, Nash described the arch as a ‘true folly in that it emphasises, in every feature, its absolute uselessness’. Nash loved the lonely setting of the tower, and its ‘wild privacy’, and told his wife Margaret that he had ‘stalked’ the folly whilst trying to capture it on film and on paper.

At this time Nash was on the look out for a folly to paint. He had been commissioned by Shell to paint one for the Visit Britain’s Landmarks series of advertising posters which were displayed on the company’s trucks delivering petrol across the country. Nash admired the ingenuity of the Shell campaigns: ‘their customers being a motoring population, the […] display of posters is confined to lorries’. But despite his interest in the Creech Arch, he decided to depict nearby Clavell’s Tower at Kimmeridge, leaving the arch to ‘Advertising Artist’ John S. Anderson, about whom little is known.

The folly is now in the care of the National Trust and continues to catch the eye and enliven the landscape.

For Clavell’s Tower see https://thefollyflaneuse.com/steeple-folly-the-black-tower-clavell-tower-dorset-fiction-and-fact/

Thank you for reading. As ever, your thoughts are very welcome: please scroll down to the foot of the page to comment.

APOLOGIES to regular readers that your email alert failed to arrive last week, but you received a double post this week (you may need to click on both titles in your email). Hopefully the technical glitch is now resolved and normal service will be resumed next week.

Oswell Blakeston (1907-1985), was born Henry Joseph Hasslacher, and created his nom de plume by condensing ‘Osbert Sitwell’, whom he admired, into ‘Oswell’ and adding his mother’s maiden name. He was a British writer and artist with wide interests, and one of his passions was follies; his role in bringing the genre to a wider audience deserves to be better known.

In a letter of 1953 Barbara Jones thanked Blakeston for the loan of his ‘folly suitcase’, which she had used as a major resource when writing the first edition of Follies & Grottoes. Her book was published in that same year, with special thanks to Blakeston in the acknowledgements.

The pair had probably been introduced by John Betjeman, who had known of Blakeston’s interest in follies since the 1930s. Betjeman had been working as a copywriter for Jack Beddington, Shell’s Publicity Manager, at the time that Beddington was commissioning young artists to produce artwork for advertising.  This included the series of posters which promoted motoring (and therefore sales of petrol) and adorned the sides of lorries as they sedately travelled the roads of Britain.

It was Blakeston who suggested follies as a subject for a series of posters, shortly before his report on ‘Architectural Follies’ was broadcast on the wireless in October 1936. Blakeston’s idea came to fruition as the ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks You Can Be Sure of Shell’ campaign, which ran throughout 1936 and 1937 with 27 posters produced, each by a different artist.*

The contents of the mysterious ‘folly suitcase’ were assumed lost, but in fact they are in the collection of the RIBA and can be consulted in the Architecture Study Room at the V&A Museum. The valise is long gone, but Blakeston’s county-by-county files of notes and clippings on follies are there alongside transcripts of his radio broadcasts. His correspondence shows that other writers and photographers of the period also relied on his help. The ‘folly files’ were also borrowed by husband and wife team Edwin Smith and Olive Cook when they were researching the Gothic Revival.

Looking at Blakeston’s output as a writer it is easy to see why he didn’t find time to publish his folly research himself. He wrote on film theory, on photography (Cruising with a Camera) and on travel, and also wrote 15 novels, 10 volumes of poetry and the occasional one-act play. He authored three books on food, including the rather niche Cooking with Nuts. His long term partner, the artist Max Chapman, contributed illustrations to many of these works. Long before Morph or Aardman studios used the technique, Chapman modelled figures in clay and then photographed them to illustrate a book for older boys, Jim’s Gun; ‘unusual and attractive’ said a reviewer. Blakeston’s art didn’t achieve wide acclaim in his lifetime, and is largely forgotten today. His work was considered avant garde, or as one establishment critic preferred to call it ‘the childish fumblings of a youthful dilettante.’

As well as the folly files in the RIBA Architecture Study Room there is a large deposit of Blakeston’s papers at the University of Texas at Austin https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingaid.cfm?eadid=00014

Thanks to the Shell Heritage Art Collection for permission to reproduce the two posters. The collection is based at the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, Hampshire and items from the large collection are always on display. Watch out for an exciting new touring exhibition in 2020 https://nationalmotormuseum.org.uk/collections/shell-heritage-art-collection/news/

* For a fully illustrated account see ‘Visit Britain’s Landmarks: Follies on Shell Advertising Posters in the 1930s’ in The Follies Journal Vol 5 http://follies.org.uk/index.php/journal/