In the 1970s the Coutts Bank building in central London was partly remodelled to a design by the architect Sir Frederick Gibberd. A new glass entrance was designed to replace the columned central section of the facade on the Strand. As work progressed Gibberd salvaged some of the redundant masonry to reuse at his Essex home. There he indulged in what the Architects’ Journal called ‘that virtuous activity’ of building follies.

Sir Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) was the Master Planner of the new town created at Harlow, in Essex, from 1946. Needing to be close to the works, he bought a small cottage on Marsh Lane. He remodelled the house and developed the extensive garden, which had plenty of space for the sculpture and architectural salvage Gibberd collected with his second wife, Patricia (they married in 1972).

Gibberd decided to use some of the redundant masonry  from Coutts to create a ‘Roman’ Temple in the garden. His colleagues on site were apparently disgruntled by this decision, as removing the columns Gibberd had chosen was time consuming work – they would have preferred to smash the whole lot to bits.

The masonry was delivered the following year, and as Gibberd wrote ‘a huge lorry equipped with a crane drove down my lane, demolished three trees and dumped a pile of huge fragments in a ditch opposite my entrance gates’. The stone was dragged to the prepared site on a sledge with steel runners.

Three men with a crane and a digger were recruited to construct the folly. Two Portland stone columns and a section of frieze were to be erected in the form of a temple inspired by ancient Roman models. Steel rods were inserted in the columns to give support and one of the men sat in the bucket of the digger to guide the stones into place. The crane driver was asked to drop a third column, so that it would appear to have fallen and broken. The bewildered man exclaimed ‘They’ve come all the way from London and I’m to drop one of them?’, and apparently demanded the instruction in writing so that he couldn’t be held responsible for the damage.

It was, Gibberd concluded, a ‘very expensive folly’, but it brought him great pleasure. When passers-by paused at the gate and asked what the structure was, Gibberd enjoyed telling them it was a fragment from an ancient Roman temple discovered during the development of a nearby industrial estate.

Four urns from the Trafalgar Square facade of the bank, which Gibberd believed to be made of Coade Stone, were mounted on a plinth and placed at an angle to the temple to create a pleasing ensemble.

Although Gibberd claimed to have no masterplan for his garden, he did draw an exquisite plan and elevation of the temple and its garden setting. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1981 as ‘Roman’ Temple (Gibberd was elected RA in 1969).

The Architects’ Journal thought the whole of the bank’s facade should have been retained, or at least reused at another building, but as their reporter concluded, at least Gibberd had ‘tried to atone and Freddie’s folly promises to become a well-loved landmark in Freddie’s own New Town’.

Gibberd died in 1984 and left his house and garden to Harlow for the benefit of the people of the town, although initially it remained home to his widow and there were only occasional open days. Complications over his will left the garden vulnerable (a long story), but there was strong local support and in 1995 the Gibberd Garden Trust was formed to maintain the site and welcome visitors. Lady Gibberd remained closely involved until her death in 2006.

Gibberd said that the half a mile approached road gave his garden ‘a quality of remoteness’. Modern housing now stands close to the track, but is still an adventure to drive down the long lane, wondering if you have perhaps taken a wrong turn, only to suddenly spot the eagle-topped gateposts.

Gibberd’s comments on making the garden are from his lecture notes On Making Gardens and Landscapes which are in the Gibberd archive at the Garden Museum.  Sir Frederick and Lady Gibberd were early supporters of the museum where you can see a small display celebrating Gibberd’s work. The account of the bemused lorry driver is from oral histories collected by Annalise Taylor and published to mark 25 years of the Gibberd Garden Trust.

The Gibberd Garden reopens for the 2026 season on Wednesday 1 April. There’s more here.

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The Flâneuse recently attended the Garden Museum Literary Festival, the annual celebration of gardens and books organised by London’s Garden Museum. It blossoms at a different venue each year, and in 2025 it was held at Iford Manor, near Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire, where stands this exceedingly pretty summerhouse.

It was built in the eighteenth century, but renovated and moved to a new location after Iford Manor was bought by the architect and garden designer Harold Peto in 1899. The simple interior needs nothing more than a good book and a pot of coffee to make it quite perfect.

Speaking of which, the lovely village of Corsham was only a few miles from the festival, and it has excellent coffee shops as well as a great independent bookshop. The Flâneuse picked up the new book by an author she greatly admires – Jenny Uglow. Her latest work is A Year with Gilbert White: the First Great Nature Writer, and White’s charming hermitage, as temporarily inhabited by his brother, is featured.

Of course the main attraction in the village was Corsham Court, where the many beauties include this Bath House. The perfect little building was originally built by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1760s, with further gothic ornament added by John Nash around the turn of the eighteenth century.

Back at the festival, the excellent speakers included Cath Kidston, who sold her chain of shops and is now producing a range of perfumed goods inspired by her collection of scented geraniums. Coincidentally, as the Flâneuse travelled to the festival she received the newsletter of the Faringdon Folly Tower Trust containing a pelargonium pronouncement. The trust cares for the tower built by Lord Faringdon in Berkshire (although it is now in Oxfordshire) in 1935. The newsletter announced that the acclaimed nursery Fibrex has created Faringdon Folly, a pelargonium in the same vibrant pink that Lord Berners dyed some of his doves. It will be available in 2026.

The Flâneuse is taking a break and will be back with a folly story in two weeks. The plan is to relax – which brings us nicely back to Iford Manor, and this verdant spot where one can sit back with a cuppa after a busy day.

Thank you for reading.

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