In 1934 a local paper published a ‘Cleveland Ramble’ featuring a walk around Kirkleatham village. The author looked across the park to the ‘elaborate castellated pigeon-cote’ which was described as a ‘startling example’ of the extravagant ‘pseudo Gothic craze’ of the later 18th century. Only a couple of decades after this account was published the castellations were gone, and the pigeon cote was cracked and crumbling, and soon to disappear.

In 1808 Kirkleatham was praised for both its ‘various natural beauties’ and the ‘many decorations art has furnished it with’. The pigeon cote was one of the most striking of these ornaments, with a circular central tower and linking walls radiating out to three smaller turrets. Sadly no images of the folly before it began its decline have been found, but the Ordnance Survey maps illustrate the unusual plan.

The building’s early history seems to be lost, and although a document in the family archive cross-references an account book for work on the estate, that ledger does not seem to survive. The pigeon cote was most likely commissioned by Charles Turner (1726-1783), who lived at Kirkleatham after his father inherited the estate in 1757. No architect is named, although John Carr of York, who remodelled the house at Kirkleatham in the 1760s, is a possible contender. We do have a terminus post quem for the pigeon cote of around 1775, as it is not shown on an estate map of 1774.

The Kirkleatham estate passed through various families until the middle of the 20th century. The contents were then dispersed and, after attempts to find a use failed, the fabric of Kirkleatham Hall was auctioned as building materials in 1954.

Although promises were made to protect the historic structures on the estate, the pigeon cote and temple, admired by the 1934 rambler as an ‘exquisite little pavilion’, survived for less than a decade before they too were pulled down. The arable field surrounding the pigeon cote now covers the site of the building, with not a trace remaining above ground.

Happily there are still many reasons to visit Kirkleatham. The Free School of 1709 houses the Kirkleatham Museum, and the almshouses called Turner’s Hospital and the church with its adjoining Turner Mausoleum are both fascinating structures (there’s limited public access to the interiors, but they can be admired from the footpath).

The walled garden has been restored and continues to develop, and a wander around the village reveals the elegant stables and a number of other fascinating structures – look out for information boards and maps around the village. Here’s a taster…

Thanks to David Winpenny for introducing me to the archive of Peter Burton’s photographs. Burton (1927-2014) took many of the images which illustrated the Shell Guides that were produced in the mid-20th century. Burton was commissioned to write the North Yorkshire volume by the editorial team of John Piper and John Betjeman, but the project was cancelled before he could complete his research. He eventually published his material as North Yorkshire: a Guide in 2006. Thanks also to Burton’s friend and fellow photographer Harland Walshaw for permission to use images from the collection.

For the Kirkleatham Walled Garden https://kirkleathamwalledgarden.co.uk

And for more on the Kirkleatham Museum https://redcarcleveland.co.uk/enjoy/kirkleatham-museum/

Comments are most welcome – scroll down to share any thoughts. Thank you for reading.

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.

On a prominent hill above the town of Faringdon in Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire) the ornate top of a tower peeps out above the trees. Faringdon Tower, often known as Lord Berners’ Folly, was built in 1935, but its site had been known as Faringdon Folly for generations.

Although the word folly is best recognised as meaning a foolish act, or in these pages as a quirky piece of architecture, it can also mean a leafy hilltop. Such is the case in Faringdon where the clump of trees atop Faringdon Hill has been known as The Folly for centuries. The hill, once home to a fortification marked on the 1898 Ordnance Survey map as ‘Cromwell’s Battery’, was part of the Faringdon estate, home in 1787 to then then poet laureate Henry James Pye (1745-1813). In that year Pye published his Poems on Various Subjects, in which the hill which is described as ‘a noted landmark’ and celebrated in a long (and rather dreary, so you have been spared) poem.

In 1918 the Faringdon estate was inherited by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), and in 1934 he decided that the arboreal folly should be home to one of the bricks and mortar variety. Some locals were in favour of this ‘admirable endeavour’, believing an Englishman’s home was his castle, and that Berners should be free to build whatever he chose on his land. Others were less than keen, and the town was said to be ‘hot and bothered’ about the plan. A Miss Lobb was convinced that Berners was going to install a siren and a searchlight on the top of the tower, and was concerned this was would disturb the sick and the infirm. This was never part of Lord Berners’s plan for the tower, but his friend Nancy Mitford’s satirised the idea in The Pursuit of Love, in which Lord Merlin is a thinly disguised Berners:

‘A marble folly on a nearby hill was topped with a gold angel which blew a trumpet every evening at the hour of Lord Merlin’s birth […] The folly glittered by day with semi-precious stones, by night a powerful blue beam was trained upon it’.

In a sop to his opponents Berners modified the design so that the tower was only 5 feet above the trees, but Faringdon Rural District Council, acting on the advice of the North Berks Regional Planning Committee, still vetoed the plans, citing their powers under the Town & Country Planning Act. Berners appealed, and an investigation was launched by the Ministry of Health (this government department being, as John Betjeman pointed out, ‘for some mysterious reason the arbiter of public taste in such matters’).

Eventually, in October 1934, the local paper could announce that Lord Berners was ‘to have his way’ after the Ministry granted the appeal (having been given a good lunch at Faringdon House). Work was scheduled to begin in spring 1935, using estate labour augmented by local men, and giving around 6 months of employment. The architect was Lord Gerald Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, a friend of Berners.

Edward Thurlow Leeds, the Keeper of Oxford’s prestigious Ashmolean Museum was asked to examine the site after human skeletons were discovered as the foundations were laid. In May 1935 he summarised his findings for the local paper: ‘a Castle existed on the Faringdon Folly some eight hundred years ago, and […] the skeletons found there are probably those of men killed during King Stephen’s successful attack on it’. The paper was pleased to report that ‘however varied may be the views on the tower […] there is undivided interest in the conclusions which have been reached by the prominent archaeologist’.

Berners was in Europe as the tower went up, and the story goes that he arrived home to find the austere classical shaft not to his taste. He immediately gave orders that the octagonal uppermost storey be flamboyantly gothic in style.

On Guy Fawke’s Night 1935 Berners threw a ‘Tower Warming Party’, with a host of glamorous guests. The evening also marked the birthday of his companion, Robert ‘Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy (1911-1987), and Berners gifted him the tower. Heber-Percy later recalled he had been hoping for a horse.

The opening ceremony concluded with fireworks which were appreciated by the whole town, and local children wrote excitedly of the display to ‘Uncle Ted’, who edited the childrens’ page of the North Wilts Herald. The more athletic local children might have made it to the top of the new tower at the carnival in Faringdon Park in August 1936: ‘Energetic entrants’ had to race from Faringdon House to the room at the top of the tower and back, with the winner apparently covering the distance in under 12 minutes. The journalist covering the fete was impressed – it apparently took him ten minutes just to climb up the tower.

The tower had already found fame as a result of the press coverage of the ups and downs of the planning process, but it became more widely known after it appeared on Britain’s roads. In 1936 the year-old tower joined the list of more venerable follies which appeared in the Shell petrol advertising campaign ‘To Visit Britain’s Landmarks’. 27 artists were asked to create a work featuring a folly, and these paintings were reproduced as posters which were pasted onto the lorries delivering oil and petrol. Berners painted his new tower, which by 1937 was already known as ‘Faringdon’s Famous Folly’.

Much has been written of the eccentricities of Berners – he dyed the feathers of doves in rainbow hues making his lawn ‘exotically gay’, and entertained Penelope Betjeman and her horse to afternoon tea, etc., etc.. But when not occupied with these larks, he was a talented artist and an accomplished composer and writer. His epitaph recognised his many talents, and a life well-lived, concluding ‘But, praise the Lord, he seldom was bored’.

The market town of Faringdon is very proud of its local eccentric, and tributes include coloured doves perched on a windowsill, and this wonderful stone bench which remembers Salvador Dali’s visit to Faringdon House. On that occasion the artist walked through the town wearing the diving suit which had been hired ready for his appearance at an exhibition of Surrealist art. The full text on the bench is a quote from Berners: ‘Mistrust a man who never has an occasional flash of silliness’.

The press coverage of the controversial tower might have inspired a story by the prolific writer of ‘rattling good stories of school life’, R.A.H. Goodyear. It is surely not coincidence that a novel featuring a dispute over a folly tower was published in 1936, just after Faringdon Tower hit the headlines?

The School’s Airmen is set in a Yorkshire public school, and tells how the boys attempt to thwart the village shopkeeper’s plan to erect a ‘monstrous edifice’ on a nearby hill. Every time Mr Puncheon has stone carted up to the site, the boys hire a lorry and tip the stone into a stream, or steal the workmen’s tools and hack away the foundations, whilst the masters turn a blind eye. The builders (‘bone idle slackers’) try  to defend Puncheon, just as Lord Berners’s supporters had done, saying ‘who is to stop a man building anything he likes on his own land!’. Despite the efforts of the schoolboys, the tower, quickly dubbed Old Punch’s Folly, ‘rose steadily skywards’.

The dramatic denouement sees puny young Aimard, one of the few boys who finds favour with the shopkeeper, fall from the scaffolding around the tower. A schoolboy airman is despatched to Ireland in one of the school’s planes (in poor visibility for added drama) to pick up the badly-injured boy’s parents. In true movie fashion the anxious schoolboys assemble in the quad to await his return, until at last the plane emerges from the gloom to make a textbook landing. Aimard makes a slow but sure recovery and Puncheon declares the tower will be taken down, and instead spends the money on two prizes to be awarded annually by the school.

Perhaps if Old Punch’s Folly had been completed (and had not been fictional) it would eventually have become, like Faringdon Tower, a popular local landmark. Robert Heber-Percy later recalled that the locals had completely forgotten that they ever disliked it.

Whilst the flâneurs of 19th century Paris might have been content to stroll the boulevards, with an occasional exertion to reach the height of Montmartre, this Flâneuse suffers for her art, forever ascending eminences in search of follies.

And if the hill is topped with a lofty tower then there is more work to be done. But there are rewards…

Heber-Percy, gave the tower to the Faringdon Folly Tower Trust, ‘to ensure that the public have use of, and enjoyment of, the tower and its surroundings’. It was listed at grade II in 1986, when just over half a century old. It is now open regularly, and you can learn more here https://www.faringdonfolly.org.uk

UPDATE October 2022. Researching the folly tower at Woodhouse Grove School in Yorkshire the Folly Flâneuse discovered that Goodyear was a pupil, and would also have been influence by the late 18th century tower in the school grounds. Read more https://thefollyflaneuse.com/elams-tower-woodhouse-grove-apperley-bridge-west-yorkshire/

Comments are always welcome – please scroll to the foot of the page to share any thoughts or information. Thank you for reading.

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/

The rotunda at Stowe in Buckinghamshire was designed by Vanbrugh in around 1720, and stands on a sweeping lawn in front of the grand mansion. In the middle of the 20th century author T.H. White used a little artistic licence, and for the purposes of his story moved it to an island in one of the two lakes. There it became home to a colony of tiny people, and the adventure that is Mistress Masham’s Repose began.

Ten year old Maria, who has ‘eyes the colour of Marmite’, is an orphan.  She has been placed in the care of a scheming governess who is in cahoots with the local vicar to steal her inheritance – the vast Malplaquet estate. The house at Malplaquet is ‘surrounded by Vistas, Obelisks, Pyramids, Columns, Temples, Rotundas and Palladian Bridges’, all of which are slipping into decay after years of neglect. On an island in the lake stands a domed open rotunda called Mistress Masham’s Repose, home to around 500 little people who we learn are Lilliputians ‘in exile’, this being a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels. Can Maria and the little people thwart the gruesome governess and her vile vicar sidekick? The Folly Flâneuse will reveal no more here.

In the story, the Malplaquet mansion is shut up apart from two rooms where Maria and her governess live. It has been abandoned because ‘nobody could be persuaded to buy the place for a school’. This was of course an in-joke, for Malplaquet was based on Stowe, near Buckingham, which had been a school since 1923 after descendants of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos sold up. Terence ‘Tim’ Hanbury White (1906-1964) was the Head of English at the school in the early 1930s, and then spent some time living in a cottage in the grounds where he could concentrate on his writing (and in which guise he appears in the books as an eccentric academic). Familiar features at Stowe appear in the novel: the Temple of Concord and Victory for example becomes Neptune’s Temple, but the garden buildings, including some not mentioned in the text, are most easily identifiable in the wonderful map that forms the endpapers.

The map was drawn by White’s friend from his Cambridge days Raymond McGrath (1903-1977), an Australian born architect, illustrator, watercolorist, printmaker and interior designer, who arrived in London in the 1920s. In 1940 he moved to Ireland, where White also spent the war years. There he became an architect to the Ministry of Works, whilst still sketching and illustrating both for fun and commercially. McGrath was paid $50 by the American publishing house, G.P. Putnam & Sons, for the map of Malplaquet, apparently a ‘top fee for a map of this sort’.

Tim White’s Arthurian stories (later published together as The Once and Future King), were already very popular and would be adapted for the stage as Camelot, and by Walt Disney as the animated The Sword in the Stone. So his reputation was well established when Mistress Masham’s Repose was published first in America in 1946, and then in Britain by Jonathan Cape early the following year. The press advertisements announced it amongst other ‘forthcoming novels’, and were clearly targeting an adult audience with the blurb ‘a richly amusing fantasy with philosophical implications’. Reviewing it for the Daily Herald John Betjeman described it as a ‘thrilling story’, and concluded that ‘Mr White has written a story which will be good reading for all people from 12 to 100’. Tim White would have appreciated this comment, as he didn’t like to be pigeon-holed and said he never wrote for ‘anybody in particular’. The book was an instant success, bolstered by being chosen as a Book of the Month in America – this subscription scheme had close to 900,000 members when Mistress Masham’s Repose was selected.

The story was dedicated to Amaryllis Virginia Garnett, daughter of White’s friend and agent David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, a member of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’. Although the story is written as if being read to Amaryllis, she was only born in 1943 and must have had to wait a few years to hear the story.

The Folly Flâneuse throughly enjoyed revisiting the story, which is still in print today but not as well known as it should be. Although there was a radio play in 1952, the book has never been adapted for the screen. The late screenwriter and producer Carl Foreman owned the film and TV rights, but despite hints at a film in 1967, and discussions with Granada Television for an adaptation using the very latest technology in 1983, the projects were shelved.

Like the Lilliputians, White too enjoyed life on an island, and moved to the channel isle of Alderney after the success of Mistress Masham’s Repose to avoid what he saw as punitive British taxes. He also had a folly of his own, building a Temple to Hadrian (‘a very fine fellow’) in his garden. You can catch a glimpse of it in this wonderful bit of archive footage from the BBC, in which White is interviewed (? interrogated) by Robert Robinson https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013h5b3

Mistress Masham’s Repose is a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels, and in turn Andrew Dalton’s Malplaquet trilogy beautifully illustrated by Jonny Boatfield advances Maria’s story. You can read Rita Boogaart’s account here http://follies.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/ebulletin/Foll-e-46-Malplaquet.pdf Rita sadly passed away recently and will be greatly missed.

Read about Raymond McGrath’s amazing design for a modernist house in Surrey here https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/architect-of-the-week-raymond-mcgrath/

Stowe House remains a school, although visitors are welcome at certain times of the year (under normal circumstances), and the pleasure grounds are in the care of the National Trust. The park is now open for pre-booked visits https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stowe

Mistress Masham’s Repose has been through many editions and is still in print https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1098952/mistress-masham-s-repose/9780099595175.html

Thank you for reading.

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/