In 2006 the Royal Mail issued a set of commemorative stamps featuring ‘Modern Architecture’ in England and Scotland. Benham of Folkestone, the ‘independent collectables retailer’, spotted a link between these new buildings and some structures that might have been thought just as radical in their own day – follies. The company issued a set of first day covers juxtaposing the Modern Architecture stamps with examples of The British Folly.

The company linked each modern building with a folly in the same general area and called the series Architecture: the changing face of Britain. The brief summary of follies on the back of the envelope ended with a sentence with which readers of these posts will concur: ‘The British love of the eccentric statement of individuality still, thank goodness, thrives’.

The 1st class stamp featured 30 St Mary Axe in London (architect: Sir Norman Foster), better known by its nickname of The Gherkin. This was paired with the Chinese pagoda in Kew Gardens.

Next up was the 42p stamp with a photograph of Maggie’s Centre in Dundee (architect: Frank Gehry), a specialist cancer care centre. This was pictured alongside the tower and temple on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.

Birmingham’s new Selfridges department store (architect: Future Systems), clad in silver buttons, shared an envelope with Perrott’s Folly in Edgbaston, Birmingham and the 44p stamp.

The Downland Gridshell (architect: Edward Cullinan Architects) at the Weald and Downland Living Museum, near Chichester in Sussex, was paired with the Nore Folly on the first day cover for the 50p stamp.

On the 64p stamp was An Turas, a ferry shelter/landscape ornament (architect: Sutherland Hussey Harris) on the Isle of Tiree, and this was shown alongside McCaig’s Tower in Oban.

Finally, the 72p stamp showed The Deep, the aquarium in Hull in Yorkshire (architect: Sir Terry Farrell). This was paired with a folly many miles away, but still in Yorkshire: the sham Stainborough Castle at Wentworth Castle near Barnsley.

The text on the Royal Mail’s own first day cover for the Modern Architecture collection suggested that ‘buildings now can shimmer like beetles, wriggle like serpents, rise above the clouds. Anything that can be imagined can be built’. But as the structures pictured on Benham’s covers show, folly builders have been doing just that for centuries.

The advantage of writing about modern architecture is that the architect is known. Of the follies featured here the pagoda at Kew is by Sir William Chambers; the tower on Carlton Hill in Edinburgh was begun to a design by Robert Burn but completed by Thomas Bonnar and the Greek-inspired National Monument is by C.R. Cockerell and W.H. Playfair. The designers of the other structures are yet to be identified with any certainty.

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A new exhibition has just opened at Compton Verney in Warwickshire: Towering Dreams: Extraordinary Architectural Drawings explores how architects in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘understood the world around them and the ideas and cultures that inspired them’. The majority of the wonderful drawings in the exhibition are on loan from Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and the subjects include structures we would know today, as well as extraordinary designs that never made it off the drawing board.

The Flâneuse couldn’t resist a jaunt, and wasn’t disappointed. Without giving too much away the exhibition includes works by Piranesi, Robert Adam and Joseph Michael Gandy among others, and features such delights as this wildly ambitious kennel, designed for Frederick Harvey, Bishop of Derry and 4th Earl of Bristol’s estate at Downhill in Northern Ireland. Unsurprisingly, it never made it off the drawing board. Whilst a serious exercise in design, the ancient temple/doghouse created by Soane also has humorous touches, including a cluster of canines clambering around the vase atop the dome.

Many of the works on display, including the title image and the views above, were produced by unidentified draughtsmen in Sir John Soane’s office. They were drawn at a large scale to illustrate Soane’s lectures at the Royal Academy, where he was Professor of Architecture.

This image, showing the vast array of buildings at Kew, near London, against what appears to be a radiant sun, shows Soane’s interest in Sir William Chambers’ designs for the royal gardens at Kew. In January 1820 King George III died, and in a lecture in March of that year Soane ‘took an opportunity, in referring to the different buildings in the Royal gardens at Kew […] to pay an elegant and animated tribute’ to the memory of the late king. Sadly history does not record if this particular view of the garden ornaments was displayed on an easel to illustrate the subject.

The grounds of Compton Verney are sadly lacking in follies, but there is a pretty thatched ice-house.

Museums and galleries are having a tough time at the moment, with many under threat of closure or having to reduce their opening hours, so sponsorship is vital. The Flâneuse is therefore happy to mention that the exhibition is supported by SE-Solicitors who are based, like Compton Verney, in the heart of England.

The exhibition, curated by Jane Simpkiss, can be seen at Compton Verney until 31 August 2025 and the Flâneuse highly recommends a visit. If you don’t already know Compton Verney, there is also a fabulous permanent collection, further special exhibitions and grounds laid out by Capability Brown to explore. Everything you need to know is here.

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In 1954 Agatha Christie wrote a novella which was intended to raise money for her local church. Upon completion she was so taken with the story that she decided to develop it into a full novel, and submitted a different story to the fundraising effort. The work she had originally written was called Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, and this work was expanded and eventually published in 1956 as Dead Man’s Folly. 

The story is set at Nasse House in Devon, a ‘big white Georgian house’ overlooking a river that is home to Sir George Stubbs and his young wife. Preparations are underway for a grand garden fête which will feature a Murder Hunt with clues leading to a sham murder. But as this is Christie the death turns out to be for real: that’s not a spoiler, it is blindingly obvious what the course of events will be from the earliest chapters – but as ever the big question is… ‘whodunnit’?

Before the folly can take centre-stage in the story, Christie has to ensure that Poirot knows what a folly is. A character explains to the detective that the folly is ‘one of those little sort of temple things, white with columns’, adding that he has ‘probably seen them at Kew’.

The grounds at Nasse House are also home to a ‘picturesque thatched’ boathouse and an architect is present with a commission to build a new tennis pavilion and repair the folly. Said architect is Michael Weyman, and he is not impressed with Sir George’s choice of location for the folly, which is lost in trees and functions as neither eye-catcher nor belvedere. And having been erected hurriedly only a year earlier (Poirot notes this clue), the temple is already listing on poor foundations. ‘These things were meant to be seen’ complains Weyman, and revealing his knowledge of landscape design in the 18th century he complains that the folly should be visible on a mound: ‘situated on an eminence – that’s how they phrased it’. The architect then reveals that he has been asked to design a tennis pavilion in the form of a ‘kind of Chinese Pagoda’, and grumbles that this is a ‘crime against good taste’.

Dead Man’s Folly was turned into a film in 1986, with Peter Ustinov in the role of Poirot. West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire became Nasse House, with the Temple of Venus playing the folly, although the statue of Venus seen in the photo’ was removed for filming.

A television adaptation was shown in 2013, and it marked the end of an era: it was the last episode to be filmed in the 13 series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot in which David Suchet played the detective. Dead Man’s Folly was filmed at Greenway House, Christie’s own summer retreat which she bought in 1938, and which was clearly the model for the ‘big white Georgian house’ at Nasse.

Christie’s own boathouse becomes the scene of the murder but, as Greenway has no folly, a temporary temple had to be built for the episode (a square temple rather than a rotunda). The closing scenes reveal the crucial role the folly plays in the story.

Christie first came up with idea for a murder mystery based around a folly in 1954, only a year after Barbara Jones had raised awareness of garden buildings when she published Follies & Grottoes in 1953. The Folly Flâneuse would love to know if Mrs Mallowan, as Christie then was in her private life, had seen a copy.

For more on Greenway visit https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/devon/greenway

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