Tucked away in the corner of the garden of an Edwardian house in Muswell Hill, north London, is a rather special structure. In 2022 its quirky elegance earned it the coveted title of best ‘Unique/Unexpected’ structure in the Cuprinol Shed of the Year Awards.

This delightful retreat was created by Jane Dorner with the help of her architect friend Simon Hurst. The building has the distinction of being probably the only folly built to solve the problem of where to store cushions in the cooler months (Jane having dismissed the usual plastic receptacles). But, as can be seen, the project became rather more than a storage box and grew to be a gorgeous Gothic Folly. Simon’s design incorporates the all-important cupboard for the cushions, and above it there is a glazed cabinet of curiosities. Jane changes the display as the whim takes her, often selecting items to suit the interests of guests.

When the Flâneuse was lucky enough to visit recently the doors were open and the table was laid with nibbles and home-made vermouth (the red vermouth with a delicious tang of lovage from the garden was a particular treat).

A closer look at Jane’s lovely label designs, showing the interior and exterior of the folly:

The folly is illuminated from above by a lantern filled with what appears to be stained glass, which casts a lovely light. Continuing the sham tradition beloved of folly builders, this is actually a clever use of stick-on lead strips and coloured film.

Below the lantern are Jane’s paintings in grisaille, inspired by the ancient Temple of the Winds in Athens.

As the finishing touch Jane designed the weather vane with her Abyssinian cat Khairo as the model. Or perhaps not quite the finishing touch: the project remains a work in progress, with these two handsome green men soon to be installed…

The folly even has its very own doorbell, alerting Jane to the arrival of lucky visitors. It currently plays Für Elise, but Jane is hoping to find someone who can programme it to play a few rousing bars of La Follia by Vivaldi.

And as if the summerhouse itself was not enchanting enough, here it is in miniature thanks to Jane’s jeweller and designer friend Vicki Ambery-Smith.

Thanks to Jane and Simon for their help with this post. You can discover more about Jane’s folly on her website http://www.editor.net/folly/

Simon has now largely retired from his career as an architect, and is enjoying life as an artist. There’s more about his work here https://www.schd.co.uk/#home

And for Vicki Ambery-Smith’s exquisite jewellery and miniatures see http://www.vickiamberysmith.co.uk

Thank you for reading. Don’t you wish you were sitting in Jane’s folly with a glass of vermouth (or perhaps a coffee if it is still early)? Your thoughts are always welcome – scroll down to the comments box to get in touch.

Tucked in woodland off Sydenham Hill in south London sits a sham ruin. Although it is now hard to imagine, it was once a feature of the ‘beautiful grounds’ of Fairwood, an elegant newly-built villa. This area of London was very much in vogue in the middle of the 19th century, after the arrival of the relocated Crystal Palace put it on the map, and Sydenham Hill became home to a number of distinguished family homes.

Fairwood was built in the early 1860s for David Henry Stone (1812-1890), a businessman, attorney and solicitor who played a significant part in civic life as a magistrate, an alderman, and eventually as Lord Mayor of London. The substantial villa was built to a design by the architectural practise of Banks and Barry: Charles Barry (1823-1900), son of the great architect Sir Charles Barry, worked extensively in the Dulwich and Sydenham area of London, and himself lived a few doors away on Sydenham Hill. The house, stabling and conservatory at Fairwood cost just over £5775 pounds to build, the architects attributing the high cost to the quality materials used and also the ‘large excess of London prices over those prevailing in the country’.

Stone commissioned the garden designers and artificial rock specialists James Pulham & Son to create a ‘Rocky Stream’ in his grounds, as well as what were simply described as ‘Ruins’. A pamphlet written by James Pulham sometime around 1877 records this work being executed in 1863 and 1866, but sadly little other information has survived. Pulham designs often featured local stone, but when unavailable they used brick or rubble coated in their proprietary cement, which could be modelled to perfectly mimic natural rocks. The brick core of part of the Sydenham folly can clearly be seen in the photo’ above.

James Pulham himself described the role such ruins played in a garden or landscape: ‘Emotions of sublimity or beauty are awakened in the mind by castles or other ruins; also by other picturesque objects, as a portion of which may be consistently added to the scene – as an ancient tower on a precipice, forming a portion of the ruins of an old castle – or may be the ruins of an abbey, church, or ancient bridge; all such objects, which, by themselves, strike the imagination as picturesque’.

Stone was elected Lord Mayor of London in 1874 and, with the Mansion House at his disposal, sold Fairwood that same year. The particulars described it as a ‘a very superior family residence’, which had been decorated in the very best taste, ‘regardless of cost’, with all the latest fashions such as decorative Minton tiles. The house was set in over one and a half acres of ‘pleasure grounds’ with a terrace and ‘beautiful woodland walks’. The house changed hands again in 1908, when it was illustrated in the press:

Stone died in 1890 at St Thomas’s Hospital, where he was Treasurer and had an official residence. The houses on Sydenham Hill were mostly held on 99 year leases granted by the landowners, Dulwich College: after the Second World War there was little interest in taking on the leases, and the houses were almost all demolished.

Today, Sydenham Hill Wood is managed by the London Wildlife Trust and is a very popular amenity. The foundations of the grand villas are lost under a blanket of ivy and shrubs, with only the occasional glimpse of a piece of masonry poking through the undergrowth. Only the folly stands as a reminder that part of this woodland was once suburban gardens in the very latest taste.

There’s more on the woodland here https://www.wildlondon.org.uk/nature-reserves/sydenham-hill-wood-and-coxs-walk

David Henry Stone’s cousin was the Portsmouth MP William Henry Stone, who came into possession of follies when he bought Leigh Park (now Staunton Country Park) in Hampshire https://thefollyflaneuse.com/the-shell-house-leigh-park-havant-hampshire/

Thank you for reading and please scroll down to the bottom of the page if you would like to share any thoughts or comments.

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.

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

If there’s one thing you can guarantee about 18th century towers, it is that they will be described using words and phrases that were just as fashionable as the buildings themselves. A tower will always be ‘lofty’ and it will almost certainly ‘command rich and extensive views’. Severndroog Castle was built in 1784 and early descriptions follow this unwritten rule. The panorama today is even richer than it was when the tower was built, with two centuries of London development on show.

The curiously-named tower takes its title from the island fortress of Suvarnadurg, around 80 miles south of Mumbai. In 1755 the stronghold was captured by William James, a Commodore in the service of the East India Company, putting an end to attacks on the company’s trading vessels by the Tulaji Angre and his people. In 1759 James returned to Britain, rich with the booty of his years at sea. Widowed whilst abroad, he now married Anne Goddard, and bought the Park Farm Place estate at Eltham, south of London (but then a parish in Kent). He was given a baronetcy in 1778 but died only a few years later in 1783.

A plaque on the tower records that it was built ‘by the representative of Sir William James.’ This was his wife, Anne, and the tower was initially called ‘Lady James’s Folly’, before becoming known as Severndroog Castle, the anglicised form of Suvarnadurg. The plaque states that it was erected in 1784, immediately after Sir William’s death, although some accounts suggest that work began in his lifetime. The architect was Richard Jupp, surveyor and architect to the East India Company, of which Sir William was a director. Three stories high, with a viewing platform on the roof, the tower was used for banquets and as a museum for the weaponry and trophies he had brought back from his travels.

The tower quickly became a tourist attraction, and only a few years after completion was celebrated in the poem ‘Shooter’s Hill’ by the (then) popular poet Robert Bloomfield:

This far-seen monumental tower
Records th’achievments of the brave,
And Angria’s subjugated power,
Who plundered on the eastern wave.

The estate was sold by Lady James’s descendants in 1812 and then had a succession of owners, many of whom allowed public access. In 1829, with the fashion for folly towers on the wane, it was described as ‘nondescript’ and a few years later faced destruction. In 1847 the Duke of Wellington sanctioned a plan to demolish the tower and in its place construct a ‘grand cemetery and mausoleum’, with 10,000 catacombs for the remains of officers of the British army and navy, as well as those in the service of the East India Company. Happily for Severndroog Castle the scheme was never implemented and in the 1920s the London County Council bought the estate and opened it as a public park.

The LCC opened a popular tea-room on the first floor and charged one penny to climb the tower and take in the view. For a period Severndroog Castle flourished, but as the decades passed there was little investment and the tower started to look a little sorry for itself – a Country Life article in 1984 said that ‘a large question mark now hangs over its future.’ With the demise of the LCC (by now Greater London Council) Severndroog Castle passed into the care of Greenwich Council in 1986, and access was severely limited.

There was hope of salvation in 2004 when the BBC television programme Restoration featured Severndroog, but it didn’t win the vote. Galvanised, the local community pressed on with fundraising, and in 2014 the Severndroog Building Preservation Trust succeeded in reopen ing the folly to the public and offering refreshments and a series of special events. Check the website for opening times of the tower and the cafe https://www.severndroogcastle.org.uk

A footnote…

Big thanks to Twentieth Century Posters for permission to use the poster featuring Severndroog. Explore the wonderful works they have for sale here https://www.twentiethcenturyposters.com