Overlooking the sea at Bude, in Cornwall, stands an elegant little tower. It was first built in the 1830s, but after being battered by the elements it was rebuilt a little inland fifty years later. The erosion of the cliffs on which it stands means that the Storm Tower is again under threat, and it must once more be dismantled and moved to safety.

In the first decades of the 19th century Bude was developed as a resort, thanks largely to investment by Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 10th Bart (1787-1871) of Killerton, who owned much of the land in the area. His favoured architect was George Wightwick (1802-1872), who would design a number of new buildings in the town, and by 1836 Bude was able to style itself the ‘fashionable Watering Place of the West’.

In 1835, when he was working on a new church at Bude Haven, Wightwick was asked to draw up plans for a more modest structure. The Storm Tower, known locally as the Pepperpot, was intended to fulfil three purposes. The principal of these was shipping safety, as vessels were all too frequently wrecked or endangered close to Bude. The tower provided a base for the coastguard, with one window directly aligned on the nearby Coastguard Station, and it also acted as a landmark for ships: when vessels were in danger, a flag was hoisted and tar barrels were set alight as a warning signal.

The tower also offered a haven to anyone caught in bad weather on the clifftop, and was a picturesque ornament to the coastal walks in the developing resort.

As is acknowledged on the design above, Wightwick drew his inspiration from the Tower of the Winds in Athens, and the octagonal tower had the eight principal points of the compass engraved into the appropriate faces. The cliff on which it stands was already known as Compass Point, which presumably inspired the architect’s design.

By 1881 the tower had to be ‘demolished in consequence of its dangerous condition’: frosts had caused the cliff to crumble and there were cracks in the tower. Sir Thomas came to the rescue and paid to have the tower rebuilt ‘on a spot as near as circumstances will permit to the original site’.

At this stage the tower ceased to be precisely orientated to the points of the compass, but instead it was positioned to maintain the important sightline to the Coastguard Station.

The Storm Tower became a well-known landmark, and even featured in fiction. The now largely forgotten novelist George MacDonald holidayed in Cornwall, and inspired by the dramatic coast he set his 1868 novel The Seaboard Parish (first serialised in the Sunday Magazine) in Bude. The Storm Tower is accurately described as ‘a small building standing square to the points of the compass, with little windows from which the coastguard could see along the coast’. In 1890 the tower appeared in a story by H. Fell in All the Year Round, the weekly journal ‘conducted’ by Charles Dickens. In the melodramatic His Little Maid, Olive, our young heroine (‘a fine lady’), gazes into the eyes of her lover (predictably, a ‘rough sailor chap’) as a storm obligingly rages around the tower.

In 2021 local newspapers reported that the Storm Tower was in grave danger, and that it was ‘to be moved inland before it vanishes into the sea’.

Funding was secured from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the local councils, but the strength of local pride in the tower is most apparent in the success of a crowdfunding campaign which raised around £60,000 in 56 days. Work to move the tower was scheduled to begin in March 2022, with Historic England and Historic Environment Planning satisfied with the proposals outlined in the planning application for ‘listed building consent to dismantle, relocate and rebuild a grade II listed structure’. Natural England, however, has asked for further information as, in their words, it is not currently ‘possible to ascertain that the proposal will not result in adverse effects on the integrity of the site in question’. Permission for work to begin can not be granted until Natural England are satisfied so, regretfully, Bude-Stratton Town Council has announced that work will be delayed until March 2023.

Update summer 2023: work has begun to move the tower. You can see a film of the start of the ongoing work here https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2023-05-09/historic-storm-tower-to-be-moved-brick-by-brick-to-stop-it-collapsing-into-sea

Update October 2024. The Flâneuse was delighted to return to lovely Bude and see the completed tower. The inscriptions have been restored and the pebble pavement around the tower replicated. A fabulous rebuilding project and congratulations to all involved.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts are always welcome: please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page to get in touch.

High above the valley of the River Towy stands a sturdy, and seemingly invincible, tower. It was built to commemorate Admiral Lord Nelson, but within a century it was falling into decay, and it only narrowly escaped conversion into a cowshed.

William Paxton (1744-1844) had been Master of the Mint in Calcutta, a role that was as lucrative as it sounds. He returned to Britain towards the end of the 18th century and bought Middleton Hall in Carmarthenshire, where he began work on a new house and pleasure grounds. The tower, high above his estate, was ‘now erecting’ in 1808 when it was called ‘a grand Castellated Edifice, designed to honour the Memory of the Immortal Nelson’. It must have been largely complete externally by 1809, when a visitor noted the ‘fine Bird’s Eye view of the House and grounds of Middleton Hall’ which it commanded.

The tower was described in detail in the South Wales volume of The Beauties of England & Wales, which was published in 1815 but compiled in the preceding years. Thomas Rees wrote that ‘of late, a new and pleasing circumstance has been added by Sir William Paxton […] a lofty tower on a conspicuous summit’. The ‘elegant design’ was by ‘Mr Cockerell’*. The tower had a ‘lofty and sumptuous banqueting room’ on the first floor and a ‘prospect room’ on the upper storey. Stairs then led to a viewing platform on the roof. The upper apartment was not finished when Rees visited, and Sir William (he was knighted in 1803) was in the process of commissioning painted glass panels showing scenes from the life of Lord Nelson.

Rees also noted that a marble tablet was on order which was to carry a Latin inscription honouring the admiral. Later histories describe inscribed plaques above each of the three doors, with the tribute in Latin, Welsh, and English:

‘To the Invincible Commander, Viscount Nelson, in Commemoration of Deeds before the Walls of Copenhagen, and on the Shores of Spain; of the Empire everywhere maintained by him over the Seas; and of the death which in the fulness of his own glory, though ultimately for his own Country and for Europe, conquering, he died. This Tower was erected by William Paxton’.

A grand hilltop folly attracts equally grand stories, especially with such as prominent personage as Paxton. His career in India over, he aspired to be a Member of Parliament, and there are tales of how he spent lavishly to ‘encourage’ the electorate to vote for him. Among the local legends is one which tells that he promised to build a new bridge over the River Towy if successful, but when he failed to win the seat at his first attempt, he instead had the stone carted up the hill to build his tower.

The tower became a great local landmark, and having a vista to the folly was considered a selling point when local estates came to the market. It remained a popular destination throughout the 19th century, and in 1887 was the focus of celebrations to mark Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign. The Union Jack was flown from the top of the tower, and a huge banner inscribed with the letters V.R. was draped over the western elevation so that it was visible across the valley.

By 1903 however the local paper was expressing concern that ‘this handsome structure is now exhibiting evidence of decay’. Fearing for the safety of the painted glass panels, descendants of the Abadam family (who bought the estate soon after Paxton’s death in 1824) gave the glass to the Carmarthenshire Museum for safekeeping before selling the estate in 1909. In 1934 the future of the tower looked precarious, and it was dismissed by one onlooker as a ‘vast and useless sentinel’.

But happily a few years later its status as a historic building was beginning to be recognised, and in February 1950 the Western Mail ran the headline ‘Noted Tower in Danger of Collapse’. The paper reported that heritage bodies were powerless as the building was not scheduled as an ancient monument. Two years later a preservation order was obtained just in the nick of time: the farmer, fearing that falling masonry would concuss his cattle, planned to demolish the tower and use the ‘stones to erect a cowhouse’. The planning officer, Mr R. Randles (a pragmatic fellow), summed things up: ‘It will fall down eventually but the point is it will be there for a little longer’.

Unlike Mr Randles, Viscount Emlyn, whose seat was the nearby Golden Grove, was confident that the tower would endure. In 1964, when High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire, he bought the tower and donated it to the National Trust. It was restored in the 1970s and remains a popular attraction, although sadly the inscriptions are long gone, and there is no access to the upper rooms. Paxton’s Tower is listed at grade II*.

* Generally accepted to be Samuel Pepys Cockerell, who worked on Middleton Hall, but a drawing in the RIBA collection is attributed to his son Charles Robert.

For information on visiting the tower see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/feel-on-top-of-the-world-at-paxtons-tower-

Middleton Hall was demolished in the middle of the 20th century. The grounds are now home to the National Botanic Garden of Wales. For more on Paxton and Middleton Hall see this excellent paper https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/middleton-hall-case-study/

Please scroll down to the comments section if you would like to share any thoughts or further information. 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/

Joseph Locke was a railway pioneer. Sheffield born, he achieved great wealth, but business and a career in politics took him away from his native Yorkshire. He remained hugely popular in Barnsley and never forgot the town where he moved as a small boy, which benefitted ‘to a large extent in his liberality’. There was great sadness when his death was announced in September 1860, aged only 55.

The following year Locke’s widow, Phoebe, announced that she intended to create a ‘recreation ground’ for the people of Barnsley as a ‘mark of regard and affection for her late husband’, and 17 acres of land were bought from the estate of the Duke of Leeds. The Chairman of the Board of Health declared himself  ‘exceedingly well pleased with the plans for laying out the ground’, and the local newspaper reported that it was a ‘most munificent gift, and would prove … a pleasure to the inhabitants.’ 

Mrs Locke asked a Mr Edwards, an engineer from her late husband’s railway company Locke & Errington, to travel to Barnsley and prepare plans for laying out the ground. The opening of the park was marked with processions and a general holiday, and commemorated by a medal with a profile of Joseph Locke. On the reverse was a wreath of laurels and the legend ‘The Locke Park, given to the inhabitants of Barnsley by Phoebe, widow of the late Joseph Locke, June 10, 1862.’

Phoebe Locke died in 1866 and left the bulk of her fortune to her sister, Sarah McCreery. In 1871 McCreery travelled to Barnsley with an architect, Richard Phené Spiers, to discuss a substantial enlargement to the park in memory of her sister. The purchase of an extra 20 acres took some time to complete, and it wasn’t until October 1874 that the deeds were presented to the town. William Barron, famed for his work at Elvaston Castle in Derbyshire, was appointed to ‘lay out the whole of the park in the form of an ornamental garden’. The Board of Health ensured everything met with the ‘cordial approval’ of Miss McCreery and Spiers.

Spiers meanwhile had been drawing up plans for a monument to Mrs Locke which would sit on the highest point of the park. In July 1875 the papers announced that an ‘elegant tower of observation’ was to be constructed, and in 1876 the design was exhibited at the Royal Academy with the caption ‘Memorial Tower to Mrs Locke; now being erected in the Locke Park, Barnsley, from the design and under the supervision of R.P. Spiers.’ Spiers had studied architecture in  Paris, which was considered very unusual at that date, and the tower was believed to be ‘somewhat of the nature of one in the park at St Cloud, near Paris, destroyed three years ago’; this was the Lanterne de Démosthène, which was desecrated during the Franco-Prussian war. Spiers knew the building well, having captured it in a watercolour sketch in 1858. One can see the influence of the central shaft, but it is far from a slavish copy and Locke Tower is a wonderfully quirky and individual structure. “Did they use an architect?”, asked The Folly Flâneuses’s uncouth companion.

The park extension and tower were formally opened in August 1877 on a day of great festivities marred only by torrential rain. Another medal was produced bearing an image of the tower with, on the reverse, the words ‘In recognition of the generosity of Miss McCreery who on the 7th August 1877 added 20 acres of land to the park of Barnsley previously presented by her sister Phoebe Locke.’

The park was greatly appreciated by the ‘working classes’ who organised a subscription to erect an ornamental fountain to thank Miss McCreery. The fountain was also designed by Spiers. Joseph Locke himself had been commemorated with a larger than life bronze statue by the sculptor Baron Marochetti in 1866. However it is the monuments to the sisters Phoebe and Sarah which are of greatest historic significance, being rare dedications to non-royal women in a public park.

The Friends of Locke Park continue to campaign for investment in the grade II* listed tower and the park. In 2013 the public were readmitted to the interior after £80,000 was spent on the structure but further funding, estimated at around £250,000, is needed to restore the exterior.  A tall hedge and gates are now in the place which rather spoil the proportions, but keep out the vandals. The weather vane with Sarah McCreery’s monogram was blown off in a gale early this century and the Friends hope funds can be found to return it to the tower. Sadly philanthropists like the Lockes and Sarah McCreery are in short supply in the 21st century.

The Locke Park Tower is open to the public on the afternoon of the first Sunday of each month courtesy of the Friends of Locke Park http://www.friendsoflockepark.org.uk

For more on St Cloud http://www.saintcloud.fr/articles/dathenes-saint-cloud-lhistoire-dune-lanterne

The design for the memorial fountain is in the RIBA collection and can be seen here https://www.architecture.com/image-library/ribapix/image-information/poster/design-for-a-memorial-fountain-in-locke-park-barnsley-south-yorkshire-plan-and-elevation/posterid/RIBA99117.html