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.

Thank you for reading. As always, any thoughts or comments are very welcome. Scroll down to the foot of the page to get in touch.

One of the few upsides to the current situation is that there is time to rootle around in the attic and find all sorts of forgotten files full of treasure. Opening one box revealed this invitation to the private view of The Sitooteries, 20 years ago this month. What’s a sitooterie you may ask? Well it’s as simple as it sounds – a building to sit out in (the term is supposed to originate in Scotland, so try saying it in your best Caledonian accent).

The Sitooteries show was conceived by Judith King, who at that date must have had a huge business card to accommodate her job title of ‘English Heritage North East Regional Visual Arts Consultant’. She worked with Mark Daniels of Northern Arts to curate the showcase of ‘contemporary takes on the traditional summerhouse and pavilion’. 12 Artists, designers, and architects were invited to design a structure within a footprint of 12 feet by 12 feet (no metric in far off 2000) and with a maximum budget of £10,000.

The structures were placed within the grounds of Belsay in Northumberland, an English Heritage property. The estate houses an ancient castle and a stunning neoclassical mansion, both in partial ruin, as well as formal lawns and a famed woodland garden set within a former quarry. Grandest of the names on the list of designers (at that date) was Sir Norman Foster, then very much in the news in the north-east and beyond for his design for what the press release called the ‘Regional Music Centre’ in Gateshead – the building on the south bank of the Tyne better known to us today as ‘The Sage’ (or The Slug to its detractors) which was opened in 2004.

The Folly Flâneuse has completely failed to find any decent photographs in her albums, but did find photos of three of the models created by the artists during the design process.

Thomas Heatherwick’s ‘Hairy Sitooterie’, which would be perched on the edge of the haha at Belsay, was a cube pierced with 5600 spikes. Heatherwick said at the time that he really enjoyed the challenge of designing a ‘small building’, and his Sitooterie was a prototype that he went on to further develop during his career, most prominently with the UK Pavilion for the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010. Heatherwick went on to found Heatherwick Studio, whose design projects include the abandoned Garden Bridge in central London.

Welfare State International designed the ‘Wishbone House’. The space was available for private contemplation or for public celebration, with visitors encouraged to use the shelter for marriage proposals or naming ceremonies.

The Romanesque church created by FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) was covered with thousands of discs which shimmered in the dappled woodland light. In 2002 the sitooterie was installed in a new home at the Grizedale Sculpture Park in Cumbria, where the two seats inside gave views of the surrounding forest. Sadly, visitors to the park were unable to resist prizing off the shiny discs, and its residence was short-lived. More recently Charles Holland of FAT Architecture worked with Grayson Perry and Living Architecture to create the holiday rental ‘A House for Essex’, which also seems to shimmer, but is clad with more durable tiles. Living Architecture describes the house, which opened to guests in 2015, as belonging  ‘to a history of follies, whilst also being deeply of its own time’. It’s well worth following the link below to learn about the whole ‘history’ Perry created for the house.

The Sitooteries show attracted almost 100,000 visitors in the 7 months it was on show at Belsay, and was widely featured in the media, including the New York Times which ran a feature headlined ‘The Summer House, Reinvented’. Further excellent art exhibitions and installations have followed at Belsay over the last 2 decades. For obvious reasons all current plans are on hold, but watch this space https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/belsay-hall-castle-and-gardens/

The full list of artists was: Inflate, Claudio Silvestrin, Simon Watkinson, Michael Anastassiades, Thomas Heatherwick Studio, Welfare State International, Tania Kovats, Mosedale Gillatt/Octo Design, FAT, Julian Opie, Ashley McCormick.

For Heatherwick’s Shanghai big brother to the Belsay sitooterie see http://www.heatherwick.com/project/uk-pavilion/

For Grayson Perry and FAT’s House for Essex click here https://www.living-architecture.co.uk/the-houses/a-house-for-essex/overview/