Close to the little town of Ryde on the north coast of the Isle of Wight stood Appley Towers, a fine seaside villa with views across the Solent to the mainland of Britain. In the later decades of the nineteenth century its new owner added a belvedere on the shore, which he called the Watch Tower.

In 1872 the Appley Towers (sometimes Apley Towers) estate was up for sale, and there was much gossip about who might purchase it. The Hampshire Advertiser suggested in June of that year that the Marquess of Bute had snapped up the estate for £47,000, but in July papers across the country reported that a ‘well-known member of Parliament’ had purchased the ‘magnificent estate’ for £59,950. This was Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), MP for Gateshead since 1841, and knighted in 1865 after serving as Paymaster General and Vice-President of the Board of Trade.

Immediately after purchasing the estate Sir William began to remodel the house and fill the gardens and glasshouses with the finest botanical specimens (soon to be described in all of the smart gardening journals of the period). He built a private pier where his visitors could arrive by yacht, and he contributed handsomely to the costs of building a ‘massive sea wall’ below his estate with a promenade open to all. By the time of his death in 1882 he was rumoured to have spent £70,000 in ‘beautifying the place’.

In this same period he erected a pretty little ‘Watch Tower’ on the sea wall. Sir William commissioned local men to design and build the tower, which was complete by 1876. Over the door is a plaque carved with Hutt’s family crest of a lapwing and the motto Vouloir est Pouvoir – which can be translated as ‘where there’s a will there’s a way’. Although Sir William called it the Watch Tower, it quickly became known locally as the Appley Tower.

The architect was Thomas Hellyer and the builder was Isaac Barton, both of Ryde. Hellyer and Barton also worked on remodelling the main house, Appley Towers, including adding the lofty clock tower which, with the Watch Tower, made ‘such a conspicuous figure in the landscape as viewed from the sea’.

After Sir William’s death in 1882 there was speculation that the Prince of Wales was going to buy Appley Towers, but this was soon dismissed as ‘a flim-flam of the wildest kind’. The Hutt family continued to own Appley Towers until 1912, when the property with its ‘View Tower’ was sold to Sir Hedworth Williamson 9th Bt, a wealthy industrialist who entertained members of the royal family at Appley Towers on a number of occasions in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1945 Ryde Borough Council bought the estate with a view to creating a public park, and in the following decade the house was demolished and its site developed for housing. The ‘pudgy little Appley Tower’ (as described by Gwyn Headley in Country Life in 1993) was restored in 2023-2024 in a project led by Natural Enterprise. The tower is now to be open regularly (although reliant on volunteers, and the Flâneuse found it shut, so check before visiting). The area of the former gardens nearest the sea is now a public park.

The tower is listed by Historic England at grade II for its ‘curiosity value’, and so in keeping with such whimsy, and with apologies to Edward Lear…

There was an old gentleman of Ryde,
Whose estate was his joy and his pride.
He thought it quite jolly,
To build a fine folly,
On an esplanade by the seaside.

Sir William Hutt, by the way, has interesting folly connections if you have time for a couple of detours…

In 1831 Hutt married as his first wife Mary, Dowager Countess of Strathmore (died 1860). She had been the mistress of the 10th Earl of Strathmore, and their relationship was legitimised when he married her from his deathbed in 1820, leaving her a considerable fortune and the mansion at Gibside as her home for life. Hutt had been tutor to her son, John Bowes (1811-1885), at Cambridge and thus met Mary. Gibside, with its landscape dotted with follies, was the couple’s home when Hutt was MP for Gateshead. Hutt advised and encouraged his stepson when he and his wife, Josephine, embarked on a project to create a museum in Barnard Castle, Co. Durham – famed today as the Bowes Museum. A new exhibition inspired by Josephine’s collecting has just opened at the Bowes Museum.

In 1842 when Hutt was Member of Parliament for Gateshead, he was part of the committee convened to decide how to commemorate the life of John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham. It was Hutt who put forward the resolution that suggested a monument of an ‘architectural character’ on Penshaw Hill, near the late earl’s Lambton Castle estate. This eventually took shape as the grand Penshaw Monument, loosely modelled on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens.

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