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/

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Sir Christopher Wren died 300 years ago on 8 March 1723. The Folly Flâneuse thought she would mark the anniversary by looking at a two examples of his work that served as garden ornaments – once surplus to their original requirements.

In 1829 the churchwardens of St Antholin on Budge Row, rebuilt to a design by Wren after the Great Fire of London, were informed that the church was in need of repair, and that it was ‘indispensably necessary to take down and rebuild the upper part of the spire’. The Bishop of London was petitioned for permission to borrow the £1,000 needed to cover the cost of repairs to the church, and an appeal was then launched allowing work to begin. An entirely new spire was erected, leaving the old one in need of a new home…

The original spire was bought by a wealthy printer called Robert Harrild (1780-1853) and re-erected as an ornament in the garden of Round Hill, his villa at Sydenham in south London. Here he was laying out ‘extensive grounds’ on land he had reclaimed from ‘wild common’. And happily there it has remained, despite much of his former estate being developed for housing in the 1960s. The spire is listed at grade II and was restored in 2019.

St Antholin’s replacement spire, as erected in 1829, did not have such a happy ending. Despite a public outcry, and an initial promise to leave the tower and spire standing, St Antholin’s was demolished in its entirety in 1875 to enable the construction of Queen Victoria Street. The tower and spire were sold to a building contractor for 5 Guineas and according to contemporary accounts he recouped his investment by selling the stone at 3 shillings a barrowload. This plaque originally marked the site of St Antholin’s on Budge Row, but was moved a short distance to the wall of St Mary Aldermary early this century.

Temple Bar, completed in 1672, was one of the city gates designed by Wren. It stood on Fleet Street for two centuries, and was the last surviving city gate until it was taken down in 1878, with the carefully numbered stones being taken into storage.

The masonry was acquired a decade later by Sir Henry Bruce Meux, who had the gate rebuilt as a feature on his estate at Theobalds in Hertfordshire. The move was unpopular, and throughout the 20th century there were appeals that it should be returned to the City of London. In 1911, following the death of Lady Meux, it was proposed to make the gate the centrepiece of a grand garden in front of the Adelphi Terrace, and in the 1950s the architectural practice of Seely and Paget proposed re-erecting it on Ludgate Hill. The eminent photographic studio of Bedford Lemere & Co. worked with the architects to create a photomontage of how the arch would look in its new location.

Each proposal failed until The Temple Bar Trust was established in 1976 with a new determination to save the deteriorating structure. With the support of the City of London Corporation, Temple Bar was eventually re-erected as part of the Paternoster Square development in 2004.

You can read more about the Wren300 programme of events here https://wren300.org

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