Tag: Yorkshire Post

architecture, belvedere, Buckinghamshire, eyecatcher, Folly, garden, garden history, landscape, Mausoleum, Pagoda, Suffolk, Temple, Tower

Recording Britain

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The Dashwood Mausoleum, West Wycombe. Image ©fotoLibra/Scott A. McNealy.

This weekend the country celebrates the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Thinking of the events of 1939-45, the Folly Flâneuse was reminded of a wartime project to document the changing rural and urban face of Britain. At a time when the future seemed uncertain,  ‘Recording Britain’ commissioned artists to portray the country as it then was, creating a visual history for future generations.

Folly, Grotto, West Yorkshire

Happy 65th anniversary ‘Follies and Grottoes’

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A great stumbling block in the understanding of follies is the attempt to define what exactly one is. Must it be useless? Wildly expensive? Weird? One of my favourite summaries comes from Barbara Jones, the first person to study the genre in depth in Follies and Grottoes, published by Constable 65 years ago today 

She wrote that a folly ‘is built for pleasure, and pleasure is personal, difficult to define.’