When I stepped out of the back entrance to the Omni William Penn Hotel on the first morning of my visit to Pittsburgh, I was confronted only a couple of hundred yards down the street by one of the masterpieces of American architecture by one of its master architects, the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail (1883-88).
Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) was responsible for a catalogue of memorable buildings, many of them so immediately recognisable that their distinctive style is named after him – Richardsonian Romanesque.
Though he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris he didn’t simply recreate the neoclassical Beaux-Arts style in the USA; he distilled elements of European architecture based on the solidity of medieval Romanesque – solid, rusticated masonry, sturdy round arches (including Syrian arches which rise directly from the ground), dormer windows (including Japanese-derived eyelid dormers), extended eaves and tall towers with capped roofs.
He claimed he could design anything “from a cathedral to a chicken coop” but he’s best remembered for houses, public libraries, railway stations and grand public buildings.
Richardson himself believed that the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail was his greatest achievement.
The courthouse stands four storeys high with a five-storey tower punctuating the main façade. An internal courtyard provides light to the interior as well as a cool space with a fountain away from the street.
The jail is connected with the courthouse across a road by a close imitation of the Bridge of Sighs at the Doge’s Palace in Venice.
Richardson’s influence on American architecture is unmistakable, whether in his own designs, like the Glessner House in Chicago, or in those of his followers such as Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and, at a further remove, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) in such Prairie-style houses as the Robie House, also in Chicago.
Rather than take a humdrum flight into Pittsburgh, I travelled by rail from Philadelphia in 2017 along what’s now called the Keystone Corridor. It’s a much more meaningful experience.
The historic main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia crosses the forbidding Allegheny Mountains, passing through formerly prosperous steel towns that, when they fell on hard times, were identified as part of the Rust Belt.
Altoona, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s railway town, is still an important centre bristling with the works and sidings of the PRR’s successor, the freight operator Norfolk & Southern, and also the location of the Railroaders’ Memorial Museum.
Five miles west of Altoona lies the Horseshoe Curve, opened in 1854, a 220° curve which is so spectacular it’s a tourist attraction. The purpose-built observation park opened in 1879. On the train, the attendant alerts passengers with a PA announcement.
Johnstown has a powerful history – home of the Cambria Steel Company (founded 1852), the site of the notorious Johnstown Flood of 1889, a dam-failure which killed well over two thousand people, and the location of the Johnstown Inclined Plane of 1891, a funicular like Saltburn’s but big enough to carry a car.
Further on there are stops at Latrobe, birthplace of the banana split according to Wikipedia, and Greensburg, a coal town that seems to have reinvented itself more successfully than most, partly perhaps because it has a university campus.
Arrival in Pittsburgh is less than dignified: the two daily arrivals and two corresponding departures run into an annex beside Daniel H Burman’s magnificent Penn Station (1898-1902) which is now an apartment block.
However, a five-minute taxi transfer took me to the Omni William Penn Hotel, where I was speedily installed in a spacious and comfortable room with a vast bed, a generous bathroom and a walk-in closet (wardrobe) which could itself almost have taken a single bed.
The William Penn is an illustrious, civilised landmark in Pittsburgh, opened in 1916 by a consortium that included the much-disliked Henry Clay Frick, and host to a succession of US Presidents from Hoover onwards: https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/pittsburgh-william-penn.
Barack Obama, apparently, was the first president to be barred from the top-floor presidential suite because his security people insist on occupying the floors above and below him.
His successor appears never to have darkened the doorstep. Perhaps he owns or leases some place else.
My mate Simon had an opportunity recently to inspect the interior of the former Burton’s shop at 783-787 Attercliffe Road, Sheffield and sent me a collection of images. The shop exterior is intact though time-worn, and still bears decorative features that can be restored. The interior, like the Banners department store a couple of hundred yards away, was simply a space for shop fittings, most of which have disappeared.
The Burton tailoring empire was founded by a remarkable man, a Russian Jew born Meshe David Osinsky (1885-1952), who emigrated to Britain at the start of the twentieth century with £100 to his name and hardly a word of English.
He began as an itinerant pedlar, and opened his first shop at Holywell Cross, Chesterfield in 1904. From there he expanded to Mansfield and then Sheffield. He married in 1909 and started his family in a modest but respectable cul-de-sac, Violet Bank Road in Nether Edge.
The men’s suits he sold were bought in at first, initially off-the-peg until 1906 when he offered a bespoke made-to-measure service. By 1910 he moved to Leeds to manufacture his own garments, and in the 1920s his Hudson Road premises became the largest clothing factory in Europe with 10,500 employees.
His identity became grand as his business flourished: his name was Morris Burton by 1909 when he applied for British citizenship; he quickly changed to Maurice Burton, and by 1917 he was Montague Maurice Burton. In 1931 he became Sir Montague Burton.
It’s possible, but not certain, that his suits originated the expression “full Monty” – jacket, waistcoat and two pairs of trousers.
783-787 Attercliffe Road is typical: it’s located on a corner site next to the Adelphi Cinema. a white faience façade divided by pilasters fronts a steel-framed structure, and there were prominent reliefs (one of which remains intact) of the contemporary Burton logo with its strapline “The Tailor of Taste”. The first floor is top-lit because of the proximity of surrounding buildings, some of which have since been demolished. Surviving decorative features include the foundation stone laid by Stephen Austin Burton (possibly a grandson), the mosaic-floored entrance with original cast-metal glazing bars and at least one glass panel naming Burton stores in other towns and cities.
There’s also a slightly earlier, more restrained Burton’s building on the corner of Staniforth Road at 582-588 Attercliffe Road (1931). Stanley Howard Burton (Sir Montague’s eldest son) laid the foundation stone. Upstairs was at one time the Astoria Ballroom, and by 1944 it was a billiard saloon. It’s now occupied by a monumental mason, Madani Memorials.
The proximity of two Burton’s tailor’s shops tells us that Attercliffe folk were not rich but they were prudent, and many of them had cash and believed that “best is cheapest”.
Burton’s brand is now found only online, but around a couple of hundred of Harry Wilson’s buildings survive, though in England and Wales only half a dozen are listed, largely because English Heritage takes a dim view of good buildings stripped of their interiors.
Let’s hope the new owner of 783-787 Attercliffe Road treats the building kindly, because it commemorates the time when an ordinary working man could first afford a “Sunday-best” outfit as an alternative to his workaday clothes.
Kew Gardens, London: The Great PagodaKew Gardens, London: Temperate HouseKew Gardens, London: Palm House
I have a blind spot about botany, probably because I spent my Sheffield childhood in smoky, sulphurous 1950s Attercliffe, where the only indigenous flowers were dandelions and the only plants my mother could grow in her window box were nasturtiums.
Spending a Sunday recently at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was instructive, because every time I looked at a plant I had to read the label. So I found out what tamarind, the distinctive ingredient of Sheffield’s favourite condiment, Henderson’s Relish, looks like, dug into my smartphone dictionary to discover that ‘symbiotic’ means, in effect, a win-win relationship between different organisms, and learned that bamboo is in fact giant-sized grass.
To describe Kew Gardens as world-class is a simple statement of fact. It sits at the heart of an international network of organisations that through research and education foster the study and conservation of plants, seeds and fungi, alongside an enormous collection of botanical books and illustrations.
There have been royal residences south of the River Thames around Kew since the Middle Ages. Sheen Palace (1299), a favourite residence of sovereigns from Edward I to Richard II, was reconstructed by Henry V in 1414. After the timber palace burnt down in 1497, Henry VII rebuilt it and changed its name to the title he had derived from the Yorkshire town – Richmond.
The estate became a favourite retreat of the Hanoverian royal family at the start of the eighteenth century.
When Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), the son of George II and father of George III, lived there, the poet Alexander Pope gave him a puppy which wore a collar engraved with the couplet –
I am His Highness’ dog at Kew.
Pray, tell me Sir, whose dog are you?
Frederick’s widow, the Dowager Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1719-1772), was responsible for embellishing the gardens with a plethora of ornamental buildings, mostly now lost, by the Swedish-Scottish architect Sir William Chambers (1723-1796), of which the largest is the Great Pagoda (1761).
Chambers’ buildings are mostly straight-faced Neoclassical, but at Kew he had the opportunity to design for enjoyment. Unusually for his generation, he had travelled in China, and his pagoda is the epitome of Chinoiserie, ten storeys high, rising to 163ft, built in brick embellished with eighty fearsome dragons, originally enamel.
Horace Walpole, who lived at Strawberry Hill across the river, was impressed when the huge ornament went up in six months flat, writing to a friend – “…the Pagoda at Kew begins to rise above the trees and soon you will see it from Yorkshire”.
The whole structure was lovingly restored in 2018. The dragons on the first level are carved wood by Tim Crawley, Head of Historic Carving at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Those higher up, to lighten the load on the structure, are 3D-printed nylon: How we brought dragons back to Kew | Kew Palace | Historic Royal Palaces (hrp.org.uk).
After Kew was designated the national botanic garden in 1840 the pleasure buildings gave place to functional structures to house and nurture the collections. The architect Decimus Burton (1800-1881) collaborated with the Irish iron-founder Richard Turner (1798-1881) to devise the wrought-iron Palm House (1844-48), 362 feet long, with hand-blown curved-glass roofs extending to 62 feet in height. It’s a memorable space to wander in, with opportunities to ascend the spiral staircases for a bird’s-eye view of the palms and the building itself.
Decimus Burton subsequently collaborated with the Director of the Royal Botanic Garden, Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), in designing the Temperate House (1859-62), which is longer (628 feet), lower and less elegant than the Palm House. For practical reasons, to moderate indoor temperature in hot weather, the glass is entirely straight and the window-sashes are wood so they can be opened.
From the outset these serious, scientific structures admitted the general public, and Key Gardens remains one of London’s most popular tourist attractions.
Even a botanical ignoramus like me needs more than one whole-day visit to sample all its attractions: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | Kew.
There’s a story about the great Victorian architect Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) hopping off a train in a provincial town, marching down the street to a partly-built Gothic church and entering the site and giving orders, until the clerk of works approached and said, “Excuse me, Mr Scott. This is Mr Street’s church. Yours is further down the road.”
Both these architects were busy men.
Mr Street was George Edmund Street (1824-1881), who was one of Scott’s pupils for five years and established his own practice in 1849. He was predominantly a church architect, but is best known for his Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London (1873-82).
One of Street’s finest designs – All Saints’ Church, Denstone (1860-62) – is in Staffordshire, a county rich in fine Gothic churches by the best Victorian architects.
All Saints’ was financed by the patron of the living, Sir Thomas Percival Heywood, Bt (1823-1897), who had retired from his father’s Manchester bank and abandoned his Unitarian faith to join the Church of England. Sir Percival wished to establish a new parish with a church reflecting Anglo-Catholic architecture and worship in an area still dominated by Evangelical practice.
He retired to his family’s country home, Dove Leys, which he enlarged, endowed the nearby village of Denstone with the parish church (1860-62), the vicarage and the school (1866), all of them, together with the lychgate and churchyard cross, designed by George Edmund Street.
At All Saints’ Street was responsible not only for the exterior, a composition of nave, taller apsidal chancel and circular north tower with its conical cap, but also for its opulent interior. The entire church, inside and out, is characterised by structural polychromy, the cream Hollington stone highlighted by bands of pink stone.
All the original interior fittings were designed by Street: the font, reredos, organ case and pulpit were all carved by Thomas Earp (1828-1893), and the floor-tiles were manufactured by Mintons of Stoke-on-Trent. The stained glass was manufactured by the newly-established Clayton & Bell company. Derbyshire marble and alabaster are freely applied to give richness to the interior.
The windows are of varying designs, intended to bring daylight where it was most needed: the south aisle has two traceried windows, in contrast to the narrow lancets in the north aisle. There is a single rose window above the font in the north-west corner of the nave. So that the chancel could be lit by tall windows, the walls are significantly higher than the nave.
Street regarded All Soul’s, Denstone as his favourite church and it is undoubtedly one of his finest compositions. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, in The Buildings of England: Staffordshire (1974), remarked, “…here indeed is young Street at his very best”.
Denstone is very close to Alton Towers and only a few miles from A W N Pugin’s masterpiece, St Giles’ Catholic Church, Cheadle (1841-46). Less than twenty miles away is Holy Angels, Hoar Cross (1872-1901), one of the best churches of another master of English Gothic Revival, George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907), who was another of Scott’s early pupils.
These leaders of their profession were more than nodding acquaintances. Bodley attended two London churches – All Saints’, Margaret Street, where Street was churchwarden, and St Alban’s, Holborn, where Scott also worshipped.
Foxton Inclined Plane, Grand Union Canal, Leicestershire
Sir Edward Leader Williams’ Anderton Boat Lift (1875) in Cheshire successfully enabled canal boats to move between the River Weaver and the Trent & Mersey Canal, a vertical distance of fifty feet. Despite problems with maintenance it worked efficiently for over a century, and after a radical overhaul in 2000-02 it’s now likely to operate for another hundred years.
A completely different, less fortunate engineering solution to the same difficulty was tried in the Midlands, on the border between Leicestershire and Northamptonshire near Market Harborough.
The engineers who built the old Grand Union Canal at the beginning of the nineteenth century faced a similar situation at Foxton, where their main line climbed 75ft from a junction with a branch canal to Market Harborough up to the summit level.
The solution was a staircase of ten locks, opened in 1813, which took narrow boats forty-five minutes to travel. At the other end of the summit pound, at Watford Gap, another flight of locks dropped 54ft 1in.
In 1894 the Grand Junction Canal company amalgamated with the old Grand Union and the Leicestershire & Northamptonshire canals to operate the trunk route between Leicestershire and London as a single entity.
It still seemed practical at the end of the nineteenth century to compete with the railways for bulk, non-urgent freight traffic, using broad barges, provided the bottlenecks at the narrow locks at Foxton and Watford were eliminated.
The Grand Junction engineer Gordon Cale Thomas devised and patented a steam-powered lift that drew tanks, called caissons, laterally up a ramp between the top and bottom of the old locks: Foxton Inclined Plane – Foxton Inclined Plane – Wikipedia.
This device, which opened in 1900, had numerous advantages: each caisson could carry two wide barges between the two levels in twelve minutes and, whereas canal locks lose a lockful of water whenever a boat passes up or down, the lift lost hardly any water at all.
The disadvantages were that the winding engines had to be kept constantly in steam whether there was traffic or not, and there turned out to be insufficient traffic to justify the ongoing cost.
Perversely, the canal company chose to rebuild the Watford locks as narrow locks, simply moving the bottleneck further south and leaving the Foxton incline underused. A boat lift at Watford would have speeded up traffic dramatically, and may have yielded better cost benefits.
Because the main carrier, Fellows Morton & Clayton, demanded twenty-four-hour working, Foxton Locks was rebuilt, also as narrow locks, in 1909 and the incline was mothballed after ten years. It was used intermittently when the locks needed repair until it was scrapped in 1928.
Its site was abandoned for nearly half a century until it was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1973, and the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust was founded in 1980.
Nowadays the site of the ramp is cleared and the scale of this sophisticated piece of Victorian canal engineering is apparent to visitors. The reconstructed boiler-house is a museum which explains the vanished incline and the Trust intends eventually to restore the lift.
It won’t happen any time soon, but the Trust is actively curating the site and maintaining public awareness of a fascinating corner of the canal network: https://www.fipt.org.uk/copy-of-about-fipt.
In the early 1970s, the time when I learnt about industrial archaeology from the Arkwright Society based in Cromford, there was a sense of urgency about witnessing, if not safeguarding, relics of the Industrial Revolution that were deteriorating and going out of use.
The Arkwright Society had among its members Leslie Bradley (1902-2004), formerly headmaster of Derby School from 1942 to 1961, who led a succession of canal day-trips which were themselves an education. Leslie knew his way around the canal system because he had, like Tom Rolt, converted a narrow boat to a leisure craft before many other people took to the idea.
In 1973 Leslie ran a trip including potentially a last chance to experience taking a boat through the Anderton Boat Lift. This unique survivor was built in 1875, rebuilt in 1906-08, and was clearly nearing the end of its useful life.
It was built to provide a more efficient link between the Weaver Navigation which served the Cheshire salt beds and the Trent & Mersey Canal, which connected with the industrial heart of the Midlands and the waterways of northern England.
The Lift replaced the collection of chutes, cranes and inclined planes dating from the end of the eighteenth century that transhipped freight up and down the fifty-foot vertical distance between the two waterways.
It was designed by Sir Edward Leader Williams (1828-1901), the chief engineer of the North Staffordshire Railway which owned the Trent & Mersey Canal, as a development of the lifts designed by James Green (1781-1849) for the Grand Western Canal in Devon. Sir Edward proposed an iron tower containing two caissons, side by side, to lift and lower floating narrow boats, powered by hydraulic rams assisted when necessary by a steam engine.
The Weaver Navigation Act (1872) empowered the river trustees to construct the lift, which opened to canal traffic on July 26th 1875. Boats gain access from the river at the base of the lift which stands on an island in the middle of the river, like Williams’ later Barton Swing Aqueduct (1893). At the top of the structure an iron aqueduct leads vessels into the canal on its embankment.
The polluted canal water that powered the hydraulics repeatedly caused difficulties with the machinery over the following three decades. The trustees were advised by their engineer Colonel John Arthur Saner (1864-1952) to install a system of electric motors and counterweights which would be cheaper and easier to maintain and had the advantage that the caissons could operate independently rather than in tandem. However, the full 252-ton weight of the water-filled caissons was no longer cushioned by the rams, so Colonel Saner reinforced the structure with steel A-girders to support pulleys that led the wire ropes which bore the load.
The conversion from hydraulic to electric power took place within two years, 1906-08, and operated efficiently until the 1970s, despite increasing doubts about the effect of atmospheric pollution on the integrity of the structure. A 1983 inspection revealed such severe corrosion that the Lift was closed immediately.
Fortunately, it had been listed as a Scheduled Monument in 1976, so there was no likelihood it would be dismantled, but it stood idle until an admirable £7,000,000 restoration programme brought it back to life in 2000-02.
The Lift is now once more hydraulic-powered using oil, and the redundant A-frames and pulleys remain to show how the structure looked for most of its working life. The heavy counterweights were not replaced, and now form a maze in the grounds of the two-storey visitor centre.
Now the traffic is no longer salt but people – leisure boaters and day visitors.
I’m glad to think that Leslie Bradley lived long enough to know of the restoration. It was industrial-archaeology pioneers like him who helped to save for future generations a priceless legacy of mementos of British industrial genius.
Ralph Dutton – his first name always pronounced ‘Rafe’ – was born in 1898, in the right place at the right time.
His parents were wealthy – his father a descendant of the 2nd Baron Shelborne with an estate at Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, his mother a daughter of a Bristol banker.
Ralph progressed from West Downs School to Eton, leaving in 1917 without taking his School Certificate. He was rejected for military service because of his eyesight and instead served as a clerk in the Foreign Office. In 1919 he was admitted to Oxford University on the strength of a letter from his mother to the Dean of Christ Church, and left two years later without taking a degree. During his second year at Oxford his father asked him how he was getting on at Cambridge.
This path through education gave him a priceless legacy of friends, young men who became luminaries in British life and culture – Anthony Eden, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Christopher Hussey, Beverley Nichols, Sacheverell Sitwell.
To the end of his life he gave no hint to anyone of his political views, his religious persuasion or his sexuality.
He knew that sooner or later he would inherit Hinton Ampner and, apart from taking a course at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, he spent his time and money on broadening his mind, travelling, and becoming adept at collecting fine art and furniture.
He acquired such treasures as a fireplace from Hamilton House near Motherwell, paintings by Jacob de Wit, Francesco Fontebasso and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and ceiling roundels by Angelica Kaufman.
He loathed his father’s house, a Victorian remodelling of a late-eighteenth century hunting lodge, and when eventually it became his in 1935 he lost no time in remodelling it in neo-Georgian style. His architects were his friend Lord Gerald Wellesley (from 1943 7th Duke of Wellington) and Trenwith Wells.
At the same time he began to write about the aesthetic interests that gave him joy, beginning with The English Country House (1935) and The English Garden (1937), and after the War resumed producing books about architecture and fine art until the early 1960s.
He filled the house with the paintings, furniture and books that he’d accumulated, and when he took up residence in August 1939 he entertained only one guest, his friend Charlotte Bonham-Carter, before the property was requisitioned to accommodate the girls of Portsmouth High School at the start of World War II.
When peace returned Ralph gradually brought the house and garden to a state that satisfied him, so that he could entertain his wide circle of friends in comfort and luxury – the biographer James Pope-Hennessy, the art critic Raymond Mortimer, the diplomat and politician Harold Nicolson and the novelist L P Hartley.
A serious fire in 1960 destroyed part of the house and disfigured the rest. Ralph Dutton’s immediate reaction was to call back Trenwith Wells (because Lord Wellesley was by this time fully occupied being Duke of Wellington) and his favourite decorator Ronald Fleming, and they not only restored the house but improved it, making good deficiencies that had only been recognised when it was lived in after the war.
He inherited the title 8th Baron Shelborne in 1982, three years before his death. He had no direct heir, so the title died with him.
He had bequeathed the estate to the National Trust in the 1960s, soon after the house was rebuilt. This caused some embarrassment to the Trust, who did not habitually take on properties before the paint was dry. They were grateful for the gardens and grounds, but only agreed to open the house to the public after his death.
I’m glad they did, because it’s a beguiling place to visit. The volunteer room-stewards are notably welcoming, and Ralph Dutton’s rooms are exquisite.
It’s not an easy place to find, and really needs more signage in the surrounding area, but it’s worth putting aside a day to relax and savour some of the comforts its owner wanted guests to experience: Hinton Ampner | Hampshire | National Trust.
St Cecilia’s Apartments, formerly St Cecilia’s Parish Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (2024)
At long last, the attractive parish church of St Cecilia, Parson Cross, Sheffield is sure of a secure future after years of redundancy and the threat of demolition.
It was built at the same time as the surrounding council estate and consecrated in 1939, designed by a little-known architect called Kenneth Mackenzie.
The church community thrived into the post-war period, led by clergy provided by the Anglo-Catholic Kelham Fathers, but in later decades the congregation shrank until they were forced to abandon the building for the smaller church of St Bernard, Southey Green.
Sheffield City Council insisted that the only possible reuse would be residential, and eventually a developer came forward with a practical scheme, completed in 2024.
I wish that the UPVC glazing had been black or dark grey instead of stark white, and it’s a shame that Kenneth Mackenzie’s Gothic tracery had to go, but I’m pleased that this charming building survives within its circle of surrounding houses in an area of north Sheffield which has lost some of the few landmark buildings that were built in the 1930s, such as St Hilda’s Parish Church, Shiregreenand the Ritz Cinema, Parson Cross.
Local people who knew and loved St Cecilia’s Church will be bewildered if they set foot inside now. Necessarily, its spaciousness has been sacrificed by the insertion of a mezzanine floor and multiple internal partitions, and though the arches of the nave arcades provide decorative features in individual first-floor apartments, the need to preserve the external fenestration has required compromises in the height of the window apertures.
Demolishing St Cecilia’s didn’t bear thinking about, not only because it’s an attractive and substantial building, but the closeness of the adjacent houses meant that it would have had to be taken down expensively brick by brick, which would have been an extended nightmare for local residents.
As it is, the former church can earn its keep and repay the investment in redevelopment. And the exterior looks immaculate.
It remains a quiet, unobtrusive presence in the midst of the Parson Cross estate, and it’s a witness to the energy of the Kelham Fathers and the optimism of the worshippers who arrived from dismal inner-city areas at the end of the Thirties, only to face the upheaval of war and the uncertainties of the decades that followed.
When I was at university in the late 1960s, the first social landmark of the academic year was the Fresher’s Bazaar – a recruitment fair in which new students could enrol in societies and clubs as diversions from their studies.
Here was a panorama of extra-curricular talent – sports societies (naturally), various cultural groups (predictably), religious, political and hobby groups.
The University newspaper, Torchlight, recruited reporters (one of whom would have been Chris Mullin, who rose to be its editor and later became an MP).
There was a Winnie-the-Pooh Society which, I was later informed, under the pretence of activities with Pooh-sticks planned to overthrow the government.
Best of all was the Apathy Society which left a single sheet of paper on a bare trestle table where innocents could disqualify themselves from membership by summoning the energy to sign their name. The Apathy Soc were notorious for never clearing their pigeon-hole.
On this analogy, you might think a society called the Folly Fellowship would be the destination of fools, but it’s quite the opposite.
I came across them when Jonathan Holt bought a back copy of my handbook for a 2009 Derbyshire-based tour, Taking the Waters: the story of spas and hydros.
He made admirable use of it to include out-of-the-way wells and spas that are largely unknown, such as the Royal Well at Matlock Bath, Quarndon Spa and the Stoney Middleton Bath Houses in his article in the Foundation’s magazine Follies, No 118 (Summer 2024), pp 10-14.
He also gave me a generous shout-out at the end of his article and invited me to join the group on their Derbyshire tour.
Because I already had a commitment on the Saturday I arranged to meet the Folly Fellowship members at Chatsworth on Sunday lunchtime for a tour of the house and the freedom of the gardens.
Chatsworth is full of garden features and buildings without a purpose other than to entertain guests, from the Tudor Queen Mary’s Bower to the grand Victorian engineering of the Emperor Fountain, the ingenious Willow Tree Fountainto Dame Elisabeth Frink’s War Horse.
I chose to go looking for the one item on Jonathan’s list that I couldn’t identify, the Moorish Summerhouse. It’s not marked on any of the maps, and I had to ask a garden guide at the ticket-kiosk how to find it.
Six of us tramped up the slope, past the Case and the Kitchen Garden, and up a serpentine path until we came upon it.
The Moorish Summerhouse, otherwise called the Saracen’s Shelter, is a fine structure, sited on a level with Thomas Archer’s Cascade House, exquisitely designed in Moorish style. It seats six and would make an impressive bus shelter.
We chatted idly and then people wandered off to look at other things. There are far worse ways of spending a Sunday afternoon.
I can find nothing about the Summerhouse online or in Pevsner, but that doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of the spirit of harmless eccentricity that it embodies.
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