Andy Rourke mural, The Wheatsheaf, Oak Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester
Andy Rouke (1964-2023), the highly-regarded bass-player of the 1980s Manchester band The Smiths, died of pancreatic cancer, and the loss has had a huge impact on his fans and admirers.
Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, picked up his wife Bee’s suggestion of a wall mural as a way of commemorating Andy and his exceptional musical legacy. He knew the exact image to capture his friend when they were both playing in the band, an image taken at the Caird Hall, Dundee by the photographer Nalinee Darmrong who had travelled with them on tour in 1985-86. Other images from that time are at You’ve Got to See This Local Photographer’s Book About Her Teenage Years Touring With the Smiths – Washingtonian.
Mike Joyce recruited the Manchester muralist Akse P19 to render Nalinee Darmrong’s image in his precisely detailed manner. His work has been enriching the local streetscape since 1992: Akse P19 | Greater Mancunians.
Andy Rourke frequented the Wheatsheaf pub on Oak Street in the Northern Quarter, and the current landlords, Robert Ashton and Lisa Booth, immediately offered the gable wall overlooking their car park with the approval of the building’s owner, Admiral Taverns. Andy’s family gave their blessing to the project.
Dartington, Devon: Henry Moore ‘Memorial Figure’, Dartington Church and Hall
Dartington Hall, north of Totnes in Devon, celebrates its centenary as a community in 2025. It’s a magical place, where people of talent have created, educated and influenced life and culture in Britain and beyond in all manner of fascinating ways.
It grew from the vision of Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) and his wife Dorothy (1887-1968), who purchased the decrepit estate, with its grand house dating back to 1338, to found a charity dedicated to encouraging all forms of art, sustainable agriculture, social science and peace.
Dorothy Elmhirst belonged to the Whitney family, which had settled in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and became fabulously wealthy after Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, transforming the economy of the slave-based cotton industry in the Southern states. She inherited $15 million dollars at the age of seventeen. She and her husband wanted for nothing, and sincerely wanted to make the world a better place.
Leonard was descended from a long line of Yorkshire gentry. After service in the First World War and subsequent study in the USA, he met the Bengali poet, artist, social reformer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and followed him to India as his secretary. Together they founded an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal.
When Leonard and Dorothy married in 1925, Tagore, who had travelled extensively in England, encouraged them to invest in the ideas of the Chinese-based Rural Reconstruction Movement and may have suggested Dartington Manor as a suitable site.
The Elmhirsts lost no time in improving the estate, employing the architect William Weir (1865-1950) to restore and adapt the existing buildings, including the Great Hall which had stood roofless for over a century. Dorothy Elmhirst worked with the garden designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane to transform the gardens.
The weaver Elizabeth Peacock created the wall-hangings for the Great Hall between 1930 and 1938. The architect Walter Gropius adapted the interior of the Barn Theatre in 1935, in preparation for Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton, to start the Dartington Theatre School the following year. The Henry Moore sculpture ‘Memorial Figure’ was installed in the grounds in 1947.
A cluster of practical and educational projects grew up and were placed under an umbrella organisation, the Dartington Hall Trust, in 1935. All of them have adapted over the years, and some have closed down or moved away – the progressive Dartington Hall School (1926), the Dartington Hall Film Unit (1945), the Dartington International Summer School and music festival (1953), the Dartington College of Arts (1961), Dartington Glass (1967; divested and renamed Dartington Crystal 1986) and the ecology-focused Schumacher College (1990).
The roll-call of prominent artists and innovators associated with Dartington is remarkable, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s initial visit in 1926. Paul Robeson rehearsed his 1930 production of Othello at Dartington. The potter Bernard Leach was involved in Dartington from its earliest days and taught there from 1932. The influential dancer and teacher Rudolf von Laban arrived from Nazi Germany in 1938 and contributed to Dartington programmes until 1951.
The composer Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, taught at summer schools between 1942 and 1951. Benjamin Britten conducted his cantata St Nicolas in the Great Hall in 1949, the year after it was completed, and Igor Stravinsky visited the 1957 Summer School.
One of the most influential figures associated with Dartington was the sociologist and writer Michael Young, latterly Baron Young of Dartington, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old pupil at the School in 1929, was a Trustee for fifty years, 1942-1992, and wrote the history of the Trust, entitled The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an utopian community (1982).
After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.
It’s remarkably difficult to find: there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.
If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction. But we’re from Sheffield. How are we supposed to know?
The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.
From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.
The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds CentralStation, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).
In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).
The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.
Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.
On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting.
If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.
The Cathedral of St John the Baptist (Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, Duomo di Torino) is worth visiting for the sake of an object that’s hardly ever seen – the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone).
The church interior is not particularly ornate. The nave is plain, with Doric piers supporting round arches, the bulk of it built very quickly between 1491 and 1498 alongside a slightly older brick bell tower. There is, however, a sequence of spectacularly Baroque side chapels, a huge organ case aloft in a transept, and a shrine to the twentieth-century Catholic local hero Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), due to be canonised in the centenary of his death from polio.
The domed Chapel of the Holy Shroud (1668-94) fills the space between the east end of the Cathedral and the adjacent Royal Palace.
The story of the revered relic it was built to contain is unrecorded before 1354, when it was exhibited in the French town of Lirey about a hundred miles east of Paris.
It came into the possession of the Royal House of Savoy in 1453, and was kept in the royal chapel at the Savoyard capital, Chambéry. There it sustained fire-damage in 1532, and it was transferred to the new capital of Savoy, Turin, in 1578.
Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1634-1675) commissioned priest, engineer and mathematician Camillo Guarino Guarini (1624-1683), to complete the elaborate chapel that had been planned by his predecessor, Charles Emmanuel I “the Great”, Duke of Savoy (1562-1630).
The floor of the Shroud Chapel is raised so that the interior Is visible from the nave, and both public pilgrims and royal visitors could gain access to the chapel on separate occasions. Crowned by Guarini’s dome, a masterpiece of engineering, the Chapel was consecrated by the architect in 1680, but was only completed after his death. It was finally ready to receive the Shroud in 1694.
At the time of the 1898 exposition of the Shroud it was photographed for the first time by an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia (1855-1941), who was astonished that the negative image provided detail invisible to the naked eye.
Following a fire in 1997, the Shroud is currently stored in a temperature- and humidity-controlled case in a side-chapel.
Since 1998, the 500th anniversary of the Cathedral’s consecration, the Shroud has been shown much more frequently than before, in 2000, 2010, 2015 and (by live stream because of Covid) at Easter 2020.
At all other times visitors are invited to sit in front of a digital image of Christ’s face, an opportunity that is treated with the greatest respect. Even the bambini fall quiet.
I respect the views of scientists who say the Shroud’s herringbone weave postdates the time of Christ, that the images are painted with identifiable colour agents such as iron oxide, and so on, but I also sense that we can’t possibly know the significance of this piece of fabric.
There’s an ethereal quality about the image that defies logic, and hosts of visitors to Turin gaze with awe at what may be the face of their Redeemer.
Newburgh Priory, as the name suggests, was founded as a monastery of Augustinian canons who came to the site from elsewhere around 1150.
At the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was purchased by Henry VIII’s chaplain, Anthony Bellasis, in 1539. It has remained the property of Bellasis’ descendants to the present day – taking a baronetcy in 1611, and the successive titles Baron, Viscount and Earl Fauconberg.
Thomas, 1st Earl Fauconberg (c1627-1700) married Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, Mary (1636 or 1637-1713) whereby hangs a tale.
Lord Fauconberg had an unerring instinct which side to back in the convoluted politics of the day. He was a Roundhead in the English Civil War, but welcomed King Charles II at his Restoration in 1660 and when Charles’ brother James II was obliged to relinquish the Crown in 1688, the then Viscount Fauconberg supported the invitation to William of Orange to assume the Throne, for which he was made Earl Fauconberg.
In the aftermath of Charles II’s Restoration the corpses of three regicides, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Henry Ireton (1611-1651) and John Bradshaw (1602-1659) were exhumed and taken to Tyburn for post-mortem execution. The details of this unpleasant event are at Cromwell’s Body | olivercromwell.org. The three corpses were beheaded and the heads stuck on spikes above the parapet of Westminster Hall.
Cromwell’s head was said to have blown down from the roof in a gale sometime towards the end of the seventeenth century and was picked up and hidden by a sentry. It passed through several “owners”, until it eventually reached the Protector’s alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where it was buried in an unmarked spot in the grounds in 1960 so that it would remain undisturbed.
There are bizarre stories of the identities and subsequent fates of the regicides’ headless corpses, contradicting the official version that they were buried in a pit below the gallows at Tyburn.
Alternative accounts of the location of Cromwell’s corpse began circulating in the 1720s, just as the events of 1660 passed out of the memory of the living: it was said either to have been sunk in a lead coffin in the River Thames or buried at the battlefield of Naseby.
Alternative versions place its location in St Nicholas’ Church, Chiswick, where Mary, Lady Fauconberg and her sister Frances are buried, or in St Andrew’s Church, Northborough, where Oliver Cromwell’s widow, Elizabeth Claypole, is said to lie.
However, visitors to Newburgh Priory are shown a stone vault in the attic, where family tradition says the Protector’s headless corpse rests.
Lady Fauconberg was said to have used her husband’s political influence to ensure that her father’s corpse was protected from further abuse. It was quietly spirited away to Yorkshire and has remained undisturbed in the attic of Newburgh Priory to this day.
The Newburgh Priory family, now called Wombwell, have to their credit declined every request to open the vault and examine its contents. It attracted the curiosity of King Edward VII as Prince of Wales when he stayed at Newburgh. He bribed the estate carpenter to break into the vault one night but was caught and like everyone else had to take “no” for an answer.
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.
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.
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.
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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