Bomb-proof investments
QUESTION Having seen a water tower converted into a house, what are the strangest building conversions? The Solent Forts, comprising Spitbank Fort, No Man’s Fort, St helen’s Fort and horse Sand Fort, are a series of artificial islands built in the 19th century to cut off the Solent and protect the Portsmouth and Southampton shipyards from the threat of a French invasion.
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston ordered their construction in the 1860s. With 15ft granite walls and armour plating, these structures were marvels of Victorian engineering. Giant stone blocks were used as foundations, transported from the quarry by train and then by barge, before being set in place by divers.
The project took 15 years to complete and by the time they were ready, the French threat had faded, hence the forts became known as ‘Palmerston’s Follies’.
They came into their own during World War II, when they acted as defences for Portsmouth dockyard and the sea channels, and housed anti-aircraft guns.
They were put up for sale in 1963, but no one gambled on investing in them until the eighties. Spitbank Fort was originally converted into a museum. In 2009 a company called Solent Forts transformed Spitbank into an eight-suite luxury hotel and wedding venue which was opened in 2012.
Solent Forts has since converted No Man’s Fort into a 23-suite hotel and horse Sand Fort into a museum. St helen’s Fort remains derelict.
Amy Lewin, Southampton. MILL hill, a suburb in the London Borough of Barnet, was once home to one of four overground nuclear bunkers dotted about the capital.
The bunker was built in the early Fifties, when it was believed a concrete building above ground could withstand a nuclear blast. It was quickly realised nuclear weapons had become too powerful, and better shelters were built underground and away from London. The building was subsequently mothballed.
The bunker was Grade II-listed in December 2002 and described by english heritage as: ‘A reinforced concrete construction. Two-storey surface structure, with a central map room surrounded by control cabins, offices and plant room.’ It had 3ft-thick walls, a 5ftthick roof and a single steel door.
The bunker was eventually sold to a developer for conversion into a luxury home called Seafield house, which in 2010 was put on the market for £4.5million, described as ‘an architecturally significant contemporary house built on a large scale (with a) sleek, modern design’.
The whole project says a lot about how the world has changed.
Mrs J. Klein, Leamington Spa, Warks. WATer tower conversions are quite common and have featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs.
One of the most impressive projects on that programme was the £2 million conversion of a 99ft-tall water tower in Kennington, South London. Originally part of the Lambeth Workhouse and Infirmary (then Lambeth hospital), the building has 5ft-thick walls and a large steel water tank at the top. The house now has four bedrooms, a lift shaft and a 360-degree view of London.
There’s an additional modern living space at the bottom, nicknamed the Cube. The water tower, purchased for £380,000, was recently valued at £3.6 million.
G. L. Jacks, Twickenham, Middx. QUESTION Were students of Pythagoras banned from eating beans? PyThAGOrAS (c.570-c.495 BC) is mostly remembered for his mathematical theorem a²+b²=c². But there was much more to him than that.
he grew up on the island of Samos, in the Aegean, during the reign of the tyrant Polycrates. his father Mnesarchos was a silversmith. he was a pupil of both Anaximander the philosopher, and Pherecydes the mystic.
After establishing a reputation as a thinker, Pythagoras left Samos to see the world, visiting egypt before settling in the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy. There he established a semi-religious/ scientific cult called the Semicircle. The inner circle of the school had a smaller number of philosophers/mathematicians who were called mathematikoi. They lived as if they were in a monastery, having no private property and observing strict rules, which included a veneration of harmonious numbers, and (supposedly) a ban on eating beans.
The reasons for the strange bean edict are hazy, particularly as Pythagoras left no writings of his own, so all such commentary is second hand.
The poet Callimachus cited Pythagoras in calling beans a ‘painful food,’ and the roman orator Cicero blamed the old master’s loathing of them on their ability to ‘cause considerable flatulence’.
Dietitians have proposed Pythagoras suffered from favism, a hereditary disease which can cause severe anaemia, common in Middle eastern and Mediterranean males.
Perhaps a more probable source is the use of beans in ancient democratic voting systems. Beans were used in casting votes by balloting, white beans for affirmative, black ones negative.
When Pythagoras said to his disciples, ‘abstain from beans’, he might have been telling his followers to abstain from the world of politics.
For a time Pythagoras’s sect held power in Croton and was briefly influential throughout the Greek world. It then disintegrated just as rapidly.
ian Lennon, Oxford.
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