Calling the Marble Arch mound a folly is an insult to follies
Give London’s new landmark a miss – here’s Harry Mount’s guide to the true British folly and its place in our history
The new £2million Marble Arch Mound has been called a “Westminster Folly”. A spokesperson for the Mound’s Dutch architect, MVRDV, said it is “a folly in the best British tradition”. I’m afraid it isn’t. This denuded lump of earth, wrapped around an M&S food hall, and charging for entry, is a world away from the ideal British folly – and Britain is the world centre of follies.
As the word suggests, the best have a touch of craziness to them, combined with romance and a deep understanding of history – and no commercial aspect. The Marble Arch Mound fails on all fronts.
The earliest follies were, according to legend, foolish buildings that showed folly in the builder. The first folly is said to be a castle in the Welsh borders, built in 1228 by Hubert de Burgh, 1st Earl of Kent. No sooner had he put it up than it was ordered to be demolished because a new peace treaty was signed with the Welsh. The building was given the cruel Latin name, Stultitiam Huberti – Hubert’s Stupidity, or Hubert’s Folly.
But the modern British folly really owes its origins to the great baroque architect Sir John Vanbrugh, the man who built Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, assisted by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The grounds of Castle Howard are crammed with charming monuments and follies: the mausoleum, the pyramid, the New River Bridge – and the Temple of the Four Winds, the scene of youthful folly for Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Vanbrugh was the first man who campaigned for threatened ruins. Preservation of old buildings was considered distinctly crazy in 1709, when he desperately tried to save Woodstock Manor, the decayed medieval pile opposite the site of Blenheim. Old buildings, Vanbrugh said, “move more lively and pleasing reflections than history without their aid can do”. But his campaign was doomed. The Duchess of Marlborough, Blenheim’s patron, ruthlessly demolished Woodstock Manor.
The taste for ruins combined with the British love of the joke to create the folly. It became an entertaining building, rather than a stupid one. Gothick temples, pagodas, eye-catchers, pavilions and gazebos all make you smile. The funniest of all is in Dunmore, Stirlingshire. The 4th Earl of Dunmore built the vast stone pineapple at the end of his walled garden in 1761. Follies work best when you combine playfulness with real history: like the 17th-century Pitchford Tree House in Shropshire, in the shadow of 15thcentury Pitchford Hall, an exceptional black and white building.
Fawley Court, Buckinghamshire, is the spiritual home of the folly. John Freeman, the owner of Fawley Court in 1731, built the earliest structure to combine the ideal folly elements. The sham Gothick ruin at Fawley has a genuine Gothic window punched into a tumbledown wall. Inside, a domed room is decorated in faux-primitive style with knucklebones and pebbles, its floor tiled in a swastika pattern, in the days before the symbol used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains was stolen by the Nazis. At Fawley, statues on plinths lined a processional route leading to a fragment of the altar from the ancient Greek site, Pergamon, on Turkey’s Aegean coast.
Freeman’s playfulness didn’t stop there. He also designed a mausoleum for himself in the style of the Tomb of Caecilia Metella on the Via Appia, one of Rome’s most famous ruins. His best joke lingered on after his death. In 1731, he built a pretend long barrow, near Fawley. Two centuries later, archaeologists were taken in. They excavated the barrow only to find an urn with an inscription carved by Freeman, admitting responsibility for the practical joke.
The historical element of follies can be extremely serious. By the lake at Virginia Water, in Windsor Great Park, lie the best ancient ruins in the country – the 2nd century AD columns from Leptis Magna, Tripoli, delicately rearranged in 1826 by Sir Jeffry Wyatville for George IV. Some columns lie smashed on the ground; others stand alone, stripped of their capitals, as if this forgotten corner of the Roman Empire on the Berkshire-surrey border had been sacked by vandals yesterday. Follies aren’t just in the country. In Islington, north London, you’ll find Crumbles Castle, a children’s play fort created in the 1970s. Built out of demolished Victorian tenements, Crumbles is a wild version of the medieval castle – with machicolations (through which missiles would be thrown at enemies from medieval castles) in bright red brick, crenellations of multi-coloured stones and concrete corbels.
Stowe, begun by the Templegrenville Whig dynasty in the 18th century, has the greatest concentration of ruins in the country. There are pavilions by James Gibbs, Doric and Corinthian arches, a menagerie, Dido’s Cave, Vanbrugh’s Rotondo, Queen Caroline’s Monument and temples to Venus, Ancient and Modern Virtue, Friendship and British Worthies. There’s no reason why the Marble Arch Mound should be so dull. There’s still plenty of interest in follies, new and old. The Folly Fellowship, a club for folly fans founded in 1988, is thriving.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the late Sir Paul Getty scattered his estate at Wormsley, Buckinghamshire, with a grotto, hermitage, stone hut, sham ruins and a faux-norman castle wrapped around his library. Above Getty’s hanging beech woods, he built a craggy tower, disguising the satellite mast that piped in his beloved Test cricket.
So you can combine romance, history and jokes in modern follies. If only the Marble Arch Mound had followed suit.