Top: The Temple of the Four Winds, York
Middle: The Broadway Tower, Gloucestershire
Bottom: The Chandanpura Mosque, Chittagong

By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk




THE FOLLIES OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Daring architecture is a feature of both Europe and Asia




I expect many of my regular readers may wonder what on earth I was up to before I got involved with this organ. They may (possibly) be mildly surprised to discover that I had once been the honorary editor of a library support group, Alexandra Park Library Action Group and, before that, the honorary assistant editor of Follies magazine.

Truly, a career in journalism is hard to launch and I am not at all sure that I would recommend such a walk in life to my younger relatives, as a first choice.

The position at Follies requires a word of explanation. There are no religious or psychological significances. It relates to architectural follies. To put it more fully, the entire range of that journal comprises: follies, grottoes and garden buildings.

Our original part of the world – South Asia – used to be the international capital of architectural follies. When we were rich and prosperous centuries ago we led the world in magnificent buildings. Even now the follies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are favourite subjects of interest for enthusiasts all over the West who reckon they have much to learn from our forebears.

Since those palmy days, of course, poverty and dependence on foreign overlords have intervened. Much has been lost by hostile enemy action and by our own neglect as our physical infrastructures followed the unravelling of our social fabrics and also deteriorated.

However, the Islamic world still retains the Taj Mahal, perhaps the most renowned folly amongst all Mankind and, beyond the East, the Alhambra in Spain. With edifices like that one may want to know why the Spanish sought to expel the Moors at all.

The key to the understanding of our follies is that they are almost all religious or closely linked to religion. The grandest mosques in Bangladesh are also, arguably, the grandest buildings in the country, with a few exceptions. Think of the Chandanpura Mosque in Chittagong, for example.

However, in this country I submit that that is not the case at all. Right from the beginning, even when the British were far more religious than they are today, the emphasis on follies and on folly building was decidedly secular.

What is a folly? Wikipedia the free Internet encyclopaedia defines a folly thus: “In architecture, a folly is an extravagant, useless, or fanciful building, or a building that appears to be something other than what it is.

“The term comes from the fact that such structures have often been dubbed "(name of architect or builder's) Folly", in the sense of foolishness or madness.

“Follies are usually found in parks or large grounds of houses and stately homes; they may sometimes have been deliberately built to look partially in ruins. They were especially popular from the end of the 16th Century to the 18th Century.”

The magazine Follies puts it thus:

“How do you define an architectural folly? There's no simple definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as: "A popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder," while Chambers' Dictionary says: "A great useless structure, or one left unfinished, having been begun without a reckoning of the cost."

“But that doesn't begin to hint at the wealth of variety and ingenuity to be discovered in the world's follies. Many of them are used, many of them are finished, some of them were even built with one eye on the balance sheet - what links them all is a joyous unpredictability.”If a building makes you stop, and scratch your head, and ask yourself "Why?” then unless it is a seat of government there is a good chance that it is a folly.”Showing you a picture of one is useless …because the next one you see will almost certainly be totally different.

A folly is in the eye of the beholder, wrote Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp in their definitive guide to the follies of Britain Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings. There is only one real rule - true follies are unconscious creations, and the real folly builder will deny that what he or she has created could possibly be a folly. You cannot build one deliberately. Only other people can bestow the title of Folly on your monstrous erection. It's like having a title - you may call yourself a prince but you know in your heart your royal aspirations would not be recognised by the Almanack de Gotha. ”This problem of definition can and has been debated for years. In the end, a folly is essentially a misunderstood building.”

One point that I am almost desperate to make is that there is nothing about the love and appreciation of follies as buildings, which connects with stupidity or foolishness. In fact the position is, I think, quite the reverse. The people who take an interest in this subject are, if anything, pre-eminently sane with well-developed senses of beauty and quirkiness, which add so enormously to the spice of life.

Concerning grottoes Wikipedia states: “A Grotto (Italian grotta), when it is not an artificial garden feature, is a cave, small or quite large, usually near water and often flooded or liable to flood at high tide. The picturesque Grotta Azzura at Capri and the grotto of the villa of Tiberius in the Bay of Naples are outstanding natural seashore grottoes. Whether in tidal water, the Meditteranean or high up in hills, they are very often in limestone geology where the acidity dissolved in percolating water has dissolved the carbonates of the rock matrix as it has passed through what were originally small fissures. See karst topography, cavern.”

But nowadays most grottoes are artificial.

Garden buildings comprise all structures which are built on gardens. These include such things as: summerhouses, greenhouses, sheds, belvederes and much besides.

Returning to follies, if one lives in or near London the easiest way to start familiarising oneself with these architectural curiosities is to visit Kew Gardens. Here there are many follies the chief of which are: The Pagoda, The Campanile, King William’s Temple, The Temple of Arethusa, The Temple of Bellona and the Temple of Aeolus. That was how I first encountered these curiosities, while on a study trip conducted by my history of London teacher at Morley College.

As stated above, in the UK follies are not usually religious and when they do have such associations they tend to be with paganism rather than Christianity. This factor alone puts them into a different category from our homeland equivalents.

The period of time when folly building was at a peak in the UK was roughly speaking from the 16th to the 18th Centuries. Typically, the motivation was to create employment and income for able bodied men who would otherwise be destitute at a time when there was no welfare state.

The Irish Potato Famine of 1845 - 1849 led to the building of innumerable follies. Britain's prevalent political tone of the day held that laissez faire, not a welfare state was the appropriate form of civil management. As such, distribution of alms to those in need was seen as wrong. However, to hire the needy for work on useful projects would deprive existing workers of their jobs. Thus, "famine follies" came to be built extensively. These include: roads in the middle of nowhere, between two seemingly random points; piers in the middle of bogs; and so on.

If you live in or near London, you may care to visit the Broadway Tower which is a folly located at one of the highest point (1,024 feet above sea level) of theCotswolds. On a good day, thirteen counties can be seen from the top of the tower.

It was designed to resemble a mock castle by James Wyatt, and built for Lady Coventry in1797. The hill upon which the tower was built was a "beacon" hill, upon which beacons were lit upon special occasions. Lady Coventry wondered if a beacon upon this hill could be seen from her house in Worcester and sponsored the construction of the folly to find out. The beacon could be seen clearly.

Over the years, the tower was home to the printing press of Sir Thomas Phillips and served as a country retreat for artists including William Morris.

The tower is on the Cotswold Way (CW); it is easily reached by following the CW from the A44 road at Fish Hill, or by a steep climb out of Broadway village. The tower itself stands 55 feet high.

If I have inspired you to take an interest in this inexhaustable subject which has variations in almost every country in the world (including Bangladesh) then perhaps you may care to join The Folly Fellowship. This is the social group for which the aforesaid magazine is written. It is accessible at: The Folly Fellowship, 7 Inches Yard, Market Street, NEWBURY, Berkshire RG14 5DP. Tel: 01635-42864. Fax: 01635-552 866. E-mail: plumridge@architect-uk.com. Website: http://www.follies.org.uk/. Mission: “Special interest group. The Fellowship aims to protect, preserve and promote for the benefit of the public follies, grottoes and other landscape buildings, monuments and ruins, and their settings. A quarterly magazine is available.”

THE END

This article was published in the 10th August, 2006 issue of the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the United Kingdom's Bangladeshis - read everywhere from the Arctic to the Antarctic.