Overlooked Britain
Kent’s stairway to heaven
lucinda lambton Walter Barton May’s Hadlow Castle is the ultimate Gothic folly
Pugin said, ‘Gothic is more holy the nearer it reaches Heaven.’ After his myriad ecclesiastical designs, he would have been refreshed by the domestic rarity of the Gothicry of Hadlow Castle in Kent. What a building! What a heart-soaring, sky-kissing, slender beauty of a building; a fantastical flight of architectural fancy that, out of the blue, you suddenly come Denton Welch’s 1937 poster: the tower upon, rearing out of a little village in the is eight foot taller than Nelson’s Column flatlands of Kent. Keenly aware of the disaster, May Built over a number of years from the appointed engineer/architect George 1780s by Walter Barton May, it must Ledwell Taylor to design the building. have been startling from the start. The Taylor had in the early-19th century fiery radical reformer William Cobbett persuaded William IV to call the great expostulated, ‘It was the most singular open space near Charing Cross Trafalgar looking thing I ever saw. An immense Square, rather than William IV Square, house stuck all over with a parcel of as had been originally planned. chimneys with caps on the tops to He had also been the engineer/ catch earwigs.’ architect responsible for the works at the Little did he know what was going to appear 15 years later, when, at the behest Royal Dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Sheerness. In other words, he was of Walter May’s son, Walter Barton May, spot-on perfect for ensuring that the a 170-foot-high Gothic tower was attached to the body of the building. Built tower would not crash to the ground, as Fonthill Abbey’s had. eight feet taller than its contemporary Thereafter, Hadlow had many and Nelson’s Column, it was then to be various owners – including a surgeon stretched yet further into the clouds by called Dr MacGeagh, who would set off an octagonal lantern, decorated with every morning by horse and carriage to delicately dancing pinnacles! Tonbridge Station, thereby earning Photographs survive of this renown as one of Britain’s first extraordinary apparition in the 1930s, commuters to and from London. soaring skywards as a backdrop to Over the years, the house gradually children playing hopscotch in the drifted into a dire decline. By 1946, when countryside. Walter Barton May was it was finally abandoned, a violent storm obviously a most winning character. It ravaged what was left of its ornamental was said that ‘He was no less remarkable Gothicry. Pillars crashed to the ground for his quaint and agreeable manners and it was thought best to take off all the than for his love of Gothic architecture.’ decoration that remained; leaving a lone, In building his tower, Walter Barton sad stump in the landscape. May created a folly that was to become Thanks to the Herculean efforts of famed nationwide. Shell trumpeted its local portrait-painter Bernard Hailstone, glories as one of their renowned it was saved from the annihilating jaws ‘Britain’s landmarks’. of demolition. Better than saved, it was A ‘folly’ it most certainly was, having revived, in what in my view was one been built with three bedrooms for the of the most successful restoration manservants alone! It was modelled on programmes ever carried out in William Beckford’s tower that had the country. collapsed 13 years earlier in 1825. 82 The Oldie July 2021
Support came from numerous bodies: local councils, the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage, the Architectural Heritage Fund and the Country Houses Association – heroes all. Finally and triumphantly, it was taken over by the Vivat building preservation trust, with its director Laura Norris ‘taking a deep intake of breath’ that such a historic restoration programme should go ahead. There was a complete re-rendering, redecoration and, if you please, actually remaking, of all the fantastical Gothic detailing. Most thrillingly, the work was done in its original ‘Roman cement’. It’s no more Roman than you or I but a material invented by a Kentish clergyman in the 1780s. It gave the tower all the delicate distinction of an 18th-century folly, created for the sheer joy of pleasing the eye. The material is no longer made in England but has continued in France as Vicat Prompt, having been devised by Joseph Vicat, the son of Napoleon’s engineer. For Hadlow, it was imported from Grenoble for the job, where its silky smoothness is perfection. What a labour of love it was, toiling knee-deep in Gothic detailing, with slender buttresses, gables, crocketed pinnacles and the pierced parapet. The stages were marked with string courses of elaborate rosettes. Crosses were incised above all the windows – tall and Gothic, as well as lancet, transomed and quatrefoil. Gothic- and trefoilheaded arcading abounds; some of it glazed, some blind. All in all, a fanciful concoction. In 1852, Edmund Burke delighted in the place. ‘The interior of the castle’, he wrote ‘is of the same character, consisting of arched groins, ramifications and various flowers of gothic grandeur.’ He did not mention the thumping great Corinthian columns that stood amongst the Gothicry throughout! The house was organised around a main corridor which ran the full length of the building from
