Overlooked Britain: Hadlow

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 upon, rearing out of a little village in the flatlands of Kent.

Built over a number of years from the 1780s by Walter Barton May, it must have been startling from the start. The fiery radical reformer William Cobbett expostulated, ‘It was the most singular looking thing I ever saw. An immense house stuck all over with a parcel of chimneys with caps on the tops to catch earwigs.’

Little did he know what was going to appear 15 years later, when, at the behest of Walter May’s son, Walter Barton May, a 170-foot-high Gothic tower was attached to the body of the building. Built eight feet taller than its contemporary Nelson’s Column, it was then to be stretched yet further into the clouds by an octagonal lantern, decorated with delicately dancing pinnacles!

Photographs survive of this extraordinary apparition in the 1930s, soaring skywards as a backdrop to children playing hopscotch in the countryside. Walter Barton May was obviously a most winning character. It was said that ‘He was no less remarkable for his quaint and agreeable manners than for his love of Gothic architecture.’

In building his tower, Walter Barton May created a folly that was to become famed nationwide. Shell trumpeted its glories as one of their renowned ‘Britain’s landmarks’.

A ‘folly’ it most certainly was, having been built with three bedrooms for the manservants alone! It was modelled on William Beckford’s tower that had collapsed 13 years earlier in 1825.

Keenly aware of the disaster, May appointed engineer/architect George Ledwell Taylor to design the building. Taylor had in the early-19th century persuaded William IV to call the great open space near Charing Cross Trafalgar Square, rather than William IV Square, as had been originally planned.

He had also been the engineer/ architect responsible for the works at the Royal Dockyards at Chatham, Woolwich and Sheerness. In other words, he was spot-on perfect for ensuring that the tower would not crash to the ground, as Fonthill Abbey’s had.

Thereafter, Hadlow had many and various owners – including a surgeon called Dr MacGeagh, who would set off every morning by horse and carriage to Tonbridge Station, thereby earning renown as one of Britain’s first commuters to and from London.

Over the years, the house gradually drifted into a dire decline. By 1946, when it was finally abandoned, a violent storm ravaged what was left of its ornamental Gothicry. Pillars crashed to the ground and it was thought best to take off all the decoration that remained; leaving a lone, sad stump in the landscape.

Thanks to the Herculean efforts of local portrait-painter Bernard Hailstone, it was saved from the annihilating jaws of demolition. Better than saved, it was revived, in what in my view was one of the most successful restoration programmes ever carried out in the country.

Denton Welch’s 1937 poster: the tower is eight foot taller than Nelson’s Column

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

east to west and was filled with statuary glowing from enormous stained-glass windows at each end.

Vivat made enticing arrangements to stay at Hadlow and they were no mean arrangements: having whizzed up in a lift – part of a new and frighteningly efficient technological affair – you can look out from a Gothic window on high and imagine how your lone figure, framed by such a dizzying wealth of outlandish Gothicry, must appear from below.

When Walter Barton May died, his hatchment in Hadlow church had been emblazoned with the motto Nil desperandum.

Sadly, so very sadly and dispiritingly, the costs of restoring Hadlow became too great and it had to be sold by Vivat. After various changes of ownership, it is still on the market. Let us hope and pray that this sheer miracle of Gothic architecture will one day be completely safe.