Fonthill Abbey
Fonthill Abbey was a large mansion in neo-Gothic style , the British writer and eccentric William Beckford south-southeast around 1800 two kilometers of the small village of Hindon in the county of Wiltshire had built. The nearest major city is Salisbury, 22 kilometers to the east . The main feature of the building was its high tower, which collapsed several times due to structural defects, making Fonthill Abbey a well-known example of structural megalomania with technical ignorance.
Beckford's own novel Vathek from 1786, which describes the story of a caliph who wants to build the highest tower in the world so that he can overlook all countries, could have served as a model for the building .
history
construction
After traveling halfway across Europe, William Beckford returned to England in the 1790s and relocated his two-square-mile Fonthill estate with a six-mile long and 3.65-meter high wall to keep hunters from putting foxes on his property and chasing rabbits. An avenue about five miles long ran through the park. Then he made the decision to have a Gothic -looking artificial ruin - a so-called Folly - built. He hired James Wyatt, who was very famous at the time, as the lead architect. Immediately before construction began, however, he changed his mind to favor a cathedral-like mansion. He chose a meadow for this location, just under half a mile from a Palladian house (Fonthill Splendens) that his father had built instead of an Elizabethan house that he had bought in 1744 but burned out in 1755. Beckford had this building demolished only partially and then completely. Some of the paneling was used in the Theater Royal , built in 1805 in nearby Bath .
When the building plans were published, they caused a sensation and were soon a topic of conversation in the higher social classes and architectural circles across the country. Beckford planned a main tower 137 meters high. This would have surpassed Salisbury Cathedral by 14 meters and would have been by far the tallest structure in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland . Wyatt was known, however, for not visiting his construction sites too often, which gave Beckford a lot of freedom to revise the plans and give instructions to the workers himself. He employed 500 construction workers in day and night shifts. However, since he felt that he was not seeing progress quickly enough, he lured 450 more from the construction of St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle by offering them a significantly increased daily ration of ale . In addition, he ordered all the carts and carts in the area to transport the building materials and compensated the mostly poor owners with woolen blankets and free coal deliveries in bad and cold weather.
Beckford monitored the work meticulously and endeavored to complete it as quickly as possible. For this reason he ordered - contrary to the advice of the experts - the use of the old foundations of a small summer house, which had previously been built on the same site, and which he considered sufficient. In order to comply with Beckford's request for a speedy completion, wood and cement were used on his orders instead of the usual and, considering the envisaged size of Fonthill Abbey, much more appropriate stone and bricks. In addition, poor quality mortar lime and rough stone blocks were used for the walls. These were plastered so that they looked like precious natural stones. The workers sprayed the drying mortar with colored sand to make it look like stone. Over the years, however, it turned out that these walls were not completely waterproof and the mortar trickled out of the joints. Therefore, it required a cladding with thin stone slabs as protection, which increased the construction price.
In the absence of Beckford, the main tower collapsed in 1801 when it had reached a height of 91 meters. The client expressed his disappointment that he was not able to see the collapse himself, but was otherwise unimpressed and ordered the reconstruction to begin immediately. Six years later, in 1807, the work had progressed so far that the new tower also reached a height of almost 90 meters when it collapsed. The new construction began again immediately, but this time Beckford decided to use hewn stones, which gave the structure greater stability. He stepped back from his former target, a 150-foot-tall tower, and declared Fonthill Abbey to be completed in 1813. The total construction cost was the then enormous sum of £ 273,000 (around £ 87,400,000 in today's value).
For a long time it was assumed that the old foundations were responsible for the instability of the building complex. However, this assumption could through the documentation Lost Buildings of Britain of Channel 4 to be revised, which concluded after extensive research that these foundations were indeed been very powerful and would have to passed on to the bedrock. Rather, it is assumed nowadays that the walls, mostly made of wood, could not withstand the enormous loads, especially of the high tower, and that they arched and burst. The architect James Wyatt has also been criticized: he transferred the supervision of the building too intensively to Beckford, who was not very knowledgeable in this area and also knew too little about the vaults and Gothic architecture in general.
Further happening
William Beckford lived in Fonthill Abbey alone and only used one of the numerous dormitories. He rarely received guests - mostly male friends - and otherwise lived very secluded. Nevertheless, he encouraged his cooks to prepare meals for twelve people at daily meals, eleven of which he always left untouched. The most prominent visit to the mansion was a visit from the famous Admiral Horatio Nelson , who spent Christmas 1800 there together with his mistress Emma Hamilton and the American painter Benjamin West . The property enjoyed great popularity among the population, although it could usually only be seen from a great distance. It is precisely this fact that has contributed to some legends and some myths. From time to time Beckford would allow isolated tourists to view the premises. For this purpose, he had tickets printed especially for them, which could be purchased against payment of a guinea . The painters John Constable , John Martin and William Turner were also impressed by the construction and captured it in several pictures.
In 1822 the owner was forced to sell Fonthill Abbey due to a collapse in his sugar business in Jamaica and the resulting financial difficulties. He offered it at Christie's auction house and stated that the running costs of its maintenance amounted to £ 30,000 per year (today's value around £ 9,600,000), which is why the buyer must be either a particularly daring and foolish person or a particularly courageous person . In August and September 1822 between 600 and 700 people - not just prospective buyers - took the opportunity to view the building for free. Beckford, however, broke off the auction again out of calculation. He knew that this would fuel interest even more and that eventually someone would not be able to resist the temptation to buy the mansion, which an entire nation was now talking about, at a price far too high. In the summer of 1823 he again published a sales proposal and this time the news drew more than 7,000 people to Hindon in September and October. The daily The Times reported in detail on the rush and the non-existent in the rural surroundings sufficiently accommodations. Eventually William Beckford sold Fonthill Abbey to arms dealer John Farquhar for £ 330,000 (around £ 105,600,000 in today's value) .
Almost two years later, on December 21, 1825, the main tower collapsed a third and last time, destroying a large part of the mansion. An eyewitness described the moment as follows:
- "The manner of it falling was very beautiful, it first sank perpendiculary and slowly, then burst and spread out over the roofs adjoining on every side."
- "The way it fell was very beautiful, it sank vertically and slowly at first, then burst and spread over the roofs on each side."
Fonthill Abey was not rebuilt and remained in ruins. Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster , had the rubble cleared away in 1845 and used parts of it to build a new house nearby. From Beckford's neo-Gothic building project, only the chapel and the small Lancaster Tower, which formed the northern end of the north wing, remain today. They can be viewed. The stone archway on the access road is also still standing.
architecture
Fonthill Abbey was considered one of the most extraordinary properties in the kingdom. The mansion had a cruciform floor plan with two long north and south wings and two slightly shorter east and west wings. The octagonal main tower, slightly tapering towards the top and oriented towards the cathedral of Ely , rose above the square crossing . The respective tower edges ran over the top and formed a kind of ornate crown. With a height of 84 meters, Fonthill Abbey trumped, for example, the nine meters lower Canterbury Cathedral .
The west wing was dominated by the main staircase, which began behind a ten meter high pointed arch portal, while the east portal was lined with two dominant towers. In the north-south corridor it was possible to see the entire length of 95 meters in a kind of visual axis . But the two ends of the north-south wing were designed as different as the portals. If it presented itself narrowly and calmly in the north, it was much more expansive in the south and there also enclosed an inner courtyard with a fountain. The interior was in the colors gold, red, silver and purple and was extremely luxurious, but also overloaded and ornate and in large parts oppressively dark. In addition, there should have been several secret doors in the building .
literature
- John Rutter: A Description of Fonthill Abbey . Rutter, Shaftesbury 1822.
- John Rutter, John Britton: A New Descriptive Guide to Fonthill Abbey and Demesne, for 1823. Including a List of its Paintings and Curiosities . Rutter, Shaftesbury 1822.
- John Rutter: Delineations of Fonthill and its Abbey . LPC Knight & Co., London 1823.
- Heinfried Wischermann: Fonthill Abbey. Studies of the secular neo-Gothic England in the 18th century. Komm. Von Wasmuth, Berlin 1979 ( reports and research on art history 3, ZDB -ID 568282-4 ).
- Jon Millington: Souvenirs of Fonthill Abbey. An exhibition to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of William Beckford. Bath Preservation Trust, Bath 1994, ISBN 1-898954-01-1 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ [1] Theater Royal information from Theaters Trust (English)
- ^ "Fonthill Abbey" in follytowers.com . Retrieved May 18, 2009
Coordinates: 51 ° 4 ′ 41 ″ N , 2 ° 7 ′ 4 ″ W.