New Year Follies - Ingress Abbey, Greenhithe

This year I will carry on the approach of only posting here when there is something definitely worth posting about rather than as a discipline every other day, but although this isn't a church-related subject I nevertheless think it's a useful topic. It was only by accident that I very recently became aware of the follies of Ingress Abbey at Greenhithe in Kent, when someone on the Holy Wells LiberFaciorum page posted a picture of the Monk's Well. This was already mentioned in Ross Parish's book on Kentish wells, but I'd paid no attention to it and certainly not twigged that it formed part of a larger landscape of follies and garden design. So today I took the North Kent line out of London Bridge station and then the short walk to the park.

Ingress Abbey is an old estate going back to the 14th century, the current Tudor-Gothic house dating to 1833; between 1922 and the 19970s it was a nautical training college, but then fell into ruin. When the folly writers Headley & Meulenkamp came to the site, they found the park overgrown and the follies all but invisible, and worried about the whole place falling victim to redevelopment. This it did, but Crest Nicholson, who bought Ingress in 1998, restored the mansion and cleared out the grounds as well as building a sprawling new estate which strikes me as a sort of cut-price version of Poundbury in Dorset with its emphasis on the picturesque and individual. The current residents of the Abbey itself are British-Canadian oil and gas tycoon Sam Malin and his Cameroonian model and singer wife Irene Major: Mr Malin happens to be an Honorary Consul for Lithuania which is why the country's arms appear on the Abbey gates.

Following the Fastway road from the railway station, the first folly I came across was the Grotto, a set of shallow flint niches to the right of what was once the Abbey drive:

But this is just a very modest taster. Round the corner to the left in a close of modern dwellings, and down a flight of steps, is the very weird Cave of the Seven Heads. There are now only six of the eponymous Heads left, but very baleful they are indeed. The Cave itself has niches set into the flint interior. 

We then follow the road round to the east, and take a flight of steps, which brings us to the gate of the Abbey and the way into the Park. Here we find the glorious ruined arch known as the Grange and its associated tunnel and ancillary chambers; the Monk's Well, which does actually have a well in it; and a decorated flint seat, the Lover's Arch, looking out over the lawn of the Park. 

There are other structures around the Park which may have a more utilitarian origin - the blocked-up Georgian Tunnel, and what it variously called the Model Farm or the Limekiln:

Finally, to the east of the Park, in the middle of Palladian Circus, is a grass-covered mound topped by a flint needle capped with steel: you follow a spiral path to the top. This modern folly courtesy of the estate developers supposedly commemorates a Hermit's Cave which some say occupied the site (the mound was once taken to be Tudor, but it is not). 

Along what remains of Greenhithe High Street is what seems to be a former chapel flanked by single-bay cottages, all in Gothic style and faced in flints. It might have nothing at all to do with the Abbey estate, but it seems worth mentioning too. 

This is a very incongruous set of structures to find surrounded by modern housing on the south side of the Thames Estuary. The redevelopment of the estate makes it hard to envisage how all the follies related to one another, especially the Cave of the Seven Heads which is separated from the others by a busy road and faces west rather than inwards towards the rest of the composition: perhaps it dates to a different phase. The Heads have a distinctly Mannerist flavour to them and I wonder whether they were imported from elsewhere, rather than made especially for the purpose. The truth is that we don't know who was responsible for the follies: Historic England and most sources simply assume they date to 1833 and the rebuilding of the house, but Headley & Meulenkamp hedge their bets and I suspect they are right to do so. The structures look older to me. 

Is Ingress a Gothic Garden? I was reluctant to award this status to Deepdene, the last designed landscape which I thought might qualify for the title. I'm more inclined to look favourably on Ingress. There seems to be a genuine response here to the melancholy potential of topography which binds the follies together, rather than scattering them at random around a site. The Park originates in a quarry whose use goes back to Roman times, and the towering chalk cliffs still loom picturesquely through the trees, so whoever was responsible looked at the landscape they had inherited and saw the capacity for developing it in a Gothic direction. The Grange forms an entrance to the wild area to the rear of the house (I suspect the tidy lawn is a bit more tame than it once was), while the broad green to the front forms a contrast. 

Now, one folly I am kicking myself for missing is the Prioress's Tomb which apparently lies near the Grange. The story goes that this is the burial place of the heart of Jane Fane, last Abbess of Dartford who owned Ingress when Dartford Priory was dissolved in 1539, and that she cursed bad King Henry and all the subsequent owners of Ingress to come to ruin. This is quite something to decide to call attention to when you are building follies on your estate. One local resident even photographed a supposed White Lady weeping at the Lovers Arch seat: could she be Dame Jane herself? If Ingress was not designed as a Gothic Garden, I think it probably is now.                                                         

Shades of Netley Abbey

Here's a tangled story. My investigations of the holy wells of Glastonbury led me to the history of the town published in 1826 by the Revd Richard Warner, a great partisan of the claims to sanctity of the well in the Abbey crypt, which he seems to have been the first person to have recorded as 'St Joseph's Well'. He was a remarkable character whose father had kept a delicatessen in Marylebone, and who might have had a Naval career before becoming curate to the travel writer William Gilpin and eventually attracting controversy for preaching pacifist sermons during the Napoleonic wars, finishing as the pluralist incumbent of Great Chalfield in Wiltshire and Timberscombe in Somerset. Gilpin - an important figure in early Picturesque travel writing and therefore in the history of the Gothic Garden - was a strong influence on Richard Warner who ended up writing accounts of his own walking tours. Another friend was John Losh, uncle of Wreay church's singular architect Sarah Losh. Warner's extensive literary output (his clerical duties clearly left him plenty of time for this) included reissuing historic cookbooks and antiquarian works as well as gossipy fiction about Bath society. But the work of his that I've just finished reading is his Gothic novel from 1795, Netley Abbey. 

I was intrigued enough by the mention of the novel in Richard Warner's Wikipedia entry to look it up and then buy it. Obviously I knew that what would arrive would not be a pair of 18th-century volumes with thick board covers and marbled endpapers, but I wasn't quite expecting an absolute facsimile, complete with long 's's that look like 'f's, contained in floppy covers and printed so badly that in places the reader has to reconstruct the text. In fact, that, and the inevitable temptation to read it to oneself like Nigel Molesworth's take on Shakespeare ("Fie, fir, if I may fa fo"), are the main pleasures to be derived, because it is difficult to express how bad this book is. The majority of the story is reported speech as characters relate to others what has happened to them in very unlikely prose. There is an impoverished good baron and a very wicked one, dashing knights and an evil abbot presiding over a monastery where a maiden in a white dress (very flimsy, one imagines) is confined to a subterranean chamber. (I know, spoilers, but you're not likely to venture further into this text anyway). This could all be exciting or at least camp fun, but most of the first volume is irrelevant and you virtually know what's going to happen before the plot starts. The main benefit is to get something of a feel for what the book's original 18th-century readers might have experienced: the facsimile reproduction, however faulty, does replicate the typesetting with on average no more than 100 words to each of its 390-odd pages. It does make me appreciate far more the last initial-wave Gothic novel I read, Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or, The Moor from 1806, which is itself no great shakes as literature, but at least has some flair to it.

And there is also this question that occurs to me. Although the setting of Netley Abbey is medieval, the world it depicts is, of course, nothing like the actual Middle Ages at all. Neither the castle of good Baron de Villars nor that of dastardly Sir Hildebrand de Warren function anything like a medieval household: they are 18th-century aristocratic establishments projected into the past. The hero young Edward de Villars sniffs at the superstitious monuments of the umbrageous Abbey like a rational Georgian Protestant. Now, given that this book was written by someone who fancied himself as a historian, what did Revd Warner believe the past was actually like? His account of St Joseph's Well in his History of the Abbey of Glaston is highly romantic and coloured, and hardly unsympathetic to the Age of Faith and its monastic institutions which he criticises as a Gothic novelist. It's interesting that the same person can adopt both variant modes when writing in different genres.

Far East Gothic

Radio 4 is redoing The Wombles at the moment, though I can’t see (or rather hear) Richard E Grant narrating as any kind of credible replacement for Bernard Cribbins. Still, rather like the Wombles ‘making good use of the things that they find’ as the song goes, Goth fashion was originally a matter of salvaging bits and pieces other people discarded or used differently – lace, and velvet, and torn fishnet-stocking sleeves, that sort of thing. By the late 1990s and early 2000s some Goth scene participants had realised they could make some money (and maybe even a modest living) out of the things they enjoyed wearing, by making them for other people to buy: every Goth girl (and a lot of the boys) knows how to sew, though actually making stuff anyone might want to wear required a bit more application. There were of course the one-stop-Goth-shops in Camden where you could pick up desperately cheap corsets, skirts and coats that were only one step up from Halloween fancy dress and would fall apart after a couple of evenings out; but there were the serious makers like Darkangel too. Based in Tavistock, Darkangel* was the brainchild of Carri who began as a photographer and has cycled round in that direction again now that, she says, it’s ‘very difficult for small independent labels such as ours to survive when competing with low cost overseas manufacturers’. In fact, my only item of clothing from any Goth retailer is a Darkangel brocade frock coat – it has a suitably clerical collar, not that I’ve had a chance to wear it for a long time, since S.D. gave me a vintage frock coat from the 1930s. Good, heavy wool, that, keep you warm if nothing else.

I hadn’t noticed Darkangel’s claims to be an ethical manufacturer, specifically ‘avoiding using any fabrics, trimmings or other components that are made in China’. I wonder what Carri makes of one of the makers whose wares were flashed across my LiberFaciorum feed the other day, the Guangzhou-based fashion house Punk Rave. They’ve been going since 2006, though I’d never heard of them (in contrast to Poland’s well-known Restyle brand, with its big round hats, huge hoods, and astronomical imagery). Punk Rave’s founder and head designer, Zhi Yi Kim (or sometimes Kin) comes from Chinese/Korean ancestry; she started out (she says on the company website) from a poor background and was always interested in clothes. An early clothing store business didn’t work out, but after a stint slaving in a Beijing restaurant Ms Kim went back home to Guangzhou to try again, having discovered punk and Goth culture through a friend and realising that the styles she kept being instinctively drawn to had a name and a meaning. Dissatisfied with the clothes she was selling – mainly, then, for export – Ms Kim took a design course at Baewha Women’s University and set up Punk Rave. In 2010 a sub-brand, PyonPyon, was started to market clothes specifically in the Japanese-oriented Gothic Lolita style. Further lines ‘Fashion Series’ and ‘J&Punk Rave’ now cater for a Chinese home market as, Ms Kim says, ‘domestic young people acceptance of punk Gothic culture is far greater than when she first started designing’. Punk Rave came to pre-lockdown London Fashion Week in 2020 (you can even see a catwalk video here) and now sends its wares to online Goth influencers to try out, and the founder has a go at describing Gothic fashion for anyone in doubt on the matter. So this is not a local cottage industry outfit, nor a mainstream fashion house which occasionally uses Goth ideas, but a basically Goth retailer becoming part of the international mainstream.

But what are the clothes like? Unlike Restyle, Punk Rave does try bravely to cater for chaps, but although there’s a range of dramatic cloaks, coats and shirts, such as the Halifax jacket below – with integral weskit, as far as I can make out – on offer, what I really want is an interpretation of the traditional gent’s suit. Ah, if only I had the talent to do it myself, or believed enough people would buy such an artefact.

Predictably it’s in the women’s range that Punk Rave is most interesting. We might legitimately claim that ‘all Gothic life is here’ (it's not even all black), but in amongst the more familiar Victorian and punky-influenced stuff we find some really beautiful items such as the Cheongsam jacquard dress (trad Chinese style, Gothically reinterpreted with buckles and lacing), the Amaterasu kimono dress in cotton and leather, named after the Japanese sun goddess and which you can easily imagine Yuuko-san from xxxHolic wearing, and this lovely asymmetric velvet coat the company just calls ‘Avant’. I don’t know what conditions this schmutter is made under, but it’s no cheaper than Darkangel was.

There’s another political aspect to think about, too. Ms Kim seems to envisage fashion as having something to say about ‘promoting a future-oriented consumption model that achieves a cultural, environmental, scientific and technological balance’, and sums up the punk ethos as ‘never depressed, never slavish’. Such comments are two-edged in modern China. She’s probably safe as long as she carries on making money and doesn’t comment too much.

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*[I notice an increased emphasis in parts of the Goth world on ‘fairy’ motifs. You find this in Carri of Darkangel's current photography, in events including the annual Fairy Ball in Glastonbury, and the styles occasionally adopted by my friends such as Madame Morbidfrog and Lady Wildwood. There’s some crossover with pagan and medieval themes, and enough material for a short thesis].

'The Rossettis' at The Tate

To London to visit the Tate's exhibition on the Rossettis with Dr RedMedea and Ms Mauritia. It seemed on the pricey side and when the first room was full of Christina Rossetti's poetry and one painting I thought we'd been diddled, but in fact as we followed the route it was clear there was enough to justify the cost - even if art is always a bit exhausting, and art in one style more tiring than that, and when finally an artist is producing multiple versions of the same picture weary is not the word. The furniture made for a nice palate-cleanser. We liked Gabriel Rossetti's prints and drawings more than his lush and famous paintings which are technically stunning and emotionally empty: 'It's all about the hair!' said Dr RedMedea. Discovering that Ken Russell had made a BBC film in 1967 about the Rossettis full of Gothic nonsense means I will have to try to find it.

Tale of Two Castles

Thankfully Rian-who-was-Cylene and their partner Deri now live in a part of South Wales I can leave my car in and feel reasonably confident it will still be there in the morning - a town a local apparently described as 'tired but functional', which was rather not the case with their previous location - so that's where I was yesterday and today. On the way there, and on the way back, I visited two castles, one offering the real Middle Ages and one a pretend version. The former is Caerphilly, a colossal Marcher fortress with a bloody history of treachery and exploitation; the latter, Castell Coch, which hangs in the woods overlooking faraway Cardiff, built on a medieval site but designed by Victorian Gothic Revival nutcase William Burges for the Marquis of Bute as a fantasy of what might have been there before.

Aesthetically there's little resemblance between craggy Caerphilly and the psychedelic polychromy of Castell Coch, but they both represent engineering triumphs even beyond the usual involved in the construction of castles. Caerphilly is the biggest castle in Wales by area, but what impresses most in building terms is the massive curtain wall that dams the moat-lake, fashioned of huge buttresses flanking concave walls in order to restrain the enormous weight of earth and water behind it. Castell Coch required ridiculous investment in stone-moving and stone-working, artisanship and ingenuity. It used to have a chapel which Burges designed to hang off a series of corbels built into one of the towers and projecting out over the courtyard: it was taken down in the 1890s. Mass there must have demanded faith of a particular kind. 

Fuseli at the Courtauld

Although getting to London yesterday was more problematic than usual, requiring catching the train at Woking rather than anywhere further down the line, I made the journey so I could visit the Fuseli show at the Courtauld along with Ms Mauritia. Henry Fuseli has a relationship with the Gothic tradition especially via the various versions he painted of The Nightmare, but also his treatments of scenes from Shakespeare, and other fantasies - including his fantasy women, who are on display in this exhibition. In fact, they are not complete fantasies, but I'll come to that.

I was already familiar with most of the images, but hadn't seen them in the flesh before, and gathering them together creates a slight sense of oppression as Fuseli obsessively repeats poses and ideas, using swirly dress to experiment with form and movement. He hardly ever drew from life: the story went that he would mark a paper with four random dots and use them to dispose the limbs of his figures. Many of his subjects are (imagined) sex workers, but far more erotic and striking than the exposed breast or six is what seems to be the main object of the artist's obsessive interest, hair. During the earlier part of Fuseli's life, wealthy women did indeed have towering hairstyles, but he creates weird, geometric and elaborate shapes for his figures to wear, curls, fringes, sculptured structures, decorated with beads and papers, which must often, surely, be completely unreal. Ms Mauritia remembered the 20th-century fetish artist John Willie who drew women in impossible high heels - another way of simultaneously depicting women as powerful while defusing that power with disabling dress, shoes you can't walk in, or hairstyles you can't move without disarraying. 

But the ladies in this show aren't entirely unreal. Gazing from many drawings, the dramatic features of Fuseli's wife Sophia are unmistakable even when she's not acknowledged as the model. Her hair is the most fantastic of all, but she, the young English model who became the artist's spouse, is real enough, and there's something very odd going on psychologically in the way her husband depicts her: he adores her and fears the fact he does. He shows her next to a head of the Medusa; he draws her making the corna gesture that signals cuckoldry. What kind of a person was she? Of course you get no clues from this art: Fuseli wasn't interested in showing real people, just moments from his own imagination. She's supposed to have had quite a temper, but perhaps that was just from being married to him. 

Horror!

A week last Saturday I went with Lady Wildwood and MaisyMaid to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House, a bit nervously as it was my suggestion we should. We all quite liked it though my friends preferred the first bit with its nostalgic glimpses of punk, New Romantic and early Goth ('My memory isn't wrong, people really did dress like that', MaisyMaid mused at the blownup footage of early-80s club nights, being a few years senior to her Ladyship and myself), but I thought all of it was good fun even though a couple of bits were a little queasy: the artist who'd sculpted himself as a hyperrealistic drowned corpse under an archway admitted in the captions that even he'd found it thoroughly unsettling to make. I was almost overcome being brought face-to-face with Sue Webster's Banshees jacket: 

The premise of the show is that the mode of horror has been used to analyse society since the breakdown of the hopes of the 1960s in three broad phases, that the curators categorise as 'Monster' - figures and institutions of power are made monstrous, and to oppose them nonconformists construct spectacular selves that are also monstrous; 'Ghost' - the sense of reality collapses into nostalgia and pastiche, paranoia and hysteria, fragmentation and the uncanny; and 'Witch' - narratives of power and authority are deconstructed and reconstructed into new expressions of self-determination and connection. There are multiple ways of arranging even the specific art of rebellion across five decades, of course, but this is as interesting as any.

Notwithstanding all the horror, the artwork that caught me up most was Susan Hiller's Homage to Joseph Beuys, which is 86 bottles of holy well water collected from a variety of sacred springs and sites between 1969 and 2016. I couldn't quite see what was uncanny about that. Lady Wildwood suggested that the healing capacities of the water were there to counteract the fractured and baleful material around it: nice try, I thought.

'The Music of Gothic' at the Wallace Collection, 28th October

Oh dear, I should have posted about my trip to London on Friday 28th to attend this event: a combined lecture-cum-recital hosted by Dr Emma McEvoy at the Wallace Collection, discussing, and illustrating, 'The Music of Gothic'. Dr McEvoy's case is that Gothic literature is full of music, and stage adaptations of Gothic works are too - but at first such orchestration was quite lighthearted, drawing on the conventions of comic opera. It was only from about 1820 that melodrama took over and 'The Music of Gothic' started to turn into 'Gothic Music'. A chamber ensemble conducted by the organist of St Cuthbert's Philbeach Gardens played a variety of pieces by now-forgotten composers to make her point. Funnily enough I have been reading a book about Henry Purcell at the moment - I say 'reading', but there are quite a few bits which I have no greater chance of understanding than I would a programming manual, so I skipped over them - and that mentions a number of pieces from his theatre work that would seem to go against Dr McEvoy's case, but she is, of course, planning a book, which will doubtless deal with all of that. I can't promise I'll be prepared to take out the loan necessary to buy it!

A Visit to the Home of Time

This afternoon I visited someone in hospital for the first time since the pandemic started. It's relatively easy now, though inflexible: you wouldn't be able to remember another parishioner in a different ward and just pop to see them on your way out. Now every visit has to be booked in. I was seeing Dol, who was anxious to know 'all the scandal, who's misbehaving'. In fact she was so keen she asked me this repeatedly. The truth is that nobody at all connected to the church is misbehaving, and in fact barely anything is happening at all.

So I will instead put up some photos from my trip to Greenwich with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen on Friday, which encompassed St Alfege's Church, the Junk Shop (an aptly-named emporium offering items ranging from Windsor chairs to a traffic light), the Observatory, and the Foot Tunnel. I had never actually seen the Meridian before: it was amusing to find that while you have to pay to get into the famous Observatory courtyard across which runs the metal line from which Time is measured, there's a free bit accessible by a path around the hilltop for plebs. The Foot Tunnel has wood-panelled lifts as though to recall its Edwardian origins (not very nice wood-panelling, but still). Looking across the Thames at the Naval College and up to the hilltop you get some dim impression of what might have been had the Stuart government decided to go with Nicholas Hawksmoor's ruinously expensive plan to turn Greenwich into an English Vatican, combining royalty, science, the military and religion, including a Chapel Royal with a dome big enough to fit St Peter's Basilica's inside it. I was taken with Gothick Trinity Hospital vastly overshadowed by the old power station, and will have to investigate it one day.

Hatfield House

As it is World Goth Day, I will delay relating what happened at the Bishop's Supper in favour of this topic. which has some vaguely relevant aspects. Yesterday I visited Hatfield House with Lady Wildwood, who is, after all, one of the very first people I met in London Gothic many years ago. Her Ladyship has just finished working in the tourism and heritage sector in Hertfordshire and is now marketing director at a London arts venue, so she knows Hatfield and the other local attractions very well, while I'd never been there. It seemed surprisingly quiet for a bright late-Spring Saturday, but Lady Wildwood says this is quite common: Hatfield makes most of its money from events and hiring itself out, and visitors are so relatively unimportant that it recently closed its souvenir shop. Both house and estate are appropriately grand but I will remember some of the smaller details best: the famous portrait of Margaret Beaufort; the tapestries of the Four Seasons lined with little allegorical vignettes which were only deciphered in the last ten years; the bust of Queen Alexandra in the robes of a graduate of the Royal College of Music; Queen Elizabeth's sleeve in the Ermine Portrait.

The last stage of our visit took us round the woodland walks, as far as The Castle, a Gothick folly dating from the 1780s which is fun but, at the moment, dreadfully underused when it could so easily make a splendid holiday let a la Landmark. We'd both have stayed there quite happily!