William Beckford’s landmark tower saved from ruin

An extravagant Georgian folly that was once the home of the “richest commoner in England” is to be saved from decay thanks to a grant of almost £400,000.

Beckford’s Tower, which overlooks Bath, was constructed in 1827 for the eccentric William Beckford, a profligate art collector, alleged paedophile, sometime politician and gothic novelist.

It was placed on the Heritage at Risk Register in October due to water penetrating through windows and into the distinctive wooden-framed lantern at the top.

The award of £390,900, announced by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, will pay for urgent repairs to the grade I listed 120ft structure on Lansdown Hill. It also prepares the way for a later application for £2.5 million to illuminate the tower using renewable energy, conserve the cemetery surrounding it, and create a museum to shed light on Beckford’s complex life and hold his library and art collection.

Beckford, author of the gothic novel Vathek, inherited a fortune, his estate at Fonthill and a number of Jamaican sugar plantations from his father, twice mayor of London, at the age of ten. It allowed him to indulge his fascination with the arts and briefly enter parliament as the MP for Wells and later for Hindon. He was forced into exile in 1784 when letters to William Courtenay, later Earl of Devon, were intercepted by the boy’s uncle and published in newspapers; Courtenay had been only ten, and Beckford 18, when they first met.

On his subsequent travels throughout Italy he developed a love of architecture and returned to build an imposing gothic-revival house at Fonthill, the main tower of which later collapsed, and Beckford’s Tower. He is chiefly remembered for the latter, made to a design by Henry Edmund Goodridge, and was later buried beside it.

“Beckford’s Tower is one of our most significant 1820s British buildings and its setting on an escarpment above Bath, with its bright golden lantern, has been admired by generations,” said Caroline Kay, the chief executive of Bath Preservation Trust, the conservation charity that acquired the tower in 1993.