A secret garden reborn
THE Bath Preservation Trust (BPT) has acquired and, if funding can be secured, plans to restore the 2½-acre plot of overgrown gardens that were once a landscaped idyll between Lansdown Crescent and Beckford’s Tower.
William Beckford (1760–1844) was the richest man in England when he inherited his fortune at the age of nine and is famously known for draining his coffers by building Gothic Revival Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, which he later sold. But his legacy in Bath, where he spent the final 22 years of his life, stretches beyond the 120ft neo-Classical tower he had Henry Edmund Goodridge build to house his library and art collection.
Beckford saw Lansdown Tower, as it was then called, as his personal retreat from a society from which he was largely outcast—this would have been all the more valuable to him after 10 years in exile on
