William Thomas Beckford - Lansdown Crescent and Lansdown Tower

Lansdown Crescent and Lansdown Tower

Beckford spent his later years in his home at Lansdown Crescent, during which time he commissioned architect Henry Goodridge to design a spectacular folly at the northern end of his land on Lansdown Hill: Lansdown Tower, now known as Beckford's Tower, in which he kept many of his treasures. This is now owned by the Bath Preservation Trust and operated by the Beckford Tower Trust as a museum to William Beckford; part of the property is rented to the Landmark Trust which makes it available for public hire as a spectacular holiday home. The museum contains numerous engravings and chromolithographs of the Tower's original interior as well as furniture commissioned specifically for the Tower by Beckford. There is also a great deal of information about Beckford, including objects related to his life in Bath, at Fonthill and elsewhere.

After his death at Lansdown Crescent on 2 May 1844, aged 84, his body was laid in a sarcophagus placed on an artificial mound, as was the custom of Saxon kings from whom he claimed to be descended. Beckford had wished to be buried in the grounds of Lansdown Tower, but his body was instead interred at Bath Abbey Cemetery in Lyncombe Vale on 11 May 1844. The Tower was sold to a local publican who turned it into a beer garden. Eventually it was purchased by the Beckfords' elder daughter, the Duchess of Hamilton, who gave the land around it to Walcot parish for consecration as a cemetery in 1848. This enabled Beckford to be re-buried near the Tower that he loved. His self-designed tomb — a massive sarcophagus of pink polished granite with bronze armorial plaques - now stands on a hillock in the cemetery the centre of an oval ditch. On one side of his tomb is a quotation from Vathek: "Enjoying humbly the most precious gift of heaven to man — Hope"; and on another these lines from his poem, A Prayer: "Eternal Power! Grant me, through obvious clouds one transient gleam Of thy bright essence in my dying hour." Goodridge designed a Byzantine entrance gateway to the cemetery, flanked by the bronze railings which had surrounded Beckford's original grave in Lyncombe Vale.