Broadway Tower
Interesting facts
- Sir Thomas Phillipps printed so much here that the tower was nicknamed the "Lighthouse of Wisdom".
- Morris's stays at the tower are said to have helped inspire him to found the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877.
- Another story holds that the tower signalled to the staff at Croome Court that the Earl and Countess were on their way home.
- Broadway Hill was a traditional beacon hill, and in 1837 a bonfire for Queen Victoria was lit here, one of 2,548 across the country.
- Before Cormell Price leased it in 1866, the tower was used for a time by local glove makers.
- The tower is said to stand on the site of the 1661 executions in the Campden Wonder, a notorious English miscarriage of justice.
- The Cold War bunker beside the tower is one of the few Royal Observer Corps posts in England that survive and can be visited.
- The bomber remembered by the memorial was an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley that crashed on the hill during a 1943 training flight.
- The tower is a Grade II listed building and stands on the Cotswold Way long-distance footpath.
Why it is worth it
Broadway Tower stands on Broadway Hill, at 1,024 ft (312 m) the second-highest point of the Cotswolds, and the views from its roof are the reason to climb it. The tower is a romantic sham castle of honey-coloured limestone ashlar, about 65 ft (20 m) tall: hexagonal, with three round turrets, battlements and gargoyles. Although it is usually called a folly, it is a proper building with rooms on four floors, spiral stairs in two of its turrets and a viewing platform on the roof.
Capability Brown is credited with the idea, and James Wyatt designed it in 1794 for George Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry; it was built in 1798–1799 for his wife Barbara. One story says that Lady Coventry wanted to know whether a beacon on the hill would be visible from their home at Croome Court, about fifteen miles to the north-west — it was. Over the nineteenth century the tower led a string of unlikely lives. From 1822 to 1862 the bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps ran a private printing press here, and later it was leased as a holiday retreat by Cormell Price, a friend of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris wrote in 1876 that he was at "Crom Price's Tower among the winds and the clouds".
Around the tower lies a country park, and the hillside holds two reminders of the twentieth century: a memorial to the crew of an RAF Whitley bomber that crashed here on a training flight in June 1943, and an underground Royal Observer Corps monitoring post of the Cold War, built in the late 1950s, decommissioned in 1991 and restored for visitors. The upper floors of the tower are used as a museum.
Getting there
The tower is on the Cotswold Way, above the village of Broadway in Worcestershire; walkers reach it by a steep climb from the village or by the path from the A44 at Fish Hill. The market town of Evesham is about 11 km away, and Birmingham Airport (BHX) about 48 km.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Broadway Tower is an 18th-century building near the village of Broadway, in the English county of Worcestershire. It is a Grade II listed building.
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