Way back in the latter part of the nineteenth century a wealthy Halifax businessman Sir Henry Edwards had a long-standing feud with neighbouring landowner John Edward Wainhouse. To prove his superiority, Edwards built a large house standing in its own land and boasted that he had the most private estate in Halifax, and nobody could see into his property. His neighbour, Wainhouse who owned a dye works and needed to build a new chimney to comply with the smoke abatement act of 1870, so he commissioned a local architect to build an ornate octagonal chimney, way higher than it needed to be and far more ornate, and an important addition was the provision of a viewing platform at the top of the chimney. The tower was built between 1871 and 1874 and from the top of his tower, Wainhouse could see right into the estate of his neighbour and thus wone the upper hand! The Wainhouse Tower is perhaps one of Halifax’s most famous landmarks, standing at 275feet it is the tallest structure in Calderdale and can still claim to be the tallest folly in the world. The tower is open to the public on Bank holidays only and the viewing platform is reached up 405 steps, so not for the faint hearted and almost a hundred and forty years after his death the structure carries the Wainhouse name into its third century.
The Victorian period was a time of sheer opulence, sitting alongside desperate poverty and the Wainhouse Tower story is just one example of grossly overstated buildings being erected by wealthy businessmen and landowners as a public demonstration of their wealth and status. Religion was also dominated by this habit and around the country free church chapels were built, in theory to demonstrate an individual’s faith, but more often than not making an even bigger statement about their standing in the community. It was a prerequisite in some of the industrial areas the menial workers attended the chapel built by their employers for the benefit of their workers spiritual wellbeing. Many of those buildings hang like millstones around the necks of aging, small societies who are struggling to survive in the current era.
In the set Bible reading for this Sunday (Luke 18: 9-14) Jesus tells a story of a Pharisee and a tax collector, the Pharisee, full of his own self-importance, and the tax collector knowing that he is guilty of swindling people, but acknowledging what he has done wrong and seeking forgiveness, and I am reminded that we need to be very careful when we are busy polishing our own halo’s to show how wonderful we are. The world today is judged by the number of followers on social media, the number of people watching as people video their everyday lives and publish them online. Humility is often associated with weakness in the modern world, I still look in awe at the Wainhouse Tower if I’m ever in the Halifax area, and it is a sight to behold, but John Wainwright could be remembered for far more than building a folly to prove supremacy over a neighbour.