thumb|Broadway Tower in 2007

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.

The tower is built of limestone ashlar and is four storeys high, hexagonal, with three round corner turrets, battlements, and gargoyles.

History

The Saxon-style tower was the brainchild of landscaper Capability Brown, designed by architect James Wyatt in 1794 in the form of a castle, and built by the 6th Earl of Coventry for his wife Barbara in 1798–1799. Broadway Hill was a beacon hill, where beacons were lit on special occasions. The tower was just visible from the Coventrys' home at Croome Court in south Worcestershire,

From 1822 to 1862, the tower housed the private printing press of Sir Thomas Phillipps. By the mid-1870s, it was being rented by C. J. Stone and Cormell Price.

On 20 June 1837 the vantage point was used as a bonfire site for Queen Victoria's Jubilee. This was one of 2,548 celebratory bonfires lit across the country.

Near the tower is a memorial to the crew of an A.W.38 Whitley bomber that crashed there during a training mission in June 1943.

In the late 1950s, an underground Royal Observer Corps monitoring post was built nearby. It was decommissioned in 1991, but has been restored, and is now one of the few such Cold War monitoring facilities in England still extant and accessible to visitors.

The Tower was built on the site of the Campden Wonder Executions.

Notes

References

  • Official website