Vectis Decorative and Fine Arts Society Lecture

Doors open at 7.15pm. Tea, coffee and bar are available before the lectures which begin at 8.00pm.

We ask you to be seated by 7.55pm. They finish at approximately 9.15-9-30pm Guests are welcome at a cost of £7 and £2 for students.

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David Winpenny spent four years crossing Britain and Ireland to find more than 400 pyramids and to uncover their secrets and bizarre stories.

Dr Francis Douse is ’entombed like an Egyptian’ under his own small pyramid at Nether Wallop in Hampshire. For 23 years Mad Jack Fuller of Brightling in East Sussex gazed from his house at his own pyramid mausoleum. George Durrant of Tong in Shropshire housed his hens and his pigs in pyramids. Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, thought the secrets of the universe could be found by measuring Egypt’s great pyramid. All these eccentric men were what Sir Flinders Petrie called ‘Pyramidiots’. David Winpenny, another pyramidiot, spent four years crisscrossing Britain and Ireland to find more than 400 pyramids and to uncover their secrets.

Some are by distinguished architects – among them Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Wyatt and Kent, and Basil Spence – or commemorate famous men, like Nelson and Prince Albert, or the infamous, like Lord Lovat, the last man to be beheaded on Tower Hill. The earliest has links to the Armada; among the latest is the Coop Bank’s huge blue pyramid in Stockport. One held IRA rebels; two commemorate favourite horses. There are pyramids of brick and stone, of course – but also of cast iron, of formica and even of road signs.

This talk sets all these – and many more – in their historical and architectural context, from Ancient Egypt and Rome via landscape gardens, Napoleon and the Great Exhibition, to today.