Chilton Priory, Somerset
I took a break from architecture after 2021, or at least, architecture took a break from me… I re-explored my freedoms, and after many years of my peace being stifled by isolation, I found someone with whom to I might dwell. A conversation in a pub garnered an interesting enquiry.
Currently known as Avalon Priory, Chilton Priory is a Grade II listed 1830 folly tower by William Halliday, built for the collector and antiquarian William Stradling. In 1910, the folly was much extended to form a large gothic-revival country house for Major Francis Kennedy, by the notable architect, author and psychical researcher, Frederick Bligh Bond. The house was later bought by the Oxo millionaire, John Maltwood, whose wife, the artist, collector and scholar Katharine Emma Maltwood, theorised of a giant zodiac of creatures formed by the hills of the Somerset levels. Her 1920’s large bas-relief, ‘The Grail Frieze’, quotes Sir William Dugdale’s Monasticum Anglicanum of 1655;
About sixty three years
After the incarnation
Of our Lord St Joseph
Of Arimethea
Accompanied by Eleven
Other disciples of
St Philip was despatched
By that apostle into
Britain to introduce
The Meek and Gentle
System of Christianity
They settled in the
Isle of Avalon
(All information from Historic England listing)
In 2015, the derelict priory was bought and restored by a Glastonbury eccentric, and a gang of the craftspeople that build the Glastonbury Festival annually. The ever-changing mind of the owner, and his laissez-faire attitude to architectural information, and regulations in general, had produced a difficult working situation with the local conservation officers.
Now a multi-bedroom House in Multiple Occupation (HMO), the priory is often being repaired, renovated, and extended, and more areas of the building are being brought into use. I was asked to produce drawings for a kitchen conversion, a cloister enclosure, and to make buildable the designs of others for an extension to the side of the main house.
The existing drawings did not agree with themselves, as is very often the case when working with the design work of others, particularly those who do not work in 3D; the windows were not the same size, or in the same place, between floorplans and elevations. In this extra-special example, rainwater downpipes are shown at the top of the roofslope, and on the other side of a parapet wall from the roof surface.
Modelling in 3D, I was able to produced properly coordinated drawings, and attend to all of the sense of how to construct the building as I worked. My re-design was used to revise the planning permission, and a series of detailed drawings showing connection details with the existing listed building satisfied the conservation officer.