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The tower
A hexagonal limestone tower stands on Broadway Hill
Broadway Tower is a four-storey hexagonal building of limestone ashlar with three round corner turrets, battlements and gargoyles. It stands on Broadway Hill, the second-highest point of the Cotswolds, and is 65 feet tall.
1,024 feetthe height of Broadway Hill above sea level
The plan
An idea of Capability Brown was built by an earl for his wife
The Saxon-style tower was designed by James Wyatt in 1794 from an idea of Capability Brown, and built by the 6th Earl of Coventry for his wife Barbara. One theory says Lady Coventry wondered if a beacon on the hill could be seen from Croome Court.
The press
A private printing press made it the Lighthouse of Wisdom
From 1822 to 1862 the tower housed the private printing press of Sir Thomas Phillipps. It was known as the Lighthouse of Wisdom, after the voluminous works printed there.
A holiday home
A headmaster rented it as a holiday home for his friends
In 1866 Cormell Price took out a lease on the tower as a holiday home for himself and his friends. Price was a headmaster and a friend of the artists William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
“...today at Crom Price's Tower among the winds and the clouds”
William Morris, in a letter of 1876
Cold War
A Cold War monitoring post lies near the tower
In the late 1950s an underground Royal Observer Corps monitoring post was built nearby. It was decommissioned in 1991 and has been restored, and is one of the few such Cold War facilities in England still open to visitors.
Day 1, afternoon
It comes after Broadway village.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Broadway Tower, Worcestershire, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.