At the time Rochfort built the Jealous Wall, the fashion for false ruins, or “ruin follies,” was spreading all over Europe. Everywhere, the aristocracy was building ruins from scratch or ruining their existing buildings to create dramatic and picturesque effects. In 1836, one English landowner at Scotney Castle in Kent went so far as to move out of his beloved country home, an opulent Elizabethan mansion with a great hall and oak staircase, and build a new house for himself at the top of a nearby hill. He then smashed the stones of his old country house and blew several picturesque holes in its walls. [...]
False ruins were used to celebrate British imperialism, too. The “Temple of Augustus” at Surrey’s Virginia Water used genuine columns and capitals from the Libyan ruins of Leptis Magna to position the British Empire as a natural successor to the legacy of Rome. [...]
But these false ruins also carry with them a strange kind of melancholy. It’s only with the coming of the 20th century, its cataclysmic changes and the genuine ruins its wars spread across Europe and the rest of the world, that the trend for ruin-building faded. In the ashes of Dresden, Coventry, and Stalingrad, the romantic ideal of the ruin in the European imagination was changed forever.
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