Completed by William Beckford in 1827, Lansdown Tower was built at the end of a mile-long pleasure garden he constructed above his house in Lansdown Crescent, Bath. Beckford was a troubled character, who inherited a vast fortune from his family's sugar plantations, but lost much of the wealth building the disastrous Fonthill Abbey, an enormous Gothic revival house which later collapsed. Beckford was a writer, critic, MP and prolific art collector, but is probably best remembered for the tower which now bears his name, and alongside which he is buried in a moat-surrounded pink granite sarcophagus he designed himself.
