It gives your dinner added spice to know you're eating it on the premises of a notorious degenerate. And the names 'Beckford' and 'Fonthill' summon up a chap who, in the early 19th century, was thought by many to be "the most evil man in England".
He was William Beckford, author, occasional MP, art collector, builder, critic, traveller and sexual predator. His debut fiction, Vathek, written in three days and two nights when he was only 21 and in the grip of heaven-knows-what stimulant, was one of the earliest English Gothic novels, a big influence on Lord Byron, who called him "England's wealthiest son" – Beckford inherited the equivalent of £110m from his dad, who owned slave plantations in Jamaica. Scandal engulfed him when he was exposed in the newspapers as a bisexual sadist and paedophile, once discovered in the act of whipping a 10-year-old boy. He had the enormous Fonthill Abbey built to his design, but it featured a massive phallic tower which collapsed one night, bringing the roof down, in 1825.
The eyes of the weary traveller on the A303 from London fall with delight on the Beckford Arms, on the old Fonthill estate. It's a big white inn covered in ivy and lit with welcoming lamps. The bar has been modernised to look more like a sophisticated country house than a pub. The tables and chairs are as lumpy and bandy-legged as Mrs Patmore in Downton Abbey, but the décor is on-trend: more Farrow & Ball than Colefax & Fowler. There are sofas, newspapers and a blazing fire in the sitting-room, wall-hangings in the dining area, and eight bedrooms
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/
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