Book Launch
A recently published new biography of Henry Winstanley, the Saffron Walden engineer, engraver, lighthouse-builder and theatrical entrepreneur will be launched on 3rd December 2024 at the Old Sun Inn, Saffron Walden . Thereafter it will be available from Hart’s bookshop in Saffron Walden (hardcover, £25).
Henry Winstanley of Saffron Walden was an ‘engineer’ both in the late mediaeval and in the modern sense of that word. Working with pumps, automata, clockwork and fireworks he created wonders which were mechanical, theatrical and hydraulic.
The great lighthouse he built on the Eddystone reef fourteen miles off Plymouth was a triumph of marine engineering, dressed in the flamboyant architecture of an age already passing. It survived only six years before being torn, with its architect, off the reef by the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703. Most of what he did and made was spectacular but impermanent – with the exception of fifty or so surviving etchings, mostly of the Earl of Suffolk’s great house at Audley End, later a palace for Charles II, of the heyday of which they form the only, and splendid, record.
