The dragons are back at Kew after more than two centuries, tails curled, wings neatly furled to make them less of a wind catcher, gazing down with glittering eyes on the acres of gardens and thousands of visitors far below.

The most spectacular garden folly in England, the great pagoda towers 50 metres over Kew Gardens. It was designed by Sir William Chambers in 1762 after visiting China, where his travels were restricted, but he sketched every traditional building he could see – including pagodas.

It was completed inside a year as a birthday gift for Princess Augusta, who was a major influence on the design and development of what was originally the royal back garden at their modest Kew Palace. Opened to the public by Queen Victoria, it became the world-famous showpiece of the Royal Horticultural Society.

Polly Putnam, a curator at Historic Royal Palaces, who has climbed many miles worth of the 253 steps, said that although the dragons were originally such a famous feature of the building, perched on every ridge of the 10 storeys, they had a short life.

Legends insisted they were made of gem-studded enamelled bronze or even solid gold, and that they were stripped off the pagoda to settle the Prince of Wales’s gambling debts, or to decorate his extraordinary oriental-styled Royal Pavilion in Brighton.

The truth was more boring. Chambers took them off when he restored the building in 1784, because although they looked magnificent, they were made of cheap pine and after a spell of atrocious weather – the Thames froze over in 1783 – they were rotten.



Their replacements, blazing in green, blue, red and gold, guard a secret. The eight at ground level were hand carved from cedar wood, but the 72 dragons on the higher floors were produced on a 3D printer.

“The biggest engineering problem we had was attaching the dragons to the roofs,” Putnam said. “They didn’t worry much about health and safety in the 18th century, but the biggest of the printed ones weigh less than 10 kilos, and the wooden ones weigh a quarter tonne – to make them all in wood we’d have had to punch the original structure through and through with steel-reinforcing rods to hold them.”

The tower, which once appeared ignominiously on the buildings at risk register of listed structures in danger of falling into ruin, proved to be in remarkably good shape.

The £5m restoration involved replacing just 60 bricks, and at the summit they found not the expected 20th-century lead, but the original much more expensive copper roof insisted on by Chambers.

The elegant timber spiral staircase is still the one he designed. A glass panel in the floor halfway up the building gives a magnificent but vertigo-inducing view of it. The panel fills one of the holes cut in each floor by the Royal Aircraft Establishment when they used the building to test smoke curtains used to camouflage low-flying aircraft in the second world war.

“This building changed the landscape,” Putnam said. “As soon it was finished every prince in Europe wanted a pagoda of his own.”

• The Great Pagoda at Kew reopens to the public from Friday, by separate ticket in addition to admission to the gardens.

