My tower house is ready to play its part in celebrating our heritage

IF the neighbours weren’t used to it, they’d demand the destruction of my house. It is one of the ugliest buildings in the neighbourhood. In fact, it wins the prize for being ugly, leaky, and disfunctional.

Plus, it cannot be missed, this one-bedroom residence with windowframes spotted by all-pervasive salt. You know that description “stainless steel”? It doesn’t apply where I live. The atmosphere is so salty that brand new items made of iron, steel, and aluminium all rust like they had been submerged like the Titanic and around the same time. That means kitchenware always looks manky, while every blade becomes blunt and every needle, pin or staple spreads rust stains on everything it touches.

My short, stubby, squat house is unique, yet matched in general design to a string of others like it, all of them passive aggressive by virtue of placement and by virtue of scale. They were the product of state coercion and misplaced paranoia. The British were sure that Napoleon was coming after them by sea and — led by Admiral Jervis, who had been impressed by how a rounded tower in Cape Martella in Sicily withstood bombardment by his water-borne cannon — resolved to build almost eight copies of that tower around the coasts of Britian and Ireland. They figured walls 8ft thick and a canon circling on the conical roof would make each tower virtually impregnable, and each being in line of sight of the next would allow any two of them to catch incoming ships in crossfire.