On the outskirts of Sway, a village near Lymington, on Britain’s south coast, stands a peculiar Victorian tower. Visible for miles around, the narrow rectangular tower shoots straight up into the sky for more than two hundred feet, and is crowed by a cupola. A spiraling staircase housed within a separate but adjacent hexagonal tower allows visitors access to all the fourteen floors and the top.

Sway Tower is a folly, a purposeless building, that housed nothing but pigeons for more than a hundred years, until about 45 years ago when it was converted into a residential house. The kicker is—there is not a single piece of iron support anywhere in the entire concrete building. Sway Tower was the first building in Britain to be made of non-reinforced concrete, and is also the tallest structure in the world to be built without reinforcement.

Photo: VIP International Homes