Dec 12, 2014

Called an "Underwater Ballroom," in reality it was a subterranean smoking room built beneath a roof aquarium. Either way, it was spectacular, and like everything else on Whitaker Wright's Lea Park estate, it was doomed.

The main house on the estate was a 32-room mansion, and Wright had three artificial lakes constructed, the 9,000+ acres lavishly landscaped and reeking of wealth and means. Perhaps the most famous addition to the palatial properties was the underground conservatory/smoking room with aquarium windows, an epic statue seemingly rising out of the manufactured lake on the underwater dome that gave the glorious below-ground room a ballroom-like appearance.

Whitaker Wright wore many hats throughout the years, but when he finally settled into something, it was something big - big and illegal. London and Globe Company floated stock and bonds in the realm of the mining industry, and at first Whitaker's business dealings were simply misleading, not particularly criminal. The line was crossed into outright swindling when, after floating a large, unwieldy bond issue for the Waterloo Railway (an expensive endeavor quite out of his usual comfort zone) everything went south, straining his finances. To keep investors from seeing him struggle, he began to issue himself a series of loans and shuttle them between his companies. Unable to keep things afloat, in 1900 he fled, leaving his floundering investors in a panic, and single-handedly terrorizing London's exchange.

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