Gloucester

The Golden Minster

Dominating a small patch of green space by St Oswald’s Road in Gloucester is a piece of wall with a story going back more than one thousand years.

In around 900, Æthelflæd, daughter of King Alfred the Great, built a large church, known at first as the New Minster, in Gloucester. It became a shrine when Æthelflæd and her brother Edward led a military expedition into Lincolnshire, which was then occupied by the Vikings, and brought back a number of holy relics. Amongst these were the bones of St Oswald, who had been king of Northumbria, a keen supporter of the spread of Christianity in the North of England, and bringer of St Aidan to his kingdom to preach the Christian faith. Oswald’s saintly life – both his encouragement of Christian missionaries like Aidan and his selfless support of the poor – led people to revere him, and after his death miracles were said to take place at his grave. It was said too that miracles occurred at his shrine in the church at Gloucester, to which so much wealth flowed that it become known as the Golden Minster.

After the Norman conquest the minster became an Augustinian priory (one of several priories and friaries in the city) and the building was extended to provide domestic quarters for the monks, to create accommodation for guests, and to upgrade the church. However, in the 16th century the priory was dissolved by Henry VIII and the church was partially demolished. Part of the building survived as a parish church but by 1656 this had been replaced with another building and soon just this wall was left.

The surviving hotchpotch is not much, just part of one wall of the nave, but even this shows several different phases of the building. The semicircular arches are early medieval; the pointed arches represent the later extension of the priory church to the west, and the walls that infill the spaces beneath the arches date from the period after the dissolution when the building was reduced in size for use as a parish church. It’s a rather sad ruin, in a little visited part of the city, probably mostly just glanced at by motorists as they whiz past on a nearby ring road. A reminder of the ways in which this large city changed over the centuries, from a religious centre to an industrial and trading one, of how much has been lost, but of how many traces of the past remain for those with the time and the eyes to see.

Altarnun, Cornwall

The hard stuff

In the list of English building stones most familiar are the sedimentary rocks, such as limestones and sandstones, that are so widely found and widely used for building. In the Middle Ages, when so many of the country’s churches, castles, and other notable buildings were constructed, these stones were widespread, plentiful, and widely used. Many of them were also sympathetically yielding to the carver’s chisel, and whether for the hunky punks of Somerset or the glorious Romanesque carvings of Herefordshire or their contemporaries in many other places, often just as stunning, masons and carvers used these materials enthusiastically. But there are other stones with very different qualities. One such group are the granites of parts of Cornwall, Devon, and Lancashire, igneous rocks that are so hard they rapidly blunt any tool that one is rash enough to use on them.* Early builders were sometimes thankful to find ‘field stones’, chunks of granite that they could pick up and use with little or no chiselling. An entire church built of granite is a testimony to a lot of very hard work.

Such a church is St Nonna’s, Altarnun, in Cornwall. Not for this building are the glass-flat blocks of ashlar stone that we see so often on the limestone belt or in the sandstone country. The surfaces, though well worked, have a roughness that gives them a character of their own. My photograph shows a detail of the superb Norman font. There’s a carved head at each corner and in the middle of each side, a roundel with a six-petalled ‘flower’ motif, embraced by a some kind of two-headed serpent. It’s simply detailed – getting fine detail into this stone is a real challenge – but wonderfully strong. It would have been further enhanced with coloured paint, of which traces remain – a hint of red on the cheeks of the face and a little grey to suggest hair. Whoever carved this has not been cowed by the hard rock, but has gone with an approach that suits the quality of the stone. A lesson in making the best of a material, something that ancient craftsmen did magnificently.

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* I once tried to drill a hole the granite wall of a house, to fit a curtain rail. My good quality hammer drill was defeated: once through the plaster surface, the tip of the bit just danced about on the surface of the rock, knocking away more and m ore surrounding plaster as it did so. We called in the professionals, who had a machine the size of my arm that did the job.

Ledbury, Herefordshire

Putting up a front

In the same street as my two previous posts is this building, one that has caught my eye before as I’ve driven past. It’s very much the kind of facade that makes you want to do a double take. On foot, this was possible, and the photograph is one result. It turns out to be a former Wesleyan Methodist chapel, built originally in 1849 but upgraded in 1884, when this elaborate frontage was added. It’s quite a statement in a sort of free Romanesque style: twin towers that decide to become octagonal partway up (they contain stairs to internal galleries), big windows, a really large rose window, yellow brick dressings contrasting with the red. A hundred years on from the refronting, the central part of the ground floor was altered – a pair of exterior staircases to the upper level were taken out and the rather dull central doorway block substituted. That was no doubt practical but seems to have been unfortunate visually. Now to make matters worse the whole building seems to be empty.

I don’t know more of the chapel’s history, but it’s very grand for a small town. However, judging by the large 19th-century houses further up the same street, Ledbury was clearly prosperous in that period. It’s in a rich agricultural region (lots of hop fields, together with mixed farming) and the town must have benefitted from the railway link. Ledbury was linked to the West Midlands Railway in 1861 and a branch to Gloucester was added in 1885. Some of the town’s Methodist population may have benefitted from the town’s new opportunities and put some of their profits into the church. What they built reminds us how bold some nonconformist architecture could be, and how the design of some of these buildings could draw on the variety of styles available during the most eclectic periods of the Victorian era.

The Lea, Herefordshire

The elephant in the room, or, Odd things in churches (11)

Although it’s not at all odd for a church to have a font, this one is odd, as English fonts go. First of all, it’s Italian; secondly, it’s elaborately carved and inlaid; thirdly, it didn’t start out as a font at all, but as a stoup. That I was able to come across this exotic object in a church in Herefordshire, near the border with Gloucestershire, is due to a gift. The font was donated by a Mrs Hope-Edwards, as a memorial to her mother, and she got it from a London dealer who imported it for Italy. It’s said to be of the 12th or 13th century, and Mrs Hope-Edwards gave it to the church in 1909.

The round bowl is carved with various interlacing patterns and a number of small scenes – just visible in my upper photograph are a man in a boat (he’s holding an oar, but the vessel’s large sail is also visible), and a fox making short work of a chicken. Other scenes feature a dog attacking a ram, a peacock eating a fish, and a woman also with a fish. The bowl is set on a distinctive shaft that has a faux-knot halfway up and the staff is carried on the back of an elephant, a creature that seems to have ears very like human ones. As well as the carving, another delight of the font is the mosaic or Cosmati work running around the bowl and around the saddle cloth that is draped over the elephant’s body.

Scholars of medieval sculpture have made comparisons with work in such places as the cathedrals of Canosa di Puglia and Bari. I have seen ‘knotted’ shafts like this one at Modena cathedral. The meticulous mosaic work, with its tiny diamond-shaped and triangular tesserae certainly has an Italian feel too. In the right lighting conditions the golden tesserae must glitter attractively. Alas! England could not provide sunny weather on the day I visited, but the font still brightened a rather gloomy interior.

Oxford

Oasis

It was a long time ago. An open door seemed to promise cool shade that hot summer. I remember the silence. The streets outside, with their endless tiny terraced houses, were quiet too, the ironworks silent, and the canal and boatyard nearby inactive. I think I recall a lingering smell of incense. I'm sure I remember the light and the dark – bits of painting and gilding gleamed and pale arches shone between a dark floor and brown roof timbers high above those arches and above tall windows. I remember rows of saints and the sense that this was something different – different from the run of austere nonconformist chapels and whitewashed Anglican churches I'd experienced, more colourful and lively than the pale pointed arches of cathedrals like Salisbury and Winchester that I'd been admiring not long before. I remember thinking that these round arches were somehow distinct from the ones (Norman) that I'd previously seen in parish churches. I'd not been to Italy yet, but I knew what a campanile was and that the tower of this church resembled one: square, tall, narrow, large-windowed, roofed with a pyramid. Italy. Yes, that must be what was behind this cavernous, apse-ended space with its rows of saints and its altar canopy and its rather dark east end, where hanging things and candlesticks and the pinnacles of the altar canopy glowed in the gloom.

Passing St Barnabas, Oxford, again the other day, I was delighted to find that the neighbourhood was still almost silent and that the door was open – the cleaners were finishing their work and gave me a few minutes to look again at this glowing interior while they finished and packed up their mops and brooms. Sir Arthur Blomfield’s Romanesque basilica of 1869–72 is almost exactly as I remember it from the 1970s, except that the dark floor has been renewed with paler material. There are still mosaics of saints and prophets to admire, a glorious painted and gilded pulpit, and proportions that recall the churches of Ravenna, a place I’ve visited twice since I first encountered St Barnabas. But the details of this Oxford church, such as the artfully shaped tiles that make up the mosaics above the arcades, are English, and all its own. A David with long, string-plucking fingers, a St John the Baptist with eyes that (with apologies to the ghosts of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) seem to follow one round the room, tussocky ground, and a scaly, layered palm tree trunk. Here’s to St Barnabas, jewel of the Romanesque revival, Italianate oasis, citadel of quiet.

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Top picture by Kaihsu Tai, used under Creative Commons license 
Other pictures by Philip Wilkinson, as usual

Broadway Tower, Worcestershire

Broadway Tower is on top of a hill on the borders of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire on a site that had long been used for lighting beacons. The hill is almost 1000 feet above sea level, so any fire lit there, or any light glimmering from a building, can be seen for miles. The story goes that the wife of George William, 6th Earl of Coventry, wanted a beacon she could see from her house in Worcester, and her husband decided on this site and chose James Wyatt as the architect.

Wyatt was known for his work in the Gothic style, but was a versatile designer – for this building of 1797–1800 turned his hand to a kind of Romanesque revival, with round-headed windows and castle-like turrets. The tower can certainly be seen for miles around, and people who like to make lists of such things argue about the dozen or more counties you are supposed to be able to see on a clear day from the top of the tower. There were of course even more before the local government reorganization of the 1970s.

People talk about buildings like Broadway Tower as ‘follies’. But, all these apparently eccentric towers, sham castles, grottoes, and so on were originally built for a purpose and when we know the purpose the buildings seem less bizarre. Broadway Tower was built to be seen, to be admired, and to admire the view from. Not so outrageous, really.