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Stroll into the past
ESSAY
Forget the car, just walk and look – the pattern of the past is there
It’s a simple idea, but, in the age of the bypass and ring-road, is increasingly overlooked. It is a way of looking at, and understanding, historic buildings that was at the heart of early SPAB sensibility – that ancient architecture and the surrounding built environment is best seen and appreciated on foot. With summer here, writer and historian Jon Cannon offers a personal tour of the psycho-geography of our familiar heritage
I discovered the phenomenology of cathedrals on a ring road in Hereford. I had
by then visited several of these extraordinary buildings in the course of researching
my book, Cathedral: The Great English Cathedrals and the World that Made Them.
It was, I resolved, the last time that I would spend half my day endlessly circling
an unfamiliar city with a thousand other people looking for a parking space, before
spending the best part of £10 on a day’s parking. I invested in a folding bike;
placed in the boot of the car alongside a two-man tent, I was free to go – and
park (and, indeed, sleep) – where I pleased, and this I did. Little did I know
that I was, in spirit at least, following in the footsteps of William Morris,
of the early supporters of the SPAB, and such “Wandering Architects” as Detmar
Blow.
So on subsequent research trips, I simply found a suburban side street and cycled in. Almost instantly, the experience of approaching the building was transformed. Firstly, I became newly aware of the lie of the land: subtle rises and falls that were barely noticeable in a car become part of a series of landforms that helped me understand the place itself. How the river flows through a city, where the hills are: such things explained the path of a road, and the buildings that grew up along it. And my awareness of these was transformed, too.
I suspect many of us pick up, almost subliminally, the “growth rings” of an urban
centre as we enter it: the way modern estates give way to those of the 1930s;
the way that rows of shops are made up of increasing
numbers of older buildings, or include small hints of their origins as medieval
villages, until – often quite suddenly – everything is Victorian, and one knows
the special density of the historic core must be just around the corner.
numbers of older buildings, or include small hints of their origins as medieval
villages, until – often quite suddenly – everything is Victorian, and one knows
the special density of the historic core must be just around the corner. It was in Gloucester that this awareness became fully conscious, and with it
a deeper attention to the bones of an ancient landscape, still discernible, ghost-like
in the footprint of the settlement. Gloucester, like so many cities, is ripped
apart by a ring road, the A430. One of the many side-effects of this is that it
makes the city centre itself oddly counter-inituitive. Though I already knew the
cathedral well, I had always found it strangely hard to situate. If one came in
by car, one either followed signposts for the shopping centre, which always seemed
to make the cathedral oddly far from anywhere; or those for the cathedral itself,
which then seemed to rear up almost without preparation from the edge of the orbital
route.
The new strategy made everything crystal clear. I followed the ring road to somewhere
that seemed vaguely inner-urban, and then parked on a residential street. I cycled
to the nearest brick-terraced shopping street and followed it until I crossed
the ring road, almost immediately finding myself in the shopping centre: modern
at first, but giving way almost immediately to the pedestrianised streets of the
historic core, thick with buildings of the 16th to 19th centuries, at the heart
of which – somehow unrecognised before – was a four-way crossroad with a medieval
church tower on one corner.
All this told its own story. Four streets meeting at a single cross is a sign
of a planned settlement, and one of some age. Names such as “Southgate” Street
fell into place, as did the “cester” in the place name. This was a Roman footprint,
reinvented at some point in the medieval period. One of the reasons the ring road
was so confusing, parking so very disorientating, is that one was perpetually
circling the edge of this inner rectangle with its four main gates. A plan-form,
in other words, repeated in thousands of settlements across the ancient world;
a plan-form that was obvious on foot or riding a bicycle, but which was obscured
by the changes of the late 20th century.
The current appearance of Gloucester – post-war intrusions notwithstanding –
is defined by these extraordinary continuities: an underlying Roman street pattern,
houses on long, thin, possibly Anglo-Saxon plots, each of with its own unique
and complex history of expansion, construction, addition and reconstruction within
a tight curtilage. Such stories are everywhere in British urban settlements, and
their continuities and intimate complexities are precisely reason why the big
1960s interventions were so destructive. And now, Gloucester’s cathedral too was easily found. It could only be approached
from one of the four streets – but once found, its gates were unmissable. Another
piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place: the cathedral took up most of one
quadrant of the ancient town. Two sides of this exclusive rectangle – a cathedral
“quarter” in the literal sense – would have been bounded by city walls, or banks,
or whatever defences medieval Gloucester had; the other two sides had gradually
been built up, so that the enclosing wall that once separated thechurch from the
city was no longer obvious.
Such facts drip with content. The occupation by a single institution of an entire
quarter of a settlement is extraordinarily eloquent of the power and wealth of
that institution; the fact that the institution is a religious one, equally illustrative
of the priorities of medieval life. This was a religious city-within-a-city, a
great, wealthy and highly regulated commune; and in turn, it raised questions
that could not be answered simply by walking around with ones eyes open and one’s
brain engaged. Did any other organisations of any kind, lay or religious, match
the wealth and complexity of this mighty religious corporation? How did it come
to occupy an entire section of a Roman settlement? Who was permitted within the
religious enclosure, and on what conditions, and how should this affect our perception
of
its architecture?
its architecture?
The answers to many of these questions are to be found in the close study of
historical fact, and they feed back into one’s perception of the buildings when
one approaches them on the ground. I quickly realised, for example, that not all
cathedrals are what they seem. Some were, for their builders, humble parish churches.
Others – Gloucester among them – were mighty abbeys; and even among those which
were, as
‘GLOUCESTER WAS A RELIGIOUS CITY-WITHIN-A-CITY, A GREAT, WEALTHY AND HIGHLY REGULATED COMMUNE'
they are now, diocesan seats, the religious communities which made the place
work could vary enormously in organisation and internal make-up, as did the wealth
and power of the cathedral itself. Poor old Chichester was dominated by Canterbury
even within its own diocese; mighty Lincoln ruled a see the size of a small country.
Wells was a community of canons, men of the world with their own houses and sources
of income, who spent most of their lives oiling the administrative wheels of church
and state. The canons even had to employ vicars choral – liturgical stand-ins
for themselves – to pray on their behalf in the choir. Worcester was a community
of monks, men cloistered from the world, living a tightly-regulated life in a
great religious commune. Gloucester was too, but without a bishop: what did this
mean for its relationship with the cathedral at Worcester, or with local lay power?As I read, some of the answers to these questions appeared; answers which would
only generate new lines of enquiry when out and about in a given cathedral city.
I noticed, for example, that a whole series of cathedral enclosures were created
in the seventh century. At Winchester and Canterbury, to name but two, Anglo-Saxons
– a people with no urban traditions of their own – had entered abandoned, ruined
Roman cities, re-occupied a former quarter, and created the first new stone buildings
in a century or two. These were the first English cathedrals. These men where
not just creating an architectural form to match their new religion, they were
evoking the idea of the city in a country that had none – that would, indeed,
have none for centuries to come. And they had begun to do other things: within
a lifetime of St Augustine’s mission to Ethelbert, King of Kent, not only had
the city of Canterbury been reconfigured as a kind of local copy of ancient Rome,
but English law had been written down for the first time, a process that first
involved working out how to transliterate Anglo-Saxon into the Latin alphabet.
The Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons, it seemed, was a forgotten revolution,
a missing stepping stone between the Roman empire and modern civilisation; their
efforts in the abandoned Roman settlements at Winchester and Canterbury had an
impact on these not-yet-cities which has shaped them to this day. So why has the scale of the Anglo-Saxon contribution been forgotten? Because,
within a few decades of the Norman conquest, every single Anglo-Saxon episcopal
seat had been relocated and/or rebuilt, with some of the largest structures then
standing on the planet – the present Winchester Cathedral among them – the result.
This was more than a reform: it was a sweeping architectural and political tabula
rasa whose impact on the nation’s resources must have been considerable. Architecture,
it turns out, is a kind of memory: when buildings are lost, so too withers our
awareness of the times that created them.
Parts of the cathedrals themselves often seemed uncannily reflective of what
we know about their builders’ lives: the north transept at Hereford, for example
– an, arch, knowing, cosmopolitan work on an otherwise provincial building – built
by the hated bishop Aigueblanche, a native of Savoy placed in the Marches by Henry
III. Or the extraordinary surviving fragment of the east end built at Lincoln
by bishop, later saint, Hugh of Avalon; both “St Hugh’s choir” and the man himself
have more than a whiff of pious insanity about them. And sometimes, I encountered
collisions of contemporary sources, modern scholarship and surviving landscape
that created experiences so vivid they were almost like stepping into a time-machine.
Now it just so happens that England was then in the midst of what was arguably
its most creative architecture decade bar none, and – aside from such glories,
then under construction, as the Ely Octagon and Lady Chapel and the Wells and
Bristol east ends – a major reconstruction of the east end and Lady Chapel at
Lichfield was then underway, along with the creation of that cathedral’s vivid
three-spired profile. This was part of a wholesale reworking of the church’s setting
in its close and a rebuilding of the bishop’s palace.
This coincidence of histories architectural and actual gives a visit to Lichfield
a special poignancy today. The cathedral is almost as much a creation of the 17th
and 19th centuries as of those before the Reformation. But the extraordinary apsed
lady chapel (probably almost complete when Simeon and Hugh visited) still shimmers
in the distance as one enters. And somehow, with a hint of their eyes to look
through, one can reconstruct something of their experience. The renewed cathedral
complex must have risen like some chivalrous fantasy as one approached from Watling
Street, at once enticing and forbidding. They would have come through a Wales
in which the conquering efforts of Edward I where everywhere visible; the new
bishop’s palace at Lichfield was (perhaps deliberately) a miniature evocation
of Caernarfon Castle. To enter the church itself, our two pilgrims had to pass
through a series of boundaries – some visually unmistakeable, others as much known
as seen – of ever increasing sacredness. They had been in the diocese of Coventry
and Lichfield since entering England. Now they found their way to the city gates,
and made their way through the busy settlement to the great gate of the cathedral
close. Within, everything was at once more expansive and more serene than in the
lay city to the south. And immediately, the extraordinary west front would have
struck them near-dumb: especially as its statues and decoration would have been
richly painted. Where was the entrance for such laymen? A side door of the west
front? The grand doorway to the south transept? Perhaps that was for the canons
and their dean, with their bishop having a gate of his own on the north side:
detailed exploration of the disposition of the medieval close might answer such
questions; for now, what matters is to that doors had specific functions, and
our visitors would have used the entrance appropriate to their status. Likewise,
in the east end at least, the two Irishmen would have remained in side aisles
rather than entering the choir enclosure itself.
This journey though a sequence of ever-richer gates and boundaries, and around
the edge of the Holy of Holies, would surely have made their encounter with the
lady chapel and shrine area all the more intense an experience. And their route
though the building – if it was not under scaffolding – was stage-managed partly
with their devotions in mind. The went round the processional aisles, witnessing
Chad’s shrine, made by Parisian goldsmiths for £2,000 in 1307, financed by a personal
loan to the bishop from his Italian bankers. Its setting, with the church-high
lady chapel rising high above, must have been ravishing; and if they were lucky,
on their way out, Chad’s holy skull might be revealed from a special extension
off the south choir aisle.
So it was with reopened eyes that I began to approach the cathedrals. One started
to notice finer patterns. Cities such as Chichester, Oxford or Salisbury are packed
with the creations of medieval bishops – market crosses, hospitals, colleges.
These are men whose names we know, whose life-stories we can reconstruct. Armed
with this knowledge, these remnants of the medieval past became more than “monuments”;
they came alive, connecting me to the vision, piety, chutzpah and cannyness of
successive individuals: real human beings who happened to have access to extraordinary
resources.
Parts of the cathedrals themselves often seemed uncannily reflective of what
we know about their builders’ lives: the north transept at Hereford, for example
– an, arch, knowing, cosmopolitan work on an otherwise provincial building – built
by the hated bishop Aigueblanche, a native of Savoy placed in the Marches by Henry
III. Or the extraordinary surviving fragment of the east end built at Lincoln
by bishop, later saint, Hugh of Avalon; both “St Hugh’s choir” and the man himself
have more than a whiff of pious insanity about them. And sometimes, I encountered
collisions of contemporary sources, modern scholarship and surviving landscape
that created experiences so vivid they were almost like stepping into a time-machine.A reference in a scholarly article led me to the pilgrimage of Simon Simeon and
Hugh the Illuminator from Dublin to Jerusalem. The ancient status of the A5 as
the road to Holyhead surely explains the fact that they passed neat Lichfield
in 1323, stopping to visit the shrine there of St Chad. They described a building
“uncommon in its beauty, with towers of stone and the loftiest and most noble
of belfries, the interior wonderfully furnished and adorned with murals, carvings
and other lovely spiritual devices”.
Now it just so happens that England was then in the midst of what was arguably
its most creative architecture decade bar none, and – aside from such glories,
then under construction, as the Ely Octagon and Lady Chapel and the Wells and
Bristol east ends – a major reconstruction of the east end and Lady Chapel at
Lichfield was then underway, along with the creation of that cathedral’s vivid
three-spired profile. This was part of a wholesale reworking of the church’s setting
in its close and a rebuilding of the bishop’s palace.‘WITHIN A FEW DECADES OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST, EVERY SINGLE ANGLO-SAXON EPISCOPAL SEAT HAD BEEN RELOCATED, AND/OR REBUILT, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL AMONG THEM’
This coincidence of histories architectural and actual gives a visit to Lichfield
a special poignancy today. The cathedral is almost as much a creation of the 17th
and 19th centuries as of those before the Reformation. But the extraordinary apsed
lady chapel (probably almost complete when Simeon and Hugh visited) still shimmers
in the distance as one enters. And somehow, with a hint of their eyes to look
through, one can reconstruct something of their experience. The renewed cathedral
complex must have risen like some chivalrous fantasy as one approached from Watling
Street, at once enticing and forbidding. They would have come through a Wales
in which the conquering efforts of Edward I where everywhere visible; the new
bishop’s palace at Lichfield was (perhaps deliberately) a miniature evocation
of Caernarfon Castle. To enter the church itself, our two pilgrims had to pass
through a series of boundaries – some visually unmistakeable, others as much known
as seen – of ever increasing sacredness. They had been in the diocese of Coventry
and Lichfield since entering England. Now they found their way to the city gates,
and made their way through the busy settlement to the great gate of the cathedral
close. Within, everything was at once more expansive and more serene than in the
lay city to the south. And immediately, the extraordinary west front would have
struck them near-dumb: especially as its statues and decoration would have been
richly painted. Where was the entrance for such laymen? A side door of the west
front? The grand doorway to the south transept? Perhaps that was for the canons
and their dean, with their bishop having a gate of his own on the north side:
detailed exploration of the disposition of the medieval close might answer such
questions; for now, what matters is to that doors had specific functions, and
our visitors would have used the entrance appropriate to their status. Likewise,
in the east end at least, the two Irishmen would have remained in side aisles
rather than entering the choir enclosure itself.This journey though a sequence of ever-richer gates and boundaries, and around
the edge of the Holy of Holies, would surely have made their encounter with the
lady chapel and shrine area all the more intense an experience. And their route
though the building – if it was not under scaffolding – was stage-managed partly
with their devotions in mind. The went round the processional aisles, witnessing
Chad’s shrine, made by Parisian goldsmiths for £2,000 in 1307, financed by a personal
loan to the bishop from his Italian bankers. Its setting, with the church-high
lady chapel rising high above, must have been ravishing; and if they were lucky,
on their way out, Chad’s holy skull might be revealed from a special extension
off the south choir aisle. With their words to hand, all this – plus the glass, the candles, the scents,
the paint – hovered mirage-like, almost vivid, over the architecture that survives.
Truly, I realised, the cathedral builders had beaten Blake hands down: he wrote
of building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land; they actually did
so.
Nowhere was the power of this approach more vivid and unexpected than in London,
to the eye – largely thanks to the events of 1666 and 1940-1 – the least medieval
of English cities. How to bring back to life a cathedral that dwarfed Wren’s St
Paul’s, the spire of which was one of the tallest structures on the planet when
it was built? A structure so lost its precise footprint vis à vis the modern building
it has taken great archaeological effort to re-establish?
Oddly enough, it was surprisingly easy: but it required a bicycle and a walk
to do it. Even in this most densely-settled of places, the underlying shape of
the land is surprisingly legible. Londinium was essentially a pair of low, sandy
hills around which a wall was thrown. The eastern hill formed the base for a crossing-point
of the Thames which became London Bridge. Between the hills ran the Walbrook;
the little lane that runs by Street Stephen’s Walbrook marks the valley of this
stream to this day: follow it across the steel-and-concrete wall that is Upper
Thames Steet and the culverted river itself emerges from a metal grille, makes
its way across a stretch of beach, and slips its feet into the Thames.With the Walbrook valley marked on one side, one can proceeed to the western
hill and find oneself outside St Paul’s; the famous view from the west front looking
towards the city’s western gate – Ludgate – and the valley of the River Fleet,
which ran immediately beyond. All around the cathedral stood the enclosure of
Paulsbury, a lost place name that marks out a complex every bit the equal of what
was already, by 1500, one of the greatest cities of western Christendom. Paulsbury
was especially interesting on the north, in the area marked today by Paternoster
Square and St Paul’s Churchyard. Here stood the Pardon Churchyard, for the burial
of laymen, with its painted Dance of Death. Here, too was the great open space
– a precursor to Trafalgar Square – around Paul’s Cross, where citizens gathered
at key times.
This way of looking, I found, has generated a whole school of archaeology: phenomenologists
such as Chris Tilley have reconstructed the experience of prehistoric landscapes
by walking them armed with a detailed knowledge of find-histories and stratification.
But it has been reinvented by centuries of antiquarian activity going back to
the days of great walkers and riders, from William of Worcestre to John Aubrey
to Iolo Morgannwg: and nowhere has it borne greater cultural fruit than in the
work of the men who founded the SPAB: men such as William Morris (“not seldom
I please myself with trying to realise the faces of medieval England”, as the
man himself put it) and William Lethaby, who talked of architecture as being “building
touched with emotion”.
It is also a “method” that can excite cautious suspicion in the more cool-headed
modern analysts. A curtain of objectivity has fallen over a discipline that can
only ever partially be a science. This is not to denigrate the value of
‘THIS WAY OF LOOKING IS A METHOD THAT CAN EXCITE CAUTIOUS SUSPICION IN MODERN
ANALYSTS’
complex scientific study: only with the most rigorous of analytical tools can
one disaggregate the layers of wall painting in a country church, or the stratigraphy
of building and rebuilding that explain the form of many of our most ancient structures.
But this on its own is arid.
These buildings were made with emotions, aesthetics and brains alike engaged, for a purpose that had more to do with faith, myth and belief than rational analysis. We have to find ways of articulating that aspect of our approach to them, even only so as to inform the intensity of our scholarly investigations. It is a triangle in which close reading and intelligent analysis, and slow journeying and sensitive looking, are two poles of the tripod needed to understand old places: the third is emotional, aesthetic, felt.
This was obvious to our forebears: Morris moved as easily from hands-on craft
practise to poetry to “simple” walking and looking, to cold analysis. The SPAB
founders spoke of watching an “an old building with anxious care, counting its
stones as you would jewels on a crown…tenderly, reverentially, continually”: this
is as much love as science. And for Morris, it was an entire morality: “if we
feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry, or hungry, or sleepy we
are so far bad animals, and therefore miserable men,” he wrote.
But such things pose problems for those who care for the past: because underneath
all the well-crafted arguments that we use to persuade policymakers that maintenance
of old builders is worth funding, and planning law should be responsive to the
character of places, there lurks an emotional response that seems to divide the
population in two as surely as there are dog lovers and cat lovers, or those who
can’t live without music and those who have no need for it. Either you “get” the
fact that the past matters – and if you do, it is so obvious that it barely needs
articulating – or you don’t. Those in the former camp must use every statistical,
economic and political argument at their disposal to persuade those in the latter
not to forget the power of the past.
Though emotions alone will never win over the wonks of Whitehall, when we overlook
the emotive response that underlies our own experience we lose something vital.
Emotion informed by analysis, and back again, in a virtuous circle. Quality of
life, after all, matters to all of us – but it is a matter as much felt as bean-counted.
It is something that William Morris would have understood.
Jon Cannon worked for 10 years
for the Royal Commission on
Historical Monuments of
England, and English Heritage.
‘Cathedral: The English
Cathedrals and The World That
Made Them’ is published by
Constable & Robinson, £30