Salisbury Cathedral: Exterior and Close

      On Monday, we left Bath for the day, taking the train south to Salisbury.  It was our first visit to the city and to the cathedral. We were in no way disappointed.  It was in fact a revelation; critics, I think, tend to credit Salisbury Cathedral with an icy perfection. Yet entering those vast and lucid cloisters for that first time was very much an emotional experience.

     History at Salisbury, for once, is straight forward.  Makes a change.  In the early 13th century Bishop Richard Poore relocated both city and cathedral from the ancient hillfort of Old Sarum down to the floodplain of the river Avon some two miles south, where the tributaries Nadder and Bourne join the river.  The foundation stone was laid on 1220 and the work continued until the 1250s - the cathedral was consecrated in 1258.  It is in Early English Gothic; the influences appear to be the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells.  In 1270s major building work resumed with the construction of the Chapter House and cloisters to the s of the cathedral church.  In 1334 work commenced on the tower and spire, a massive undertaking - the stone spire is the tallest in England at 404ft.  It is a supremely elegant design; the tower appears, to me at least, to belong to the same family as the towers of Worcester Cathedral and Pershore Abbey. 

     Apart from the tower and spire, very little was added to the cathedral in the subsequent centuries, or for that matter altered.  A small porch and two chantry chapels were added to the structure in the Late Middle Ages, but these three Perpendicular Gothic additions were removed by Wyatt as part of his ruthless restoration and re-ordering of the building.  The result is an almost uniquely homogenous structure among British cathedrals.  At the Reformation the usual amounts of destruction.  Wren worked on the cathedral in the 17th century, Wyatt 18th, and Sir George Gilbert Scott in the 19th.  

     The cathedral is surrounded by a large close - all lawns and large old houses - all very attractive and tranquil.  Quite villagey.  One of Wyatt's more egregious acts at Salisbury was the destruction of the detached bell tower in the midst of the close, just to the north of the cathedral.  An act of vandalism.  The bells, as a result, are now hung in the tower of the cathedral.  He also demolished the houses that stood around it, in an endeavour, I suppose, to tidy everything up. He really shouldn't have bothered.  

Apologies for the dim quality of the photographs; the weather was against us.

     Finally, on our walk around the close we came across 'Arundells', the home in retirement of the British Prime Minister Edward Heath (1916-2005).  It is now a museum.  Arundells is a palimpsest of a building, the history of England told in stone.  Ted Heath moved there in 1985.  It was altered at the time, and redecorated by the interior designer Derek Frost (1952-).  The result is very satisfying; Frost responds well to historic properties.  The dining room is particularly rich. The influence of David Hicks and Mary Fox Linton is evident.  The house contains a small but fine collection of art.  The garden, which leads down to the river, has a particularly fine view of the cathedral.  In all very English.  Fittingly.

     The house is very much as it was left at Ted Heath's death. What results is not only a singular memento of an individual's taste but, interior design being an ephemeral phenomena, of a work of a particular designer at a particular time, a snap-shot, as it were, of one strand of interior design at the end of the 1980s.  And valuable for that.