Cambridge : St Bene't

      Another theme of my recent trip to London is, oddly, establishment Anglicanism.  Earlier in our day in Cambridge we had visited Great St Mary, the University Church.  A busy and worldly sort of place. You can't much more 'establishment' than that, and where in the second half of the 20th century five of the parish priests become bishops and one a cathedral dean.  St Bene't (yes, that is the correct spelling) I think qualifies, having the future archbishop Ramsey as vicar at one point.

      It stands below the level of the street, at the junction of Free School Lane and St Bene't St., a low unassuming structure similar in that respect to the nearby St Edward's church.  The whole urban fabric at this point rather picturesque; to the east of the church, across Free School Lane is a group of timber framed houses one of which was a cheap'n'cheerful Greek restaurant popular with students.  I remember sitting in there on a particularly cold winter's day, lunchtime it was ,with the bf - we were about the only customers - when it began to snow.
      Between c1352 & 1580 St Bene't also served not only as parish church but chapel to Corpus Christi College next door, and as at Little St Mary a gallery was constructed between the two, tethering the church to the college.  (St Mary the Less, and St Bene't were not alone in being parish churches that also served as collegiate chapels St Michael and St Edward and the lost St John Zachary) The glory of this church is architectural, being the tower which is Anglo-Saxon. I think it makes St Bene't's the oldest building in Cambridge.  Inside the tower arch survives and is a charming, cack-handed attempt at Classicism.  On the whole, though, the interior is a little on the bleak side, for me.  It lacks a certain mystery, but is pleasant enough. Of the furnishings the font is good, as are the benefaction boards.  And that, as far as I can remember is, that.

Cambridge: The Round Church I

      Cambridge and the limit of our wandering, the church of the Holy Sepulchre, aka The Round Church. The second theme of my trip away, churches with round naves.  They are as rare as hen's teeth in England, there only being four left.   A fifth example, the chapel of Ludlow Castle, is in ruins.  There is one, in ruins, in Scotland (though there is mention of one at Roxburgh but I can't find any corroboration of that) and none in Wales as far as I know.  These structures were built as mimetic representations of the church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem (known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the West)

   This particular example dates from 1130s onwards.  It consists of two parts: the circular nave, and the chancel with n & s aisles. A bit on the dull side, the latter. The rotunda is Norman, and the east end was remodelled in the 15th century, when a bell stage was also added atop the nave clearstory.  In the midst of the 19th century the church was given a thorough going over by Anthony Salvin (1799-1881).  His reconstruction of the nave may not be entirely accurate but is visually satisfying. 

Cambridge: John Outram at the Judge Business School

      

      Cambridge Tuesday, and my friend Penny - as bold as you like - and an unexpected visit to the Judge Business School on Trumpington St.  And what an extraordinary, exuberant building this is.  A marriage of former Victorian hospital and riotous Post-Modernism.  The architect of the former Matthew Digby Wyatt and of the latter the maverick British architect John Outram (1934-).  I feel I should apologise for the use of the 'M' word here, but what other could I use? Outsider?  Both are some utility here, and yet neither are entirely satisfactory.  Outram is perhaps an architect cast in a very British mould. 'A great individualist,' to use a phrase of Sir John Betjeman, and that takes courage.  Especially when architectural education is aimed at compliance and uniformity.  He is perhaps like one of those 'Rogue Architects' of the Gothic Revival, there is, after all, a large element of 'Structural Polychromy' in Outram's work.  One feels that he has read and absorbed any number of theorists - Ruskin, I suspect, and French writers such as Blondel and Perrault.  To hear him talk is to realise he is very widely read.  His knowledge esoteric and arcane, and his buildings are freighted with a deeply personal and elaborate symbolism.  As one critic has remarked he is that rare thing among contemporary British architects: a theorist.  All a long way from the materialist culture of Modernism.

     At the centre of the Outram's scheme is an immense trapezoid atrium - 'The Gallery' - linking the original building to a series of additional structures also by Outram.  It is a complex space, with stairs leaping from one side to another, not that easy to comprehend at first, but clarity comes as you ascend.  (A bit clunky these details of stair and balcony btw.)  It is essentially a Hypostyle Hall as one one find in an Ancient Egyptian temple such as Karnak; an evocation also of its derivative, the Vitruvian Egyptian Hall, and the 'Primitive Hut' of Abbe Laugier.  It is also a sort of grove; a Sacred Grove, perhaps. It reminds me also, in its sublime verticality and ratio of void to solid, of a Gothic cathedral, which of course is just another sort of grove. A word about the solid, the columns, they are in fact hollow, the conduits for the services, electricity and such like. They have been termed the 'Sixth Order'; Outram, I believe, refers to them as the Robot Order - the 'Ordine Robotico'.  They have black bell capitals, and bare the most complex and stylish entablature.  The entablature, according to Outram, is a sort of fictive raft, its cargo here is the painted ceiling.  Some of the detailing seems influenced Louis Kahn, some of it by Josef Plechnik, like the balustrade to the roof garden.
     In a lecture on YouTube which Outram gave back in the day at The Architectural Association he talks about the origin of architecture as a housing for, well, the gods and heroes (though he doesn't name them as such), and how over time these primordial structures have become buried (the 'Cataclysm of Domesticity') in the city: "What happens, you see, that these as it were perfect buildings which also have a very big scale, these perfect buildings they just show a little vestige, you know. This is just showing its face, everything else is covered....now you see the idea that you have these kind of jewel-like perfect buildings buried inside a sort of mass of pragmatic structures, runs through even into formal, formally ordered plans...."  Indeed.  I suppose that he was trying, in some sense, to recapture the Pre-Modern pragmatic City. The city as palimpsest.  And in doing so invents for the site a mythic history, creating a modern structure that aspires to the primordial; a building that in some respects defies categorisation.  And one that critics are yet to come to terms with.

Further Reading

'John Outram' Geraint Franklin, Historic England Publishing, 2022

   

Sir John Ninian Comper V:

     'Oh, No!  Not more about bloody Ely cathedral!  Hasn't he done it to death?' I hear you all cry.  Well, tough! says I.  This is just a short post on the work of Sir J N Comper (beloved of this parish) in the cathedral.  In the 1930s Comper was commissioned to decorate the fantastical chantry chapel of Bishop West, and so bring it back into liturgical use for the first time since the Reformation.  Comper provided  stained glass, and an 'English Altar', reredos, and altar hangings, all in his late 'Unity by Inclusion' style.  I think the stained glass and the riddel posts (which are of wrought iron) etc are superb, as are the altar hangings, but the reredos sadly is not.  It is too weak for its position, not being strong enough to withstand the visual onslaught of a large e window.  Something sculptural would have been better, perhaps.  Pevsner disliked it, and I have to agree.

Ely Cathedral: The Lady Chapel

      To the north of the cathedral, like a boat tethered to a mothership stands the Lady Chapel.  It belongs to the period of Alan of Walsingham and Prior Crauden, and it is one of the greatest pieces of Medieval architecture in the kingdom.  The prolonged period of construction (1321-1349) due to the collapse of the crossing tower in 1322.  It is the largest Lady Chapel to come down to us from the Middle Ages, not only in England but in the entire British Isles.  It could be likened to a vast reliquary though it did not hold any relic of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or any one else, as far as I know.  It stands in the tradition of the demolished Lady Chapel of Peterborough cathedral, and the Wykeham chapel in Lincolnshire.  The exterior is ooltic limestone; the interior, however, is of clunch i.e. chalk, and in places Purbeck marble.

     In many ways chapel is a straightforward building; a simple rectangular plan, the long sides divided into five even bays, like that earlier Lady Chapel at Peterborough, each one clearly defined by large buttresses and prominent pinnacles.  It is easy to read.  There is a logic to it. These side elevations are not so different from that other fenland building of this type, the little known (and very hard to access) Wykeham Chapel, aka Chapel of St Nicholas, at Weston in Lincolnshire, which was constructed in 1311 by Prior Hatfield, and formed part of the grange of the Priory of St Nicholas, in Spalding.  The west façade - the one seen by pilgrims as entered and left the cathedral - is the most ornate, with rows of niches surrounding the great w window.

    Inside, however, that clarity is clouded.  Something more complex and sophisticated, and unique, than the exterior would lead us to expect, and which has elements of both the rational and the irrational. It is the irrational that strikes us first, but the best way to explain what is going on is to examine the rational first.  Mirroring the exterior each bay is defined by an engaged shaft that rises from the low bench that runs along base of the chapel walls to a wide, shallow lierne vault.  So far so good.  Except there is an extra layer, or 'lining' of architecture - an encrustation - that forms the major decorative element, a lavish 'cage' of carved clunch that is very plastic and sculptural and ignores, if not actively contradicts, the logic of the underlying architecture.  This 'cage' consists of two sections; a dado running under the windows and two tiers of tracery encasing the wall surface between the windows. The dado is the most sculptural and dynamic, with nodding ogee arches rippling in an out.  The design of the dado is consistently applied around the chapel; not even the doors in the s wall are to interrupt. The exception is the ruinous original reredos in the e wall.  In all it creates a very self-contained space.

     There is a profusion of sculpted elements to the 'cage' - rather Baroque in the blurring of categories.  Standing there amid such overwhelming and sensuous architecture it is easy to understand why Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) named this period of English architecture was named 'Decorated'.  There is scarcely any inert wall surface.  All is movement.

     Oddly, or brilliantly, each wall of the 'cage' is treated as a separate architectural element - they do not meet in the corners of the chapel. The upper sections are merely tethered to each other by diagonal ogee arches like they were the sides of a tent.  (Something vaguely similar occurs in Prior Crauden's Chapel.) The corners of the chapel are thus de-emphasized, becoming shadowy voids, perhaps of infinite depth. Something similar occurs to the vault shafts along the face of walls, where they are enmeshed in tracery, hidden by ogee canopies, and (originally) by two tiers sculptural figures supported on brackets.  The result of this is that the engaged shafts lose significance, so that vault appears to a separate, discreet element.

    In addition to the capitals, and corbels, crockets and finials the chapel originally contained a dizzying amount of figure sculpture, perhaps uniquely so.  All of this wealth of sculpture was coloured & gilded; the high vault was reportedly painted blue and speckled with stars, some of which remain.  In addition there was stained glass in the windows.  There must have been moments, at least, when the chapel came close to the state of Gesamtkunstwerk.* 

     Today the visitor stands in the wreck.  The iconoclasts have done their malignant work - the brackets are empty, the glass is clear, the stonework stripped of paint.  It is the bare ruin'd choir where late the sweet birds sang.  It is autumn.  And yet it is still sublimely beautiful.   Though of a new and different beauty.

     At the Reformation the chapel, as I have outlined in a previous post on the cathedral, became the parish church of the Holy Trinity.  An extra storey was added to Goldsmith's Tower to convert it to a bell tower to serve the parish.  And so it continued in its quiet parochial manner until, I think ,the Interwar period, when chapel was returned to cathedral use.  The monuments and memorials that had been placed on the walls were removed and the building restored.  I wonder what happened to them?  However the Georgian panelling on the e wall was later used by Stephen Dykes Bower in St Etheldreda's chapel at the e end of the Presbytery.  In 1945 Dykes Bower was called upon to design a new High Altar for the chapel.  At first it was hoped to restore the Medieval reredos, but the cost proved to be prohibitive, and instead he designed a new 'English Altar'.  And very fine it was.  Alas, it was replaced in 2011 with something a lot less sympathetic.  Of the statute of the BVM above the altar the least said the better.

 * Enough of the sculpture survived in the dado for M R James to reconstruct the original iconic scheme. It was based upon the late 'infancy gospel' known as 'The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew'.  It deals with the life of the Virgin Mary prior to the Annunciation and the infancy of Christ.

Ely Cathedral: The Furnishings

      Finally to the furnishings.  And it must be said that Ely is particularly rich in them.  Their distribution is however not only uneven 'geographically' throughout the building (the majority of them are in the eastern limb), but chronologically (the majority are post-Reformation).  The latter is to be expected in a country where the Reformation was not Lutheran, but was, at times, decidedly 'Reformed'.  Time and neglect have done the rest.  Perhaps it might be valuable to see the cathedral subject to a series of tides that have both scoured the building of furnishings and left a flotsam of new ones in their place.  It also illustrates that we assume erroneously that buildings like cathedrals exist is some sort of stasis, when by their very nature the opposite is true.

      The most important survivals from the Middle Ages are the Choir Stalls (1338-48), and the funerary monuments.  In particular are there is the Tournai marble tomb of an unknown bishop; the Purbeck marble tombs of Bishop Kilkenny and Bishop Northwold; and the tomb of Bishop Redman which is credited to John Wastell - we've seen his work so far at Peterborough Cathedral, and King's College Chapel, Cambridge.  Very little Medieval stained glass survived the onslaught of the iconoclasts - the overwhelming number of such windows in the cathedral today are Victorian.  In a similar manner nearly all the liturgical furnishings are Victorian or later.

     Little survives of the period between the Reformation and the arrival in 1770 of James Essex except a series of fine Baroque monuments.  Sadly, the rather fine marble font was exiled from the cathedral at some point during the 19th century; the bowl is in Prickwillow church but the canopy has been lost. For shame. Late 17th century, it was the sort of thing you might in a Wren church in the City of London.  Of Essex's work at Ely next to nothing survives with the exception of two paintings in the s transept that served, in turn, as altarpieces for his High Altar.  Some it, surely, must have been ok?  And that takes us neatly to the work of Sir George Gilbert Scott - where to begin? Perhaps with the fine Italianate iron screens in the chancel aisles.  Scott also designed the new High Altar and its sumptuous reredos, the accompanying gasoliers, the marble and encaustic flooring of the choir and sanctuary, the organ case, the pulpit, and the choir screen.  It is perhaps no surprise to find that his time at Ely lasted some 30 years, no surprise either that his work has come in for some heavy criticism since.  Whatever the its merits stylistically the craftsmanship is top notch.  

     In the nave are two sumptuous tombs in the N aisle.  Both Victorian. The tomb of Canon Hodge Mill by Sir George Gilbert Scott, and tomb of Bishop Woodford by Thomas Garner.  In the north transept the furnishing of the Cambridgeshire War Memorial chapel is by the Arts and Crafts architect Sir Guy Dawber - more remembered for his domestic architecture.  To be honest I'm not sure if I quite like it.  In the 1920s Sir J N Comper furnished Bishop West's Chantry, but more of that in a further post.

    In recent years a number of contemporary art works have been installed in the cathedral with mixed results.  The best is, perhaps, by John Maddison in Bishop Alcock's Chantry.