St Paul, Plasmarl & St Peter, Newton: Part 2

     

     A blustery day, but sunny.  A bus ride (finally!) across the city to that most salubrious of Swansea's suburbs, Newton.  To a place of private roads, hidden villas, occasional glimpses of the sea, and St Peter's church.  Another Late Victorian/Edwardian church by that prolific architect Edward Bruce Vaughan, but in far better condition than poor old St Paul's up the valley in Plasmarl.

    St Peter stands on a corner amongst pine trees, solid, well-massed and not a little comfortable.  Quarry faced snecked masonry of Bridgend Sandstone.  Some rich detailing (Bath Stone) all in the best Bodley and Garner mode.  Some of it even put me in mind of Melrose Abbey, that remarkable Late Gothic building in the Scottish Borders.  Incomplete s tower, massive and intriguing.  As at St Paul's Plasmarl the e end more interesting than the nave.

     The rich detailing continues inside, but on the whole it's a rather dull interior - short nave of three bays and longish chancel, oddly the walls are in the same snecked masonry as the exterior.  Sedilia, otherwise no fittings of real note. 

     In all a bit disappointing, really.  Perhaps Bruce Vaughan can be thought of as a competent though pedestrian architect with, however, flashes of brilliance.

St Paul, Plasmarl & St Peter, Newton: Part I

This post, both text and photos, was created just before the second lockdown.  The plan was write a single post on both the churches.  Plans have changed.  I hope to write a post on St Peter's soon.

     A study in contrast this, and two churches by that prolific Late Victorian Welsh architecture Edward Bruce Vaughan (1856-1919), who until moving to Wales I had not heard of. Bruce Vaughan was based in Cardiff and specialised in ecclesiastical work, designing some 45 churches in Glamorgan alone.  According 'The Buildings of Wales' he built eight churches in Swansea.  All, I suspect. of quarry faced masonry.
     Every time I head into town I pass this sad sight, St Paul, Plasmarl.  It stands at the southern end of the main street in Plasmarl, Neath Rd, hard by a busy roundabout. I rather love this church, which is all rather Bodley-esque with some interesting 'free-style' detailing.  The placing of the octagonal bell tower is masterly. Alas as you can see the whole thing is beginning to give way to ruin.  The people of Plasmarl deserve better.  Since I wrote those words three years ago now, the deterioration has continued.  The top stage of the tower has begun to tilt to the north and large cracks have opened up in the masonry.  All is Ichabod.

The Temple Church

     

     After leaving the Garden Museum I retraced my steps, walking back along the river downstream to Westminster Bridge and the Tube, and took a train to Temple. 
     Out of the tube I passed Two Temple Place, a house designed by John Loughborough Pearson for the Astors.  Tudoresque, in Portland stone. Not the sort of thing one associates with Pearson, but he acquits himself well enough.

      From there up some dark and steep steps into Essex St. Turning left into Devereux Court I found myself, finally, in Middle Temple.  The Temple is really a remarkable part of London - an interlocking series of lanes and courts, intimate and intricate, untrammelled by the worst aspects of 20th century architecture and planning.  It is a 'liberty', a sort of self-governing enclave within the City of London, a place of solicitors and lawyers.  My goal was the Temple Church, situated within the Inner Temple, and by sheer luck it was open.

     This was the second Anglican Establishment church of the day - it being a Royal Peculiar (i.e. being outside of normal episcopal jurisdiction).  It was also the second round nave of the trip away.  Like the Round Church in Cambridge, Temple Church it is connected to the religious orders founded during the Crusades.  In this case the Templars and the Hospitallers, who, after the suppression of the Templar order in 1312, were granted the site.
     Temple Church consists of two parts: the circular nave (Transitional Gothic, consecrated 1185) and the Choir which is Early English, vast and serene.  Deliciously cool too, on such a hot day.  It has been speculated (by Diarmaid McCulloch among others) that the nave which is based not (only) on the Anastasis rotunda, but the second Late Antique centralized structure in Jerusalem: the Dome of the Rock, which was by the 12th century erroneously believed to be the Temple (the 2nd Temple) in which Christ was presented in the flesh. I'm not sure what the consensus is on the origins of the Temple nave.  The website of the Temple Church, does not mention any link. The Temple rotunda however does have a three story internal elevation like the Anastasis, but of a form such as you might find in a grander Norman cathedral or abbey church. (As has the Round Church in Cambridge.) Importantly, the nave contains a number of Templar effigies, and on the exterior sports a very fine Romanesque w door.

     The choir is that rare, almost unique, thing in the British Isles - a 'hall church', that is the vaulted nave and aisles are the same height.  It was consecrated on Ascension Day 1240.  The church was restored by Blore in the 19th century and suffered heavily in the Blitz.  The effigies in the nave were seriously damaged, as were the Purbeck marble piers in the choir.  After the War the piers were replaced without taking down the original Medieval vaults.  Quite the undertaking.  The opportunity was also taken to restore Wren's altarpiece to the church (it had been removed in the 19th century).  A fine thing it is too.  Blore's extensive Gothic Revival decorative scheme was not re-instated, the architect Walter Godfrey designing new furnishings in a Neo-Georgian style.  I think the result is just right.  It's all rather lucid and beautiful.

 

St Teilo, Llandeilo Fawr

      Tuesday we visited Moelfryn, a garden high on a Carmarthenshire hill side, open to the public as part of the wonderful National Gardens Scheme, and it was an absolute treat.  Eccentric and delightful. 

     From there we headed into Landeilo for lunch - least said about that the better.  The parish church being open I took the opportunity to take some photos for the blog.  Apart from the austere, Late Medieval w tower the body of the church is wholly 19th century, the work of the ubiquitous Sir George Gilbert Scott.  In a story that one feels could rival Gabriel Chevalier's 'Clochemerle', Scott was called into design the church after a competition to design a church for under £3,000 fell apart.  In the end the church cost nearly double Scott's original estimate of £2,500.

     The site however, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, is much, much older.  The site dates back to the 'Dark Ages' and St Teilo.  I'd like to think that the large churchyard (sliced in two since the early 19th century (?)) replicates the shape of St Teilo's original monastic foundation.  Wishful thinking on my part.  In the huge retaining wall along n side of Church St is what is known as St Teilo's Baptistery; a cave like space - probably not that old in the scheme of things - where water gushes out of a pipe and a gated passage leads mysteriously deep into the hill.  It was looking all spick and span on Tuesday, when on previous visits there were vases of flowers etc.

     The style of Scott's church is Cambridge Camden Society approved Middle Pointed.  Dark, massive like a cast iron safe.  Formidable, even unfriendly in places.  The east end in particular has a metallic quality I think this down to the masonry.  The walls are of rubble masonry - to match the tower, no doubt.  'The Buildings of Wales' just says that the church is of 'hard grey limestone', but looking at the multiple buttress set-offs it's hard not think that these, at least, are of a different, lighter, close-grained stone, and have probably been cut by machine, as is the church's most extraordinary feature: a huge batter of perfectly cut blocks at the e end of the n aisle, that is half roof and half buttress.  Elemental, industrial-age Gothic. It could almost be the work of a 'Rogue Architect' such as Samuel Saunders Teulon.  You know, I'm not sure it will ever weather into mellowness.
     The interior - aisle-less chancel, nave with n aisle and s transept - is big and barn like.  No money for refinements.  In recent years the church has been subdivided.  It hasn't helped.  Some of the detailing is plain awful.  Not much in the way of furnishings except some memorials in the chancel.  The churchyard, being in Wales, has a range of forceful Victorian gravestones.  Obelisks, spires and the like.