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 shear 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.

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.