King's College Chapel

Tax not the royal saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned -

Albeit labouring for a scanty band

Of white-robed Scholars only - this immense

And glorious Work of fine intelligence!

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

Of nicely-calculated less or more;

So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense

These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof

Sel-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,

Where light and shade repose, where music dwells

Lingering - and wandering on as loathe to die;

Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof

That they were born for immortality.

     So said William Wordsworth about this most remarkable of buildings, King's College Chapel.  My last visit here was decades ago and after yesterday afternoon's visit, in the sharp spring sunshine, I cannot understand why I deprived myself of this incredible building for so long.  I suspect I just thought it all just too 'touristy', but, at least on a week day afternoon in mid-March, it was almost empty.  It is a place of immense beauty, of luminous transcendence.  There is something of the Gesamtkunstwerk, of the sublime, about it.  Not only that, the chapel has great cultural resonance not only through association e.g. M R James, who was Provost of King's 1904-1918, but inspiring poets, such Wordsworth (above) and Betjeman (below), and artists such as J M W Turner and John Piper; the chapel choir is one of the best in the UK, if not globally.  The Service of Nine Lessons and Carols is synonymous with King's; it is broadcast live across the world on Christmas Eve to an audience of millions. I was, as you may be able tell from this post, profoundly moved by the experience.

     And so to a bit of history.  King's College - The King's College of Our Lady and St Nicholas at Cambridge - was founded by the ill-stared English King Henry VI in 1441.  Inspired by Bishop Wykeham of Winchester the King also founded a school, Eton College.  The work here at Cambridge alone was a colossal undertaking, consuming streets and wharfs and a church, St John Zachary, of the Medieval city.  Work on the chapel, which is bigger than many cathedrals in the British Isles, began in 1446 and was finished (in the reign of King Henry VIII) in c1515, with the furnishing continuing into the 1530s.  Roughly speaking it belongs to two periods of work: firstly under Reginald of Ely, to whom we owe the plan and general form of the chapel and whose work we have encountered before at St Mary, Burwell; and secondly under John Wastell, who is believed to have constructed the 'New Building' at Peterborough Cathedral.  It is under Wastell that the antechapel or nave was built along with the great corner pinnacles, and the spectacular fan vault constructed.  The college buildings however were not completed until the early 19th century.  The chapel at Eton was not finished according to the original plan.

      The plan of King's College Chapel is simple enough; a long rectangular chapel (divided into chapel and ante-chapel by a hefty wooden screen) with a series of subsidiary chapels etc (18 in all, 9 on each side) nestling between the immense buttresses.  The design must owe something to the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral just to the n of Cambridge and I visited that morning, and perhaps also to the lost St Stephen's chapel at Westminster.

     The interior is breathtaking, almost incomprehensible.  The main body of the chapel is 40 ft wide and 80 ft high. Again very few cathedrals in Britain attain those sort of dimensions.  Wastell's design of the ante-chapel is a tour de force.  Rather like the choir at Gloucester cathedral all is tracery - it ascends from the floor to apex of the windows unifying everything; it forms the screen work veiling the side chapels, and what little wall surface there is has disappeared behind a mesh of tracery and over-sized heraldic sculpture.  Over all is the fan vault, itself a net of tracery patterns.  Incredible.  I think the decision to partially open up the side chapels to the nave with screen-work is very clever, adding an element of mystery and depth to what overwise be a lucidly simple space.

     Beyond the massive dark wooden screen - a work dating from the early years of both the English Renaissance and (perhaps surprisingly for some) the English Reformation - is the working space of the building, the beating heart, the chapel proper.  This is the design of Reginald of Ely.  And a more austere place it is.  Apparently more in keeping with the wishes of the founder.  Perhaps more like St Stephen's at Westminster in some respects.

     To step into the side chapels, however, is to enter a different world, intimate and womb-like chthonic space.  Spaces that are immediately easier to comprehend because the scale is, well, almost parochial. One gets a sense of the heft of the building, as though they had be excavated from the living rock.  Some are used as vestries, some (on the N side) house a small museum, the westernmost contain the porches, four are used as chapels, and one (the former chantry chapel of Provost Hacumblen) - most evocatively - is used as a tomb chamber.

    And that brings me smartly to the furnishings of the chapel.  Of the monuments in the Tomb Chapel the most important are the marble table-tomb to John Churchill marquess of Blandford,1702-3 and the wall tablet to Samuel Collins,1651, which retains its shadow painting.  Between the wars T H Lyon (we've seen his work before at Little St Mary) fitted up the the se chapel as a war memorial, and he did a very good job.  The ne chapel (St Edward's) contains a Late medieval panel painting 'Madonna in the Rosary' by Gert von Lom.  The Founder's Chapel houses a former altarpiece from the High Altar 'The Deposition of Christ' by Girolamo Siciolente da Sermoneta, c 1568, and 'The Adoration of the Magi' by the Master of the Von Groote Adoration.  The Whichcote Chapel, which I didn't see, functions as a baptistry containing an 18th century marble font, and, serving as a reredos, an 18th century painting by Carlo Maratta.

      Most important however is the stained glass in the 'great windows' of the chapel.  With the exception of the w window(Late Victorian) they date from 1515-1531 and are a rare survival.

    As for wood work I have already mentioned the great choir screen, but connected to that are the choir stalls - work continued on them until 1633.  In addition there a number of original doors.  In the the late 1960s the panelling at the e end was removed to storage as part of the installation of a new reredos for the High Altar - 'The Adoration of the Magi' (1633-4) by Rubens. Critical opinion divided sharply, and I incline to to those were opposed to such an addition to the chapel.

     Photos in the order of my progress through the chapel.

File into the yellow candle light, fair choristers of King's

Lost in the shadowy silence of canopied Renaissance stalls

In blazing glass above the dark glow skies and thrones and wings

Blue, ruby, gold, and green between the whiteness of the walls,

And with what precision the stonework soars and springs

To fountain out a spreading vault - a shower that never falls.

The white of windy Cambridge courts, the cobbles brown and dry

The gold of plaster Gothic with ivy overgrown

The apple-red, the silver fronts, the wide green flats and high,

The yellowing elm trees circled out on islands of their own -

Oh, here behold all colours change that catch the falling sky

To waves of pearly light that heave along the shafted stone.

In far East Anglian churches, the clasped hands lying long,

Recumbent on sepulchral slabs or effigied in brass

Buttress in prayer this vaulted roof so white and light and strong

And countless congregations as the generations pass

Join choir and great crowned organ case, in centuries of song

To praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass. 

St Michael, Clyro

      Of all noxious animals, too, the worst is a tourist.  And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.

     To Hay-on-Wye on Thursday (only four books bought).  Thursday chosen because it was market day - always the best day for visiting a country market town.  On the way back home we made a small detour to Clyro, just over the Wye from Hay and at the very south east tip of old Radnorshire.  My interest was sparked a couple of years ago by watching, on YouTube, a documentary made for the BBC by Sir John Betjeman on the 19th century clergyman and diarist Francis Kilvert.  'Vicar of the Parish' was made in 1975/6 (broadcast Thursday 29th July '76), directed by Patrick Garland and produced, for BBC Wales, by Derek Trimby.  It has a wonderful melancholic air and good use is made of the 'Sea Slumber Song' from Elgar's 'Sea Pictures'.  There is, sadly, evidence of Betjeman's increasing Parkinson's Disease; he spends most of the time in front of the camera sitting down.

     Francis Kilvert, born 1840 in Wiltshire, came to Clyro in 1865 as curate.  He stayed until 1871, when he returned to Wiltshire before returning to the Marches in 1876 to the living of St Hamon in Radnorshire. From 1877 until his death two years later he was vicar of Bredwardine over the border in Herefordshire. His diaries, started in 1870 and continued until his death, open a window onto rural provincial life in the 1870s.

     And so to the church.  It stands in the midst of a large graveyard.  All that remains of the Medieval structure is the study w tower - belfry stage added 1897.  The rest of the church was rebuilt in the 1850s by the Hereford architect Thomas Nicholson (1823-1895).  Chancel and nave with north aisle.  Decorated detailing. Local rubble stone with bath stone (?) dressings.  Betjeman sometimes wondered if Victorian churches would ever 'soften'; judging by St Michaels perhaps not.  The interior, with the exception of the chancel is light-filled and not at all bad, though on the dull side.  There are few furnishings of note.  Lavish funerary monuments in graveyard.

'Metro-land'

Every single little dream

Is a rafter or a shingle

We can paint the house with laughter

When we build a little home.

It's not a palace nor a poorhouse,

But the rent is absolutely free,

This is my house but its your house,

If you'll come and live with me.

With a carpet on the floor,

Made of buttercups and clover,

All our troubles will be over,

When we build a little home.

     Earlier this year, the 26th of February to be exact, the BBC quietly marked the fiftieth anniversary of that wonderful documentary 'Metro-land' made by that admirable combination of the then Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman and producer & director Edward Mirzoeff. The result, as one would expect, is a delight. For A N Wilson, Betjeman's biographer, it was 'too good to be described simply as a 'programme''.

     I've outlined before, in my post about their 1974 documentary 'A Passion for Churches', the history of the Betjeman & Mirzoeff's collaboration. (That really does sound like the name of a firm of solicitors or even, maybe, a rather posh shoe shop!); but just to recap. The two of them began working together on three programmes BBC2 documentary series 'A Bird's Eye View' in the late 60s, and 'Metro-land' represents the continuity of their collaboration and, one must feel, their friendship. 

     'Metro-land' was, apparently, conceived (in a very civilised fashion) over lunch in Wheelers, the well-known London fish restaurant. Originally the documentary was intended to be an exploration of the suburb in general but it was decided to concentrate on one area of suburbia in NW London that was served by the Metropolitan line out of Baker St.  This was chosen not only as a sort of paradigm of suburban living, but because of the unique way the suburbs in that part of the capital developed in the interwar period with the railway company effectively acting as property developer. (It was the advertising department of the Metropolitan Railway who coined the term 'Metro-land'.) Compared to 'A Passion for Churches' this is a straightforward linear narrative. Sir John takes the train from Baker St tube station to the end of the Metropolitan line in distant Buckinghamshire, stopping off along the route for a little exploration, both historical and contemporary. And a lot is crammed into those 50 odd minutes. Our first call is at an earlier suburb: St John's Wood. It can, in fact, claim to be one of the earliest, dating from the end of the 18th century - all villas strung out along tree lined avenues. Rus in urbe. We then proceed to stop off at Neasden, Harrow, Wembley, Moor Park before we come to the end of the line at Amersham. We visit Grimsdyke (1870-72), at Harrow Weald, by Richard Norman Shaw; the great Baroque house Moor Park which is now the club house of a golf club; the Orchard (1900) by Voysey at Chorley Wood and High and Over (1929-31) by Amyas Connell. We meet the man behind the Neasden Nature Trail and the chap with a full scale cinema organ in his house.  And although, as I've said, a lot is squeezed into those fifty minutes, the pace is calm and unhurried. The camera is left to linger in telling ways.
     I couldn't help but feel, watching Sir John standing in one of the avenues of, I think, Harrow Garden Village which was the Metropolitan railway's Flagship development that 1973 is a long way away from today. What has become of those neat front gardens, bursting with roses? Probably paved over for extra parking. If not I imagine the roses have long gone for the sake of easy maintenance and the wooden window frames painted in such jaunty colours lost to upvc. 

     Indeed they have.

     One of the joys of this documentary and, indeed, its contemporaries, is that it contains no introduction as such - Betjeman does not tell us he's 'on a journey'. As the writer Gareth Roberts wrote in a recent article for 'The Spectator' an awful lot of programmes these days are essentially all, or nearly all, padding. It really is amazing how the producers of, say, 'Strictly' or 'The Masked Singer' manage to stretch things out as they do, rather like a 1940s housewife eeking out a meagre meat ration. I remember watching a recent documentary about gardens - by a well known tv gardener - and there were three consecutive introductions. He was on that 'journey' as he repeated told us.  With 'Metroland' we just jump straight in.  The audience is treated, properly, as adults.  Sink or swim.  Neither do Betjeman or Mirzoeff feel the need to repeat ad infinitum what they are doing.  And neither is Sir John vain enough to make the documentary about himself.  I can think of a number of presenters of BBC arts/history documentaries, all male I might add, who really are demons for this. 

     The suburbs and the 'semi' (the semi-detached house) have come for a lot of criticism over time some of it valid and some it just downright snobbery; the most obvious example here in the UK is the play 'Abigail's Party' of 1977, which the playwright Dennis Potter described in a 'The Sunday Times' review as "based on nothing more than rancid disdain, for it is a prolonged jeer, twitching with genuine hatred, about the dreadful suburban tastes of the dreadful lower middle classes".  For good measure, try this example, which I inadvertently and fortuitously found last night while flicking through a small book on interior design* published by 'Good Housekeeping' magazine in the early 70s:

'Sophisticating your semi

   Moving into a 1930s 'semi' is enough to make anyone's ideas shrivel up on the spot. It is daunting to know all the neighbours have got floral carpet in the halls, three-piece suites in the living rooms, and dressing tables in the upstairs bay windows. But there's no reason why you shouldn't go out on a limb and create a very sophisticated interior with, say, bitter chocolate carpet in the hall and up the stairs (perhaps with off-white walls, plenty of modern prints, stainless steel spot-lights and, if you can, afford it, some new dead-simple banisters) With modern seating units in the living room, grouped into a square 'conversation' area, instead of set at an angle around a ghastly mottled fireplace. With built-in storage in your bedroom instead of the cumbersome and space-consuming wardrobe, chest of drawers, and dressing table trio. And with crisp roller blinds at the bay window instead of frilly, knickerbocker drapes.'

    Well, there writes somebody eager to escape their upbringing, and no mistake. At least the author has a strong opinion; read 'Good Housekeeping' these days and your brain will turn to mush.

     Oh, I suppose it is easy to mock the suburb and the 'semi', and indeed there has been a long history of that too from 'Diary of a Nobody' to the satirical magazine 'Private Eye' with its one time near obsession with Neasden. And then there the numerous sit-coms set in suburbia whether it's 'George and Mildred' or 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin'. The best, perhaps, was 'The Good Life'. All that said the suburban type, which was originally developed with the slightly elitist Garden Suburb and was popularized and commercialized with the spread of Metro-land, has turned out to be a particularly successful and popular urban type - certainly a damn sight more successful and popular than that proposed by the Post-War professionals. And I have to admit at this point to a certain ambiguity: rather liking the houses (at their best they can be rather good) having grown up in one not in the orbit of some British city but a small pretty nondescript Lincolnshire market town, but hating the suburban form. I think I would find it too quiet a place for me to live. I need more human interaction. 
     And then there's the issue of style. The suburban-semi is based on the Vernacular architecture of the southeast of England, as reinterpreted by the Arts and Crafts architects such as Sir Edwin Lutyens, or the earlier Queen Anne and Ye Olde Englishe Revival such as Richard Norman Shaw.  I suppose, if one was being particularly mean, you could call it a process of bastardisation. The problem for me is that with the success of Metro-land the semi, as a sort outlier of a particular vernacular architecture tradition, began its inexorable march across the UK and nowhere was safe. Tile hanging, red tiled roofs, pebble dash (that is wet dash) spread like a rash over the entire country. There are to be found here in South-west Wales. Local vernacular materials and traditions tended to be ignored. At the least the builder of my old house, who was my great grandfather, provided it with a pantile roof in the local tradition.

Steam took us onward,

Through the ripening fields,

Ripe for development,

Where the landscape yields,

Clay for warm bricks,

Timber for post and rail,

Through Amersham to Aylesbury and the vale.

In these wet fields the railway didn't pay,

The Metro stops in Amersham today.

*'Doing Up Your Home', written by Shirley Green; part of the 'Good Housekeeping Family Library' series, General Editor Isabel Sutherland. 

Philip Larking Centenary

     On the centenary of the birth of the poet Philip Larkin, just a short post to share this wonderful clip of Sir John Betjeman talking to Larkin for the BBC arts programme Monitor in 1964. Betjeman's reading of 'Here' is just superb. Larkin (1922-1985) is a poet I have warmed to more over the years. Anyway, enjoy before he's cancelled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coe11pgoj8E

'A Passion for Churches'

     'I was eight or nine years old when I used to come here, to the Norfolk Broads on the river Bure, sailing and rowing with my father and I think it was the outline of that church tower, of Bylaugh against the sky, which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've been past since I've wanted to stop and look in.'

     Back in 2015, you may remember, the bf and I went on holiday to Horsey in flattest N E Norfolk. On our last full day of holiday we went out into the Broads, walking along the Fleet Dyke until we stood opposite the scanty remains of St Benet's Abbey. A small homage to Sir John Betjeman, the Poet Laureate, and the documentary film maker Edward Mirzoeff and their collaboration of 1974 the BBC documentary film: 'A Passion for Churches' (subtitled 'A celebration of the C of E with John Betjeman'). Previously they had worked together on three episodes of 'A Bird's Eye View' between 1969 & 1971, and most famously 'Metro-land' of 1973. Their final work together was, I believe, 'The Queens Realm - A Prospect of England', 'an aerial anthology with verse chosen by Sir John Betjeman'. It consisted of clips garnered from 'A Bird's Eye View' series accompanied by music and poetry read by the likes of Janet Suzman and Michael Horden; the whole thing tied together Betjeman's narration. It formed part of the BBC's cultural offerings for the Silver Jubilee Year of 1977, along with Huw Wheldon's 10 part series 'Royal Heritage' which Wheldon co-wrote with the historian J H Plumb. They certainly knew how to celebrate a jubilee back in the day. In 1979 Mirzoeff collaborated with Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green on documentary film 'The Front Garden'.

     Anyway, my first encounter with 'A Passion for Churches' was in 1984, when, following the death of Sir John, I caught a glimpse of this wonderful film on the BBC tribute to the late Poet Laureate. There were, I think, three sequences shown and two have remained with me: there was the visit to the 'Golden Church' of Lound (in Suffolk, but part of the Diocese of Norwich) where between 1912 & 1914 the church architect Sir J N Comper worked his magic, and, more importantly to our family, the Mother's Union garden party in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, where we believed we could espy my paternal grandmother amongst the crowd. 

     Judging by Eddie Mirzoeff's account in The Oldie the filming process seems to have been a picaresque affair, with an ever shifting cast of characters, such as Penelope Betjeman and the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, popping up and needing to be dealt with.  However the result of the collaboration of poet and film maker is something quite sophisticated and complex. The nearest equivalent would be a novel by Barbara Pym where the profound is both hidden and revealed to us through the medium of the domestic and mundane. The churches seem to be mainly chosen from N and NE Norfolk. The churches to the W and SW are largely omitted, though this partly because the churches of the Norfolk fenland are in the Diocese of Ely. 

     The title itself is a pun of a gentle sort, referring to both Betjeman's love of church architecture and the passion of Christ - that his death and burial; the implication being that the churches themselves were undergoing a death, or martyrdom (the Latin passio is used to describe the martyr's death), as faith was beginning in earnest 

     'its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind'.

     Perhaps the best way of understanding this film is to think of it as cable or yarn made of a number of individual threads entwining together: the celebration of the church architecture of the diocese  and a plea for conservation; the celebration of the parish life of the diocese - PCC meetings, church fetes and the like, in which we see the preparations for Easter. Connected with that there is a linear exploration of the spiritual journey of the individual parishioner through the 'Passage Rites' such as Baptism and Marriage, the sacraments by which we participate in the death and resurrection of Christ, through the portal of death to the resurrection - of which the joy of Easter Day, with which the film ends, is a foretaste.

*  *  *  *  *

     I think a lot about Norfolk these days - that land of lost content - from this Infernal City that is a place of of exile and a place of eclipse. The very gutter. 
     I love the county. My paternal grandparents were from Foulsham, my maternal grandmother from Melton Constable. (My maternal grandfather was the odd-one-out here being a Yellow Belly.) Growing up I used to visit so many times. Hopefully I will return soon.

Into my heart an air that kills  
  From yon far country blows:  
What are those blue remembered hills,  
  What spires, what farms are those?  
  
That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,  
The happy highways where I went  
  And cannot come again.

'Waverley'

   I've been meaning to read Sir Walter Scott for years, decades in fact. Ever since I read Sir John Betjeman's richly evocative essay 'Winter at Home'.  Scott and Cowper were his favourite winter reads he confesses and ones he returned to year after year.
     'And as the great rumbling periods, as surely and steadily as a stage coach, carry me back to Edinburgh, the most beautiful city in these islands, I feel an embarras de richese.'
Recommendation enough.
   And then Scott slipped from my memory, until the end of last year - but then how often do you see Scott's work for sale? - and our trip to Birmingham.  There I bought 'Waverley', Scott's first novel.  The novel of the 1745 Jacobite Uprising, a fitting book to read too after so much enjoying 'Kidnapped' (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886) Thankfully my trust in Sir John B's taste was amply rewarded.  Do not be put off my the book's great length - some 600+ pages - or by the inordinately slow start; this book is a marvel - and that isn't the closet Jacobite in me talking.  It is a beautifully written book.  A friend said it was like a giant snowball rolling downhill and picking up speed as it went, and Scott himself in 'Waverley' writes about how, as a child, one of his chief pastimes was rolling a large stone down a hill - very slow and awkward heavy work at first before the stone gained momentum and went rushing and tumbling to the bottom - either metaphor is apt. 'Waverley' has a narrative drive and sweep that push all, including the reader, before it in to the heart of the fire.  The style is conversational, rather intimate.  The picaresque names suggest some sort of influence on Dickens; and like a Dickens novel there is a great panorama of characters.  They surround the eponymous and, at times, frankly naive hero like the characters that surround the hero in an early Evelyn Waugh novel.  The portrayal of Bonnie Prince Charlie is very flattering; Dr Johnson once met him in London and was not so impressed.  Anyway Edward is serious, scholarly and often purblind to what is actually going on around him.  He is, to begin with, as much acted upon as he has himself agency.  He is however a decent, good man, and this novel is partly about the discovery of goodness in others, even our enemies, and it is partly through those encounters that Edward grows as a character and enters into his own agency. It also evoked in me the 'Lord of the Rings', Tolkien's sprawling novel; in particular in the character of the ardent Jacobite Flora I see an antecedent of Galadriel, the Lady of the Wood.
   I am fascinated by the idea of Tory culture, and Scott is a prime example of the Romantic Tory tradition.  'Waverley' set in the heart of the '45 - the last Civil War experienced on the UK mainland - is often depicted as offering to the reader a simple contrast between a traditionally ordered society - the Highlands clans - and the Early Modern society of Protestant Lowland Scotland and England.  An almost Manichean clash of civilisations.  Scott, I think, is perhaps subtler than that: he recognises poverty when he encounters it; he allows space for his characters to be sympathetic regardless of political position, to be kind.  We feel frustration, even annoyance with some of the Highland customs. One has a sense of the utter futility of it all - the heroic against the prosaic but implacable enemy marshalling all the order and resources of the Modern state - and how dreadful is the end of it all when the snowball crashes apart.
   Robert Burns once described the great Late Gothic church of St Michael, Lintlithgow as fitted for Presbyterian worship, "What a poor pimping business is a Presbyterian place of worship - dirty, narrow and squalid, stuck in a corner of old Popish grandeur...." I suspect that, like Yeats after him (and another Romantic Tory), Scott's argument was as much about the breadth and grandeur of vision, ie culture, as it was about politics.

Holiday VII: St Benet's Abbey and the Ranworth Rood Screen

   On the final full day of our holiday we went west into the Broads.  We parked up at the rather suburban looking South Walsham Broad and walked along the Fleet Dike to see the ruins of St Benet's Abbey.  The remains of abbey were a favourite with Romantic artists such as Cotman, and were included in John Betjeman's 1974 documentary, 'A Passion For Churches', which was as much about Norfolk as it was the diocese of Norwich. (Produced and directed by Edward Mirzoeff, who was also responsible for Betjeman's 'Metro-land' of 1973.) Quite good reasons then for a long, cold muddy trek into the marshes!

     "I hear a deep sad undertow in bells which calls the Middle Ages back to me. From Prime to Compline the monastic hours echo in bells along the windy marsh and fade away. They leave me to the ghosts which seem to look from this enormous sky upon the ruins of a grandeur gone. St Benet's Abbey by the river Bure, now but an arch way and a Georgian mill. A lone memorial of the cloistered life."

   We then stopped off at the 'Fairhaven Woodland and Water Gardens', the creation of Major Henry Boughton.  Major Boughton was the younger brother of the 1st Lord Fairhaven, who lived at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire mentioned elsewhere in this blog and where the bf works.

   Our final visit of the day was to Ranworth and one of the great pieces of English late Medieval art, the Ranworth Rood Screen.  I'm tempted to call it a prime example, along with the Despencer Retable, of the 1st Norwich School; certainly it was painted locally.  The importance lies not only in its design but that so many of the painted panels survived the Reformation in such good nick.  A marvel.

Cambridgeshire Open Studios 2014

     We left Wales on Friday, but instead of returning straight home I spent the weekend with the bf on the Isle of Ely.  One of of my favourite things each year is the 'Cambridgeshire Open Studios' which takes place in July.  So after a lazy Saturday we spent Sunday in the car and visited four studios in and around Ely plus Angela Mellor's studio/gallery which also open but not part of the scheme.

   Angela Mellor is a ceramicist working in bone china and producing the most delicate if not ethereal objects.  Her beautiful gallery space too is worth a visit for its own sake.
     We then drove to Little Downham to two studios: firstly Andy English, and then Phil Treble.  Andy English is a wood engraver and illustrator and produces wonderful things like this 'Prospect of Ely which was designed, engraved, printed and bound by Andy himself in a limited edition of 100.  He uses a Victorian Albion Press.

     Andy English works in what originally was his garage as does Phil Treble.  Phil is a letterpress printer, though during the week he designs stuff for the internet.    

     Corinne Blandin-Eagling does not work in a garage or a shed; she works in a bright yellow double-decker bus which is parked in her back garden in Barway. "You're aboard, You're aboard.  You're aboard with the Double Deckers..."  Barway is a remote place, a 'dead-end', with a small village green and old houses; at the far end of the village is a wonderful old hump-backed bridge and a delicious view of Ely Cathedral.  I hope she won't be insulted if I say that it's all wonderfully eccentric chez elle.  Corinne does a wide range of courses including pottery.
     Finally we drove to Burwell and the hidden away studio of James Ryder, letter cutter, who trained at the Kindersley workshop.  The studio is literary up the garden path - possibly the best commute I know.  It was Phil Treble who printed James's wonderfully tactile business cards.

     Heading back to Sutton we caught the last few minutes of Jarvis Cocker's evocative documentary on 'Betjeman's Banana Blush' - the album of late Poet Laureate reading his work to musical accompaniment by Jim Parker.  The album was produced by Hugh Murphy.  It was released in 1974 on the Charisma label.    All rather eccentric, and quite, quite fantastic.  I urge you to go and get a copy or listen to both it and the documentary on-line.  It's well worth it.  Betjeman, I think, was the last Poet Laureate to really connect with people (that is usually prefaced with 'ordinary', but I'll dispense with that slightly lit snobbish term). But enough said about that.

Angela Mellor                    www.angelamellor.com
Andy English                    www.andyenglish.com
Phil treble                          www.muttonsandnuts.co.uk
Corinne Blandin-Eagling www.corinneblandin.com
James Ryder                     www.jamesryderlettercutter.co.uk