Ely Cathedral: The Exterior

"....Ely Minster is a curious pile of building all of stone the outside full of carvings and great arches and fine pillars in the front...."

     So said Celia Fiennes.  Daniel Defoe seemed almost completely immune to it as a piece of architecture, merely musing upon the building's supposed fragility.  But then both of them were of the Puritan persuasion.  Ely Cathedral is one of the largest Medieval churches in England, at 537ft the fifth longest.  English cathedrals (and their progeny in the other parts of Great Britain) tend to emphasise length over breadth and height.  In terms of area it ranks as the 4th largest.  I would be tempted to call Ely a leviathan of a building, except the epithet has a bad connotation in the Old Testament being the name of a monstrous sea-serpent, a symbol of chaos.  As I wrote in my previous post on the cathedral it is a complex building with an involved construction history; it is really two buildings: one a massive cruciform church (w additional western transept and tower) and an almost separate Lady Chapel to the north of the chancel that is one of the most exquisite pieces of architecture to survive from the Middle Ages.  In addition it possesses, in the central octagon of the cathedral, one of the most unique and thrilling spaces of Medieval Europe.

     To quote R H C Davies the Norman invasion of England brought to all parts of the British Isles 'a new aristocracy, a new church, a new monasticism and a new culture'.  Even those parts of the Britain that were not militarily conquered by the Normans, such as Scotland, were not immune from this new vigorous culture.  Across the British Isles this new culture was made manifest in new buildings, though few could match the colossal scale of the projects undertaken in England, or their number.  It was an architecture that, here at least, was massive, confident and austere.  Assertive, even.  In the revised Cambridgeshire volume of the 'Buildings of England' it is remarked that these projects came close to emulating the gargantuan scale of the Late Antique basilicas of the city of Rome. At Ely the rebuilding began in the 1080s when Simeon, who had been prior of Winchester, was appointed abbot. Unsurprisingly his work shows the influence of that cathedral.

    By the time the rebuilding had reached the western transept and its great solitary tower, Gothic architecture was emerging.  It makes for a striking composition, made more so by the loss of the northern transept towards the end of the Middle Ages.  It has a sculptural quality that is often lacking in the w fronts of Medieval English cathedrals which tend to flatness.  Not only that but the western tower and the remaining transept are altogether different from the austerity of the main transept and nave.  There has been a major aesthetic change.  Both are embroidered - can one say tattooed? - with lavish architectural ornament - row upon row of little arches - so that little inert wall surface is left. While not unique in the British Isles, there is only one other cathedral in England with a single west tower and it, or was, Hereford.  In East Anglia there are two contemporaries Bury St Edmunds and Waltham Abbey (does that quite count?) and only one in Scotland, Kelso Abbey.  With the exception of Hereford, these examples also possess a western transept, an architectural feature more associated with Romanesque Germany.  The final stage of the tower - echoing the shape of the Octagon dates from the 14th century, it was until the early 19th topped with a lead spire.
      Back to ground level and the final part of the w front here to be constructed was the porch or Galilee.  (It is usually referred to these days as the Galilee, but the 1730 Harris plan of the Cathedral refers to the w transept as the Galilee and the porch as simply the West Porch.*) Built at the foot of the west tower - perhaps to act as a buttress - it is the first mature piece of Gothic architecture at Ely and it is almost as ornate as the existing sw transept.  It is credited to Bishop Eustace.

     Focus then shifts to the east end of the cathedral with the construction of what is referred to as the Presbytery. It was built 1234-52 during the episcopate of Bishop Northwold to house the shrine of St Etheldreda. Luxurious Early English influenced by the nave at Lincoln cathedral.  Like a game of tennis, it in turn influenced the building of the Angel Choir at Lincoln built to house the shrine of St Hugh.

   And so we reach the Decorated period and a flowering of artistic endeavour at Ely under the subprior and sacrist Alan of Walsingham. Work began on the Lady Chapel in 1321 but was suddenly halted when on the night of 22nd February 1322 the old Norman central tower collapsed into the chancel.  Between that year and 1340, not only a new chancel was built in the most fluid and luxurious of styles but a new top-lit space was created at the heart of the cathedral; one was that was without real precedent both technically and conceptually in Medieval England.  That finished, work then recommenced on the Lady chapel, which was complete by c. 1352/3 when the chapel was consecrated.

     There is very little Perpendicular work at Ely.  The sole exceptions are the fantastical chantry chapels of Bishops Alcock, and West.  More about them in a further post.

    With Reformation comes the usual destruction and retrenchment.  The cathedral came through the Civil war relatively unscathed.  The nw corner of the n transept collapsed in 1699 and is restored in the classical style by the mason Robert Grumbold with advice of Sir Christopher Wren.  The door is particularly fine and rather French.  It replaced the old Pilgrim's Door.  In 1770 James Essex re-ordered the interior of the cathedral and worked on the Octagon.

     Pugin visited the cathedral in 1834 exclaiming with his usual vigour: 'Here is a church, magnificent in every respect; falling into decay through gross neglect.  there is no person appointed to attend to the repair of the building, and the only person who has been employed in the last sixty years is a bricklayer. Not even common precautions are taken to keep the building dry.'

     William Cobbett, visiting four years earlier, described  the cathedral as 'that honour to our Catholic forefathers and that standing disgrace to our Protestant selves.  []it is in a state of disgraceful irrepair and disfigurement.  The great and magnificent windows to the east have been shortened at the bottom, and the space plastered up with brick and mortar [] for the purpose of saving the expense of restoring the glass in repair.  great numbers of the windows [] have been partly closed up in the same manner and others quite closed up.'
     Attitudes to the building began to change with appointment of  George Peacock as Dean in 1839.  He employed Professor Willis and, from 1848 onwards, Sir George Gilbert Scott, who undertook a thorough restoration and re-ordering of the building.  He essentially re-designed the Octagon as left by Essex in the 18th century, restoring the flying buttresses that Essex had removed, and adding pinnacles to the lower stage.  Whether accurate or not those pinnacles are aesthetically just right.

     In this last century Sir John Ninian Comper, Stephen Dykes Bower and George Pace have all in turn worked on the cathedral.

*In Browne Willis 'A Survey of the Cathedrals of Lincoln, Ely, Peterborough, and Oxford', 1730.

Back in London: St Vedast, Foster Lane

 

    From St Martin to St Vedast Foster¹ Lane, not the most famous of the City Churches - it is not even in 'Oranges and Lemons' - but without a doubt it is the best of post-war restorations in the City, the work of Stephen Dykes Bower (1903-1994).  A example of what, with a mind, could be achieved in those straightened Post-War years.  It is the only City Church where I have worshipped.

     St Vedast², though in origin Medieval, is a Wren church, but built some years after the Great Fire when the Medieval church (patched up post-Fire) finally gave up the ghost.  Other names have been associated with rebuilding; in particular, Nicholas Hawksmoor who, as Sir John Summerson put it, 'we may suspect had a hand in the interpretation' 0f the spire.  Kerry Downes in his biography of Hawksmoor for Thames & Hudson says nothing.  Anyway Wren's church has a nave and s aisle, separated by an arcade of Doric columns.  There is no chancel as such. 

     The church is quite hemmed in by buildings - there is no churchyard. The only two walls to the street are the w on Foster Lane (ashlar) and to the s. This s wall is very interesting - the furthest section w is the base of the tower and is ashlared, the next section is of brick, the rest of rubble stone.  No doubt this wall wasn't meant to be seen; I wonder if it is in fact Medieval? Of the other two walls, n and e, both are plastered. To the n of the church is a small and charming 17th century vestry hall and, on Foster Lane, the formidable looking rectory³ designed by Dykes Bower.  Dykes Bower linked these two buildings with a two storey classical cloister built against the n wall of the church.  The ground floor is open, the glazed upper floor designed as a library.  The resultant courtyard is the most charming of spaces.  A real hidden treasure.

    The interior is a faithful reconstruction of the original architecture. Of the furnishings, Dykes Bower skilfully mixed old and new: the organ loft was rebuilt; the altarpiece, pulpit and font cover garnered from other City churches that had been bombed or previously demolished - there was no attempt, for instance, to recreate the original altarpiece; a new marble floor, and new stained glass designed by Brian Thomas (who had worked with Dykes Bower at St Paul's) were installed and, finally, the nave was re-seated collegiate style that is with banks of stalls facing each other across the nave rather than orientated toward the altar. The s aisle was made into a side chapel. The result is excellent.  The space coherent and lucid.

     Looking round that morning I came across an intriguing Baroque sculpture high up on the w wall of the s aisle. It depicts the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove surrounded by the shekinah, the Uncreated Light of God, and cherubs.  It's really rather fine. Turns out it is a tympanum and was made to fit into the head of the middle window of the e end, making it a rather more sophisticated version of the dove on the St Martin Ludgate altarpiece in my previous post. The current altarpiece here at St Vedast, which was originally from the demolished St Christopher-le-Stocks, also contains a depiction of the Shekinah (with the Tetragram) in its pediment to signify that the altar is the resting place of the divine, just as the tympanum signifies the descent of the Holy Spirit on the unconsecrated elements, the bread and wine, in the Eucharist to make them the Body and Blood of Christ.

     The poet Robert Herrick was baptised in St Vedast's on 24th August 1591

 

1 Foster, in this case, is a corruption of 'Vedast'

2 St Vedast was a Gallo-Roman or Frankish saint.  His is a very rare dedication in England with only one other dedicated to him.

3 On the site of the Fountain public house, destroyed in the same air raid that wrecked the church.

London II: Sunday in the City

     What to do on my day off when I wasn't playing shopkeep? I took the tube into the City, travelling through wonderfully atmospheric and grimy cuttings, evocative of the Industrial Revolution, to Barbican and an empty City basking in late summer sunshine. From the station I walked west to Smithfield, through a dense network of streets and alleys to St Bartholomew the Great; church and urban fabric a great meshing of palimpsests. The scale human. The density high. Higher still until 1913 when there was a slum 'clearance' scheme in Cloth Fair to the north of the church, that saw the demolition of Medieval and post-medieval houses.

     From Smithfield I wove my way south - a little directionless, but what did that matter? - finding myself in another city - of monstrous bland and blank office buildings. I shave to admit an ambiguity in my response to these buildings, symbols of the pre-eminence of the City in the world banking, I acknowledge. However they just don't make a city. A place of anomie and dislocation, of bland corporatism. Credit though to the City authorities for the wonderful garden created in the ruins of a bombed out Christchurch Greyfriars. Then unexpectedly the high dome of St Paul's and the peeling of bells. My new destination. Close to, the noise of bells was overwhelming and deeply emotional. 

     I stopped for refreshment, and then headed back towards Barbican tube station, stopping-off at a couple of very interesting examples of post War classicism: St Vedast Foster Lane, rebuilt after the War by Stephen Dykes Bower perhaps one of the best post-war restorations, and the Wood St Police Station by McMorran and Whitby. Not a particularly good photo of either building, I'm afraid. They both deserve a post to themselves. I arrived, eventually, at the labyrinthine Barbican Centre, where I had a mediocre lunch. It's been a while since I tasted the delights of British institutional cooking.

     The jaunt ended in the delightful Charterhouse Square. A place like Cloth Fair that is much to my taste - humane in scale, complex in the interplays of history, style, materials and space.