St Mary, Pembridge

    We were planning on stopping in Weobley, but a diversion pushed us north into unknown territory.  All, however, was not lost for we ended up on the road to Pembridge, and Pembridge was one of those places on a mental list of places to visit as we journey between the Infernal City and my family in Worcestershire.  For not only has the large parish church have a highly original detached bell-tower/bell-house but the village is filled to the brim with half-timbered buildings.

     The detached bell-house stands just north of the church, and it's quite the sight.  A low octagonal ground floor from which arises a massive spire constructed of timber looking like an upturned funnel.  Visitors have likened it to the timber spires you find in Essex and, further a field, the Scandinavian stave churches and the wooden churches of Eastern Europe.

    The church is built of the local sandstone.  Apart from some fragments of earlier work, and the vaulted north porch (which is later) it is wholly Decorated in style - lengthy nave with aisles and diminutive clearstory, transepts and long(ish) chancel.  Pevsner dates it all to c1320-60.  All the windows, I think, have Reticulated Tracery.  It's the sort of church that would have pleased the Cambridge Camden Society with their desire for correct Middle Pointed.  The exterior of the nave looks indeed like the work of one of their approved architects (like R C Carpenter).

     Sadly the two restorations in the 19th century have left the interior bald, dark and dull. The best 19th century feature is the barrel vaulted chancel ceiling which has a nice cellure over the High Altar.  It should be painted. Some good monuments though, particularly in the chancel, and Medieval & Early Modern wall paintings around the s transept. Jacobean looking pulpit.  Sadly the church is crowded with clutter.

 

Own Work: Pages from a Sketch Book

      Just a few pages from an old sketch book I found this morning while having a sort out. Mostly architectural: some sketches towards finished paintings and finally three architectural daydreams: a design for a street of houses; a reconstruction of the nave of Elgin cathedral, and sketch design for the rebuilding of the choir of the abbey church at Holyrood in best Late Scots Gothic. A bit presumptuous of me really.

Curently reading....

      I am actually reading two novels at once, quite an unusual thing for me to do.  In the past I have occasionally suspended reading one novel to read another, say at Christmas when I might lay the current novel aside to read something more seasonal.  In the past this has included the Christmas books by Dickens, or Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', or as last year the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.
    The novels in this simultaneous read are 'Lord Jim' by Joseph Conrad and 'Serotonin' by Michel Houellebecq.  And what a difference a hundred years or so makes - from richness and complexity to something much more spare and lean, a observation both general and particular.  But then Houellebecq is a much more polemical, if not downright feral novelist.  Conrad, in comparison, a gentleman.  Really, I can't think of such an illassorted pair.  Amid so many glaring differences, yesterday evening (after I had published this little post) I realised that one of the subtle differences between these two novelists is that Houellebecq is writing in an age of consumerism and Conrad not.  It is enough for a contemporary novelist in attempting to define a character merely throw in a few brands for the reader to have some idea as to the taste, social position and wealth of the person described. (I think it may have Ian Fleming who started this trend.)

     I only started reading Conrad late last year with 'The Secret Agent' and was quite bowled over. I was reminded of Dickens, Dostoevsky and Conrad's contemporary Ford Madox Brown.  He is a great and subtle stylist. 

     I have to confess to being a little disappointed (so far) with 'Serotonin' though.  It lacks the venom, the sheer spite, of say 'Atomised' or 'Platform', or even the elegiac quality of 'The Map and the Territory' and 'Submission'.  Perhaps things will improve.

Old House

   Some pictures of my old house in Lincolnshire, some I posted on insta and others on here, and some have been languishing on a memory stick in my desk.  Can't help regret that the 'project' was never finished.  In retrospect it was, perhaps, one of the most integrated periods of my life.

St Mary, Swansea

     St Mary's is a big boned church. Victorian and hefty. Worldly. It stands on an old site in the centre of the city, the mother church of the city.  However the original church has long disappeared, and the current church is the replacement of a replacement, and, to be honest, doesn't move me much. 

     St Mary's is the work of Sir Arthur Blomfield (1829-99) - that prodigious but not exactly top-rank architect whom we have encountered before in Oundle. Alas this church, which dates from 1894-8, is one of his more pedestrian offerings. One can imagine any number of similar churches populating the Victorian suburbs of Britain, cold and dutiful. It replaces a Georgian church design by one of the Woodard brothers (William) who also designed St Anne's Bewdley.  Judging by photograph evidence it was quite rustic structure, with little of the Baroque polish of St Anne's. The eastern chapel - the Herbert Chapel - escaped the fell hand of Woodward and Blomfield only to fall under the fell hand of the Blitz when St Mary's was gutted.  The church was rebuilt (1954-9) by Sir Percy Thomas, Leslie Moore (the son of the great Temple Moore) having already resigned before work began. And Thomas's fell hand can be seen in the replacement for the Hebert Chapel - Gothic nearly stripped of all spirit, and feeling and looking like an electricity substation.

     Happily the interior is altogether of a different order of things, though in much need of repair. Even George Pace who did behaved himself reasonable well at St Mary's - the only really jarring object is the font cover.

     Well, I wrote those words in December 2023 and have only today gone back to St Mary's to take some photographs of the interior.  Sadly, I couldn't get into the rebuilt Herbert Chapel to see the reredos by the artist John Piper - it's all marbled paper rather like the reredos he designed for Newport Cathedral.  Even for a building of this scale the interior architecture is a little on the heavy side, and roof on the thin side a bit like one of those oddly skeletal roofs Pugin designed for his churches.  More heft required.  Alas, none of the furnings are quite up to the scale of the church though there are couple of fine icons.  As I said over a year ago now, all rather worldly.