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Together Shoreditch and Spitalfields in the East of London constitute the most exciting place to be in London. The population is young, dynamic and imaginative; Friday and Saturday nights are a riot with a plethora of bars and clubs many with their own unique flavour. But what makes this area really special is that Shoreditch and Spitalfields comprise what one might call, ‘the square mile of art’; a de factor open air art gallery; with graffiti, posters and paste-ups being displayed on the main streets, down the side roads and in all the nooks and crannies of this post-industrial environ.
From Eine’s huge single letters being painted on shop shutters, to the haunting propaganda posters of Obey, to Cartrain’s political black and white pop-art; and to the one very small bronze coloured plastic circle, with the imprint of a dog shit and a man's foot about to step into it, which I once saw pasted to a wall, there is an incredible diversity.
Being on the streets, the work can be destroyed, taken or painted over at any minute. It is fragile and transient. Furthermore the juxtaposition of different pieces of art is random and unpredictable both in content and its location, which means that each day throws up a new and unique configuration of work within the streets, which you can only experience by travelling through the city.
Street Art Beginnings
The reasons for why East London has seen the flowering of street art are manifold. The post-industrial legacy of Shoreditch’s crumbling low-rise warehouses, not only provides an environment in which the artists and designers can do their work, but East London’s proximity to the City of London provides an economic source of support for the artists and designers; and finally Shoreditch with its building sites, old dilapidated warehouses provides a canvas upon which those artists can display their work and increase their commercial value.
Set against the characterless nature of the steely post-modernity of the city, the autumnal colours of the terraced warehouses in Shoreditch, no bigger than four to five stories high; offer a reminder of the legacy of a thriving fabrics and furniture industry which blossomed in the seventeenth Century. Both Shoreditch and Spitalfields have industrial pasts linked to the textiles industry, which fell into terminal decline by the twentieth century and was almost non-existent by the end of Wolrd War II. The decline was mirrored in the many three to four storey warehouses that were left to decay.
The general decline was arrested in the 1980s with the emergence of Shoreditch and Hoxton (Hoxton and Shoreditch are used interchandeably to refer to the same area) as a centre for new artists. It is difficult to say what attracted the artists to this area. But it was likely to be a combination of the spaces offered by the old warehouses, the cheap rents, and the location of Shoreditch and Spitalfields close to the City of London; where the money was to buy and fund artistic endeavour.
Not just that but post-war Shoreditch dominated by tens of post-war tower blocks, built amidst the ruins of the terraced housing that lay there before, which was bombed during World War II; had the rough edge which might inspire an artist. Shoreditch hums with the industry of newly arrived immigrants but also of the dangers of the poorer communities which inhabit these areas. Homeless people can be found sat underneath bridges on the main thoroughfares on Friday and Saturday nights; and Shoreditch is apparently home to one of the largest concentrations of striptease joints and a number of prostitutes. So, Shoreditch is a crumbling dirty, dodgy, polluted mess but it also has money; and these two factors provide an intoxicating mix for artists, who can take inspiration from their environment, but also rub shoulders with people who have the kind of money to buy their work.
By the early nineties Hoxton’s reputation as a centre for artists had become well established. As Jess Cartner-Morley puts it ‘Hoxton was invented in 1993. Before that, there was only 'Oxton, a scruffy no man's land of pie and mash and cheap market-stall clothing…’ At that time artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin were taking part in ‘A Fete Worth than Death’ an arts based event in Hoxton. Gradually these artists began to create their own gravity, attracting more and more of their own like. Clubs and bars began to emerge, as did a Hoxton style, ‘the Hoxton fin’ being a trademark haircut. Many designers and artists located around Shoreditch and Spitalfields. Shoreditch has also become a hive of studios for artists, vintage fashion shops, art students and musicians.
At the same time as an artistic community was forming fuelled by money from the City, London was subject to a revolution in street art. According to Ward, writing for Time Out, the street art scene began in the mid-1980s as part of London’s hip-hop scene. Graffiti artists, emulating what was going on Stateside, began to tag their names all over London. According to Ward many of those pioneers ‘went on to paint legal commissions and are at the heart of today’s scene’. That is to say, from the community of artists congregating in East London, a number were inspired by graffiti, and because the East London, with its countless dilapidated warehouses, and building sites, offered such a good canvas; they went on to use the East London as a canvas for their work.
Little seems to have been written about the individual journey’s particular street artists have taken to get to where they are, which help illuminate some of the issues talked about in this section. Cartrain said that Banksy was a huge influence for him commenting that, "I've sent him a few emails showing him my work and he sent me a signed piece of his work in the post."
What created the East London street art scene may also kill it
The East London urban art scene is unlikely to last forever, being the symptom of a delicate juxtaposition of industrial decline and economic forces.
The irony is that the same factors which are responsible for the creation of the East London art scene are likely to destroy it.
Politicians from all parties, spiritual leaders for global capital, tell us of the unstoppable forces of globalisation. They say if Britain is to continue to dip its paw into the cream of the world’s wealth it needs to become a post-industrial service economy; suggesting a rosy future of millions of Asians slaving away co-ordinated by keyboard tapping British suits, feet on desk, leant back on high backed leather chairs, secretary blowing them off.
Art, which is feeble and dependent upon the financial growth of an economy for its survival, will have to shape itself around the needs and demands of capital.
The financial district of the City of London, lying to the south of Shoreditch, has been successfully promoted as a global financial centre, and its mighty power is slowly expanding its way northwards. Plans are afoot for the glass foot soldiers of mammon, fuelled by speculative property investment, to gradually advance northwards, replacing old warehouses with a caravan of Starbucks and Japanese sushi places and a concomitant reduction in dead spaces to portray the art, increased security to capture and ward off street artists, increased property prices and the eventual eviction of the artistic community. Spitalfields has already had big corporate sized chunks taken out of it, with one half of the old Spitalfields Market being sacrificed for corporate interests in the last five years.
So then the very same financial forces, and post-industrial legacy, which have worked to create this micro-environment for street art to thrive, are the same forces which will in time eventually destroy it. Maybe the community will move northwards, maybe it will dissipate, but until that moment lets just enjoy what the community puts out there, for its own financial interests, for their own ego and also, just maybe, for the benefit of the people.
Banksy
Banksy is the street artist par excellence. London’s street art scene is vibrant and diverse. There is some good, cure, kitschy stuff out there, but in terms of creativity and imagination Banksy leads by a city mile. His stuff is invariably shocking, funny, thought provoking and challenging.
Banksy considers himself to be a graffiti artist, which is what he grew up doing in the Bristol area in the late eighties. According to Hattenstone (2003) Banksy, who was expelled from his school, and who spent some time in prison for petty crimes, started graffiti at the age of 14, quickly switching over to stencils, which he uses today, because he didn’t find he had a particular talent for the former. His work today involves a mixture of graffiti and stencils although he has shown a capacity for using a multitude of materials.
Key works in London have included:
•In London Zoo he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in six-foot-high letters.
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•In 2004 he placed a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, and stuck the box on a wall of the Natural History Museum.
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•‘A designated riot area’ at the bottom of Nelson’s Column.
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•He placed a painting called Early Man Goes to Market, with a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping trolley, in the British Museum.
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His work seems to be driven by an insatiable desire to go on producing. In an interview with Shepherd Fairey he said, ‘Anything that stands in the way of achieving that piece is the enemy, whether it’s your mum, the cops, someone telling you that you sold out, or someone saying, "Let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza." Banksy gives the impression of being a person in the mould of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher or Lance Armstrong. Someone with undoubted talent and yet a true workaholic dedicated to his chosen profession.
Its also driven by the buzz of ‘getting away with it’. He said to Hattenstone, ‘The art to it is not getting picked up for it, and that's the biggest buzz at the end of the day because you could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and you paint something big where you shouldn't do. The feeling you get when you sit home on the sofa at the end of that, having a fag and thinking there's no way they're going to rumble me, it's amazing... better than sex, better than drugs, the buzz.’
Whilst Banksy has preferred to remain anonymous he does provide a website and does the occasional interview putting his work in context (see the Fairey interview).
Banksy’s anonymity is very important to him. Simon Hattenstone, who interviewed Banksy in 2003, said it was because graffiti was illegal, which makes Banksy a criminal. Banksy has not spoken directly on why he wishes to maintain his anonymity. It is clear that Banksy despises the notion of fame. The irony of course is that ‘Banksy’ the brand is far from being anonymous, given that the artist uses it on most if not all of his work. In using this brand name Banksy helps fulfil the need, which fuels a lot of graffiti artists, of wanting to be recognised, the need of ego.
Banksy is not against using his work to ‘pay the bills’ as he puts it. He has for example designed the cover of a Blur album, although he has pledged never to do a commercial job again, as a means of protecting his anonymity. Nevertheless he continues to produce limited edition pieces, which sell in galleries usually for prices, which give him a bit of spending money after he has paid the bills. Banksy has said, ‘If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial’ (Fairey, 2008). Banksy has over time passed from urban street artist into international artistic superstar, albeit an anonymous one.
Banksy has a definite concern for the oppressed in society. He often does small stencils of despised rats and ridiculous monkeys with signs saying things to the effect of ‘laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge’. Whilst some seem to read into this that Banksy is trying to ferment a revolutionary zeal in the dispossessed, such that one day they will rise up and slit the throats of the powers that be, so far his concern seems no more and no less than just a genuine human concern for the oppressed. Some of what seems to fuel his work is not so much his hatred of the system but at being at the bottom of it. He said to Hattenstone (2003) ‘Yeah, it's all about retribution really… Just doing a tag is about retribution. If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something - that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it’
Charlie Brooker of the Guardian has criticised Banksy for his depictions of a monkey wearing a sandwich board with 'lying to the police is never wrong' written on it. Certainly such a black and white statement seems out of kilter with more balanced assessments that Banksy has made. Brooker challenges Banksy asking whether Ian Huntley would have been right to have lied to the police?
Brooker has also criticized Banksy for the seemingly meaninglessness of some of this images. Brooker says, ‘Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her. Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff.’ Brooker has seemingly oversimplified Banksy’s message, if indeed Banksy has one, to fuel his own criticisms. It is easy to see that for many the Vietnam painting tells us that the United States likes to represent itself with happy smiling characters, that hide the effects of its nefarious activities responsible for the real life faces of distress seen on the young girl. Something that we should be constantly reminded of. But then that’s a matter of politics not of meaninglessness.
Banksy’s ingenuity comes through in his philosophy on progression, ‘I’m always trying to move on’ he says. In the interview he gave with Shepherd Fairey he explained that he has started reinvesting his money in to new more ambitious projects which have involved putting scaffolding put up against buildings, covering the scaffolding with plastic sheeting and then using the cover of the sheets to do his paintings unnoticed.
Banksy has balls. Outside of London he has painted images in Disney Land; and on the Israeli wall surrounding Palestine. How far is he willing to push it? What about trying something at the headquarters of the BNP, or on army barracks, or at a brothel or strip club employing sex slaves, or playing around with corporate advertising a la Adbusters?
Motorcar Nº 274 in use for driver instructions passes the stop of route Nº 8 on the once stylish square in front of the 'Kurhaus' (Spa) and Gallery. It all (the hotel building exempt) make place for a characterless and far from pleasant surroundings. I can't accentuate it enough; this part of Scheveningen is spoilt forever. Instead of renovating and keeping the past structures alive one chooses for a complete refurbishing. The passengers at the stop are waiting for the so called 'open tram' - motorcar Nº 265 with trailer 505 being part of the heritage fleet but in the summertime on certain days running as an extra service. The front of the motorcar (fully restored) same type as Nº 274 is visible behind it.
A lovely old 1950s, 25ft-tall Concrete-Utilities 'Arc-2D' column complete with 'finned' bracket, and its original GECZ9450 sodium lantern. This fine example was one of two such columns that stood in Wolverhampton Road, Cannock, Staffordshire until quite recent times. Both have since been replaced by modern, but totally characterless steel lampposts.
Best viewed large.
Photo: April 2007.
German postcard by Krüger. Photo: Ufa.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s Alain Delon (1935) was the breathtakingly good-looking James Dean of the French cinema. The 'male Brigitte Bardot' soon proved to be a magnificent actor in masterpieces by Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni. In the late sixties Delon came to epitomise the calm, psychopathic hoodlum in the 'policiers' of Jean-Pierre Melville, staring into the camera like a cat assessing a mouse.
The product of a broken home, Alain Delon had a stormy childhood. He was six times expelled from different schools. At 17 he enlisted in the French Marines, serving in Indochina as a parachutist. In the mid-1950’s he worked at various odd jobs, including as a waiter, salesman, and porter in the Les Halles market. During this time he became friends with the actress Brigitte Auber, and joined her on a trip to the Cannes Film Festival, where his film career would begin with a screentest for David O’Selznick. He decided to stay in France and made his film debut in Quand la femmes s'en mele (1957, Yves Allégret). In 1958, during the making of the love story Christine (1959, Pierre Gaspard-Huit) he met Romy Schneider. They would be engaged till1964.
Alain Delon’s first outstanding success came with the role of the parasite Tom Ripley in the sundrenched thriller Plein soleil (1960, René Clément), based on the crime novel The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Delon presented a psychological portrait of a murderous young cynic who attempts to take on the identity of his victim. A totally different role was offered to him in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960, Luchino Visconti). In this film, he plays the devoted Sicilian immigrant Rocco, who accepts the greatest sacrifices to save his characterless brother Simon (played by Renato Salvatori). Delon received international recognition for this role. The following year he made his stage debut in Paris in 'Tis Pity She’s a Whore / Dommage qu'elle soit une putain, alongside Romy Schneider. The play, written by John Ford, and directed by Visconti, ran for more than 8 months. Delon also gave tremendous performances in L'Eclisse’ (1962, Michelangelo Antonioni) opposite Monica Vitti, and the epic Il Gattopardo / The Leopard (1963, Luchino Visconti) starring with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale. L’Eclisse won the Special Prize of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, and the following year Il Gattopardo won the Golden Palm in Cannes.
After these acclaimed Italian films, Alain Delon returned to France and to the crime film in Mélodie en sous-sol (1963, Henri Verneuil) with Jean Gabin. This classic genre film was distinguished by a soundly worked-out screenplay, by careful production and by excellent performances of both Gabin and the sleek and lethal Delon. It was in the late sixties that Delon came to epitomise the calm, psychopathic hoodlum, staring into the camera like a cat assessing a mouse. His tough, ruthless side was used to grand effect in Le Samouraï (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville), maybe Delon’s finest moment. Later Melville directed him again in the crime films Le Cercle Rouge (1970) with Bourvil and Yves Montand, and Un Flic (1972) with Catherine Deneuve. In 1968 Delon got also in real life involved in a murder scandal when one of his bodyguard was found shot dead on a garbage dump nearby his house. Eventually Delon was cleared of all charges. In the cinema he had a huge success in the bloodstained Borsalino (1970, Jacques Deray). He played a small-time gangster who, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, becomes king of the Marseilles thirties underworld. He had also produced Borsalino, which became one of France’s highest grossing films of the time. Between 1968 and 1990 he produced 26 films.
In later years Alain Delon won critical acclaim for roles against type. In the Kafkaesk thriller Mr. Klein (1976, Joseph Losey) he played brilliantly the icily sinister title role of an established art trader in German-occupied France. In 1985 he was awarded the César Award as Best Actor for his role as an alcoholic in Notre histoire (1984, Bertrand Blier). Another acclaimed rol was the homosexual Baron de Charlus in the fine Proust adaptation Un amour de Swann (1984, Volker Schlöndorf). And in 1990, Delon worked with New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard on Nouvelle vague, in which he played twins. He also directed two films himself, Pour la peau d'un flic (1981) and Le Battant (1983).
A string of box office disasters in the next years culminated in 1998 in the unexpected failure of Une chance sur deux (1998, Patrice Leconte) in which Alain Delon ewas reunited with Jean-Paul Belmondo. Delon announced that he would give up acting. For his impressive film career he received the Legion d'Honneur, the highest French decoration. He has an older son Anthony Delon, who has also acted in a number of films, from his first marriage to Nathalie Delon; a younger son Alain jr., another son Ari of a relationship with singer/supermodel Nico, and legitimately he has a young son and daughter, Alain-Fabien and Anouchka from his second marriage with former model Rosalie van Breemen. Recently Alain Delon returned in the cinema as Julius Cesar in Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques (2008, Frederic Forestier, Thomas Langmann), and he reunited with former girlfriend Mireille Darc in a stage adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller at the Marigny Theatre in Paris. At the moment of writing this post, his new, international film The Red Circle is in pre-production. The film to be directed by Johnny To will be a Hong Kong remake of Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge (1970).
Sources: Alain Delon.com, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
Just reopened, now managed by Atom Brewery. Its a pleasant place with excellent beer selection but pricey and characterless
St Martin, Overstrand, Norfolk
Like several churches in this part of the world, St Martin was in a very bad state by the 19th century, with only part of its nave still in use for worship, and the decision was made to rebuild it. It seems to have been a north Norfolk fashion to rebuild on a new site, and so when Christ Church was erected in the churchyard beside St Martin in 1867, St Martin was left as a picturesque ruin. However, in 1883, Clement Scott eulogised this area in an article written for the Daily Telegraph, and the legend of Poppyland, a dreamlike English idyll, was born.
The north Norfolk coast became a popular holiday destination, thanks to Scott's writing and the opening up of the area by the railways. Perhaps a characterless Victorian church did not fit in with Scott's vision of what Poppyland was, and what people might find there. The medieval parish church at neighbouring Sidestrand had been rebuilt on a new site in an entirely medieval round-towered style, and so it was that Christ Church was demolished, and the ruin of St Martin restored to something approaching its former glory. The architects were Cecil Upcher and AJ Lacey, and the church was opened on the eve of the First World War.
The reconstruction coincided with the pre-War triumphalism of the Church of England, which was at that time at its highest point in the national consciousness, but the project demanded a rigorously vernacular style, and so too many excesses were avoided. The guardian angel in his niche on the south side is not a taste of things to come, because you step into a relatively plain and simple interior which is full of light from the clear glass windows. The only colour comes from a vibrant east window depicting Christ in Majesty with St Cuthbert and St Martin accompanied by otters, dogs and ducks above scenes of Durham and Tours cathedrals. The aisle and chancel are by Upcher & Lacey, the north doorway surviving to create an unusual opening between aisle and nave. Mortlock says the current south porch was originally on the north side. Arthur Mee says that the old font was found in a garden.
Although Overstrand is in many ways still a remote backwater, the memorials and headstones here record links to some of the 19th century's most significant philanthropic families, including members of the Buxton and Gurney families as well as Lady Battersea, who was one of the Rothschilds.
Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was the millionaire owner of Truman's brewery. He married Elizabeth Fry's sister, and as MP for Weymouth and the Isle of Portland he spoke strongly in parliament for the abolition of all slavery, even after the ending of the slave trade. It is said that his advocacy of the extension of liberty in Africa through the influence of legitimate trade under the protection of Christianity inspired the Scottish doctor, David Livingstone, to go to Africa as a missionary.
Tragedy haunted Buxton and his wife Hannah: four of their children died during an outbreak of whooping cough in the early spring of 1820. Buxton himself never came to terms with his failure to eradicate slavery from Africa; he died in 1845, and was buried here. His memorial is inside the church, but he was also to be found on a recent British five pound note, where he was the spectacled figure standing to the left of his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Fry.
St Martin, Overstrand, Norfolk
Like several churches in this part of the world, St Martin was in a very bad state by the 19th century, with only part of its nave still in use for worship, and the decision was made to rebuild it. It seems to have been a north Norfolk fashion to rebuild on a new site, and so when Christ Church was erected in the churchyard beside St Martin in 1867, St Martin was left as a picturesque ruin. However, in 1883, Clement Scott eulogised this area in an article written for the Daily Telegraph, and the legend of Poppyland, a dreamlike English idyll, was born.
The north Norfolk coast became a popular holiday destination, thanks to Scott's writing and the opening up of the area by the railways. Perhaps a characterless Victorian church did not fit in with Scott's vision of what Poppyland was, and what people might find there. The medieval parish church at neighbouring Sidestrand had been rebuilt on a new site in an entirely medieval round-towered style, and so it was that Christ Church was demolished, and the ruin of St Martin restored to something approaching its former glory. The architects were Cecil Upcher and AJ Lacey, and the church was opened on the eve of the First World War.
The reconstruction coincided with the pre-War triumphalism of the Church of England, which was at that time at its highest point in the national consciousness, but the project demanded a rigorously vernacular style, and so too many excesses were avoided. The guardian angel in his niche on the south side is not a taste of things to come, because you step into a relatively plain and simple interior which is full of light from the clear glass windows. The only colour comes from a vibrant east window depicting Christ in Majesty with St Cuthbert and St Martin accompanied by otters, dogs and ducks above scenes of Durham and Tours cathedrals. The aisle and chancel are by Upcher & Lacey, the north doorway surviving to create an unusual opening between aisle and nave. Mortlock says the current south porch was originally on the north side. Arthur Mee says that the old font was found in a garden.
Although Overstrand is in many ways still a remote backwater, the memorials and headstones here record links to some of the 19th century's most significant philanthropic families, including members of the Buxton and Gurney families as well as Lady Battersea, who was one of the Rothschilds.
Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was the millionaire owner of Truman's brewery. He married Elizabeth Fry's sister, and as MP for Weymouth and the Isle of Portland he spoke strongly in parliament for the abolition of all slavery, even after the ending of the slave trade. It is said that his advocacy of the extension of liberty in Africa through the influence of legitimate trade under the protection of Christianity inspired the Scottish doctor, David Livingstone, to go to Africa as a missionary.
Tragedy haunted Buxton and his wife Hannah: four of their children died during an outbreak of whooping cough in the early spring of 1820. Buxton himself never came to terms with his failure to eradicate slavery from Africa; he died in 1845, and was buried here. His memorial is inside the church, but he was also to be found on a recent British five pound note, where he was the spectacled figure standing to the left of his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Fry.
Here's a little story about a guy and his attempts to get a photo of a Tug in deepest, darkest Wales. So, are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...
There once was a guy named Rich. He liked to spend his spare time roaming the rails of his homeland, photting stuff and generally enjoying himself. He had a particular favourite though, and those favourites were the brute workhorses of the freight trains, the class 60's or 'Tugs', as he liked to call them.
Trouble was, the wicked witch Heller, a Canadian witch who ran the trains in EWS land decided that he didn't like Tugs, and they must be banished to the neverlands of EMR, Booth's or Thomsons as soon as possible, and replaced by characterless Sheds the land over. Nothing of course to do with the Sheds coming from Witch Hellers side of the pond...
So Hellers horsemen of the apocalypse set about their task, and Tugs fell virtually where they stood. and they continued until only four of the hundred Tugs were left. Contented that his work was complete, Heller then handed in his cauldron, went for a last hurrah behind a special red Skip with a marijuana leaf on the side (which blew up just at the thought of it...) and handed in his gold pass as he rode off into the sunset.
There you may think this story ends, but not so...
The Tugs, sensing that their nemesis was gone, regrouped, and spluttered back into life. (Well 23 of them anyway)
And so the story continued, the Tugs that refused to die slowly returned to their former duties, heavy hauling coal, ore, steel and oil.
Then Dai the steam at Margam, decided he trusted them enough to take the heavy coils up to his brother Daffyd's steelworks in the far north of the principality. And so the sight and sound of hard working Mirrlees returned to their former stamping grounds of Tram Inn, Moreton-on-Lugg and Weston Rhyn.
Rich knew they were out and about, yet never seemed to be available to go see them when they were about. Until one cold November day...
Knowing he was going to be free after about 3.30 on that November day, he followed the progress of Tug 96, which was coming north on 6M86. But Tug 96 was more than a match for the lightly loaded train that day, and steadily she gained time. 20 early at Panteg, 26 early at Craven Arms, 37 early at Shrewsbury, and a whole hour early away from Wrexham.
Rich drove as fast as his wheels and the speed cameras would let him. But he arrived in Rhosrobyn just in time to watch Tug 96 clagging away from the signal, and heading north onto the Borderlands line. Not beaten, he got back onto his wheels and sped north to Buckley. It was all in vain. Tug 96 was gone.
What next, thought Rich, realising he was going to have to dig in and wait the two and a half long hours until Tug 96 came back, heading the empties back home to the sunny south.
He went the short distance to Pen-y-ffordd to speak to Bryn the Bobby in the box. Bryn had a surprise for him. Why Rich, he exclaimed, you mean 6V80 back to Llanwern? Why there she is, just coming down the hill. Tug 96 it is. Lovely, isn't it!
Siezing the moment, Rich bombed away to grab his camera. At last he thought, I've found you, you naughty Tug.
But that piss poor effort you see at the top of the page is the best shot he could manage....
Disconsolate, he went back to his wheels, and chased once again, back to Wrexham. And arrived just in time to see 6V80's blinking tail light as it crossed over Watery Road crossing...
And the moral of this sad tale? Well, there isn't one really, except perhaps be better prepared, 'cos you never know what will happen in a moments time. Or don't go on stupid wild goose chases half way across the country on a whim. One or t'other...
And if you look carefully and squint, you can just see 60096 and 6V80 passing Pen-y-fford box and station, running well over two hours early on 22 November 2010.
The end.
Thanks to all who provided gen, special thanks to John and 60061 on Wrexham Gen (http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wrexhamgen/) for the flow of progress all afternoon, sorry I didn't hit the back of the net... And huge apologies to all my Welsh cousins for the blatant use of stereotypes in my story. Please take it in the humorous manner that it was intended in...
BTW, if you are wondering why it's so grainy, so would you be moving at 20mph and being caught at 1/30 f4.5 ISO1600. It's a wonder I got anything at all!
I spotted this scene early (for me) this morning whilst taking a stroll around Pollok Park.
There was a bit of snow here overnight and I'd intended to get up earlier than I did to try and catch some morning mist/undisturbed snow shots.
I ended up taking a few photos around the park as I explored a few parts of it that I'd not been to before, hoping to find something interesting. Though when going through the photos I took once I got home I kept coming back to this one which was one of the first I'd taken on the day. I liked the hazy feel and the fact that the sky and ground were so 'characterless' that it made the objects that were there (the tennis nets and trees) stand out more than normal due to the colour contrast against the white.
Beccles bell tower is a free-standing Grade I listed edifice associated with the adjacent St. Michael's Church in the market town of Beccles, Suffolk, England.
It stands near the edge of a cliff overlooking the River Waveney, the bell tower rises an additional 97 feet (29.6 m) and is thirty feet square (9m) at its base. It dominates the town as well as the surrounding countryside, much of which is comprised by The Broads National Park. Views of the Waveney, the North Sea on the eastern horizon, and the flat terrain of the broads extending south into Suffolk and, across the river, into nearby Norfolk, can be obtained by scaling the 122 steps to the top of the tower.
Construction started around 1500, under the direction of the monks of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, the important pilgrimage destination in the nearby town of Bury St. Edmunds. Like the main body of St. Michael's church, the tower is Perpendicular Gothic in style. The tower is supported by deep foundations, very thick walls faced with Roche Abbey stone (so called because of its use in the now-ruined abbey near Maltby, South Yorkshire), and huge buttresses; there is a neweled staircase at each corner of the tower.
It is customary for bell towers (also called campanile) to be built at the western end of a church, the end opposite the altar. However, the site at Beccles, near the edge of a cliff, and the enormous weight of the proposed tower, approximately three thousand tons, dictated that the tower be built to the east of the church as a free-standing structure. Local historians believe that the tower was originally intended to have a steeple and spire but after forty years of construction, the Protestant Reformation during the reign of King Henry VIII (and the suppression of Roman Catholic institutions) intervened to bring work to a halt.
Great skill and care is evident in the tower's construction, particularly in the tracery and the ornamental niches and panels of the stonework. The tower entrance is similar to the south porch (portico) of the church; it features the coats of arms of local families who contributed substantially to the project. These families include the Garneys, the Redes and the Bowes.
The interior of St. Michael's was badly damaged by fire in 1586, but the tower was unaffected.
Early in the 18th century, two clock faces were affixed to the north and south sides of the tower, and, a century later, another was added to the east side and all three were raised to a slightly higher level. A clock to the west was not added as either the people of Norfolk would not pay for the clock, or the people of Beccles did not want to give the time to the people of Norfolk for free. At present the clock is run by electricity and controlled by computer, allowing the twice-yearly change between Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time to be made quickly. The tower bells sound on each quarter-hour and ring out the time on the hour, stopping at 8.00pm to allow town residents some peace and quiet during the night.
Originally there was a ring of eight bells, but this was replaced, in 1762, by Lester & Packe of Whitechapel Bell Foundry, London, with a ring of ten bells. In 1909 all ten bells were completely restored by Taylors Eayre & Smith Ltd (Loughborough) and re-hung on a new steel frame. The ringing chamber is on the second level of the tower, and the belfry is on the fourth.
One of the most historically significant events associated with this church and bell tower is the wedding, in 1749, of Catherine Suckling and the Reverend Edmund Nelson, the parents of England's seafaring hero, Horatio Nelson.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beccles_bell_tower
Beccles is the most urban of all Suffolk's smaller towns. Its industrialisation, and the large rural catchment around it, make it seem much bigger than it actually is. In fact,its population of just over ten thousand makes it but the eighth largest town in Suffolk. Another part of this illusion is maintained by the sheer scale of St Michael's church, and the accompanying bell tower. St Michael is the only church in Suffolk other than St Andrew, Bramfield, to have a bell tower separate from the body of the church. This is more common over in the fens and marshes of north Cambridgeshire and west Norfolk, which may give us a clue to what happened here.
The church was built first, without a tower. A bequest of 1369 by Robert de Mutford left money for building the 'new church', and the porch, which we'll come to in a moment, was the result of a 1455 will. But in the early 16th century, in a display of piety, power and civic pride, the great square belfry was built to the south east. Solid, faced in stone and lined in brick, it rises almost 100 ft above the street. The parapet was never built; the Reformation intervened. But why was it built here at all?
The obvious place, at the west end of the nave, is marshy, and the ground falls away to the river. And another reason, of course, is that its actual location is grander and more prominent, set on the side of the former market place. By the middle of the 20th Century, the parish found it difficult to afford its upkeep, and in the 1970s it was sold off to the Borough for the nominal sum of one penny.
You walk westwards from the tower into the south side of St Michael's churchyard. The great south porch, with its turret beyond. Now, if St Michael did not have its great bell tower, it would perhaps still be famous for its south porch. It dominates the whole of the south side, rising above the south aisle on two storeys. It is one of the biggest medieval porches in all Suffolk. Inside, bosses depict incidents in the ministry of Christ. The other interesting feature of the south side is curious. This is the small castellated porch to the chancel door. Above it, a now blocked doorway leads onto the parapet, an outdoor pulpit, apparently. Could it be a Victorian conceit? The blocked doorway matches one on the north side, except that there, it is the entrance to the rood loft stair turret.
Stepping into the church, you enter a long, open space accentuated by the long arcades running towards the east. There is no chancel arch, no physical separation of nave and chancel. Everything is neatly ordered, but perhaps a little characterless. Pevsner thought it bald and grey, and in truth it is a bit sombre. This is partly the result of a terrible fire on the night of November 29th 1586, which completely destroyed the interior of the church, along with some eighty adjacent houses. Almost everything we see today postdates the fire, some of it rebuilt, the rest restored. It didn't help that the restoration of the 1860s was at the hands of John Hakewill, a local architect whose churches are rarely joyful affairs.
However, your eyes are easily drawn through the 1920s screen to the star of the show, a seven-light east window, filled with glass by Heaton, Butler and Bayne. And here is another curiosity, for the figure of St Michael at the bottom holds his scales, which should contain a sinner being weighed against his sins. However, the scales here apppear to contain a man and a woman. I wonder which was intended as the sinner, and which the sin?
The Stuart royal arms are another oddity, because they are a fretwork design and, at first glance, you may not notice what is wrong with them. And then it strikes you that the lion and unicorn supporters are the wrong way round. In fact, both sides are painted, so as there is no chancel arch it must originally have been intended for the arms to hang from the roof and be visible from both sides.
Hardly anything survives from before the Reformation, except the font. This is a cheap and cheerful Purbeck marble job of the 13th century, familiar from many a tiny village church, with its greenish stone and carved blank arcades. It seems rather unusual in such a big church, so perhaps the original font was destroyed in the fire, and this may have come from elsewhere.
In short, it cannot be escaped that the great glory of St Michael is entirely vested in its exterior, especially when seen from a distance, where, as Pevsner rightly says, it is not easily forgotten. Internally, the aisles and clerestory are grand enough, but the lack of any medieval survivals means it is hard to see St Michael as much more than the rather sombre CofE parish church it has become. Mind you, some Suffolk churches have managed that without a fire.
Cleveland Transit L559, was one of nineteen Northern Counties bodied Daimler Fleetlines, delivered new to Teesside Municipal Transport in 1973. It survived in traffic with Cleveland Transit into the 1980s, latterly as a trainer before final withdrawal and disposal. Sister Fleetline L544 survives in preservation with the 500 Group: www.durhamweb.org.uk/the500group/Clabus.htm
The picture is taken in Exchange Square, Middlesbrough and shows the bus wearing the green and cream livery of Cleveland Transit, its originally livery being turquoise with cream relief. Cleveland Transit had been born out of local government reorganisation in 1974, and the creation of the County of Cleveland, formerly Teesside. In 1994 Cleveland Transit became part of the Stagecoach Group and now identifies as part Stagecoach North East
The elegant 'curved' building behind the bus stands to this day, but many Victorian buildings, including the Exchange buildings the Square was named after were demolished to make way for the A66 bypass. It’s quite unbelievable that the town planner’s were allowed to tear down so much of Victorian Middlesbrough, only to replace it with an ugly elevated section of dual carriageway, and characterless modern buildings.
As it is today:
I'm not usually a great fan of modern architecture, much of which I find utterly dull, uninteresting, characterless and often totally out of place with old surroundings. This building, the HallgrÃmskirkja Lutherian Church which stands impressively upon the Reykjavik skyline is certainly an exception.
It was designed by state architect Guðjón Samúelsson, commissioned in 1937, taking 38 years to build, and eventually completed in 1986. It is said to have been designed it to resemble the volcanic basaltic columns which can be seen within many lava flows throughout Iceland. Being a geologist myself I can certainly appreciate his unique concept, which has resulted in a magnificent building both inside and out and is now one of Iceland's best known landmarks.
HallgrÃmskirkja, Reykjavik, Iceland
Canon 5D MII | EF 25-104mm f4 L | f/16.0 | 1/50 sec | ISO 200 | hand-held
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
I really can't imagine too many toy makers bothering to model a vehicle so dreadfully dull and devoid of any character like the current Mitsubishi Mirage but good old Tomica have gone and done it. Well it still looks extremely dull and characterless in miniature form but thats not always a bad thing as I like collecting ordinary everyday vehicles. Resolutely budget in its construction due to it featuring in the lower priced Cool Drive series its body is entirely made of plastic and there is no interior but Tomica does have its standards and so it still keeps its legendary suspension and superior smooth running axles. Mint and boxed.
St Margaret's is situated on what was once the main A12 road between Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. I can just remember the days before the by-pass was built, and from the top deck of the bus you could make out the embankment of the railway that used to run between the two towns. Then, but by bit the bridge over Station Road was removed, then all traces of the line.
St Margaret's is another church I must have passed a dozen times, as it is on the way to a friend's house, and yet i never noticed it. But I did on Saturday.
It was locked, but there was someone inside as a car was parked in the grounds, and so maybe I should have gone round to see if I could have got in that way. If i would have known how hard it is to gain entry, then I would have done.
But, as it was, with time getting on, we had to get back to see mother before it was time to head south once again before the heavy rain was forecasted to hit.
And now, over to Simon once more:
-----------------------------------------------------------
And so to Hopton-on-Sea. Like many other explorers and pilgrims, I have not had a very good experience of this church. It is never open, there is no keyholder notice, and its aspect is so forbidding that this alone is probably enough to put some people off of trying any further. I do not know anyone who has visited it on a casual basis during the last ten years or so and managed to see inside. Back in 2008, when I had first come this way, it had been on a grey day in early March. As you may imagine, my hopes were not high. Most East Anglian parish churches are open all day, every day, but in the characterless hinterland of Great Yarmouth, with its suburbs pinned against the sea by the traffic-choked A12, they all seem to be kept locked. And Hopton, I have to say, seemed to me a dismal place on this gloomy, drizzly day. I felt my heart sink as we walked up the path to the church, the great padlock already visible on the south doors.
St Margaret was built in the 1860s by that great eccentric Samuel Sanders Teulon, one of the most prolific architects of the 19th century. He seems to have ploughed a fairly lonely and idiosyncratic furrow, but at this distance the quasi-Norman touches he put to his buildings lend a certain jollity to an otherwise somewhat austere face. This is his major work in Norfolk, although he was also responsible for Brettenham and the near-rebuilding of Rushford on the other side of the county. St Margaret has a powerful central tower, but transepts which seem to fall away to nothing, as if they had once existed but had been demolished. And perhaps that impression was Teulon's intention.
This new church was built to replace the medieval St Margaret, which burned down in 1865. The old St Margaret was out in the fields, and as so often in Norfolk the opportunity was taken to build a new church nearer to the centre of population. At the time, this was a tiny village of just 250 people, but the rise of the English seaside resort coupled with the industrial expansion of Yarmouth has meant that this parish now has several thousand of residents, not to mention the hundreds of holiday-makers who come to stay at the holiday camps on the seaward side of the parish. It may come as a surprise to learn that Hopton-on-Sea was actually in Suffolk until the border was moved in 1974. Because of this, we need to turn to The Buildings of England: Suffolk to read Pevsner's observation that the glass in the chancel is by William Morris and Burne-Jones, about 1881... beautiful and peaceful after Teulon's architecture.
But would we actually be able to see it? A notice behind the barred grill raised my hopes of a key for a moment, but all it said was Sadly, we have had to lock this porch. The shelter and protection we had hoped it would offer has been abused. It was signed by the Vicar. Well, I don't know, but this notice seemed to tell me more about the Vicar of Hopton than it did about the people. And I wondered who the notice meant when it said we. The PCC? The congregation? The churchwardens? There was something a bit smug about it, as if the people of Hopton had had their chance, but they had blown it. Maybe it is just me being eternally optimistic, but I would like to think that people who live in a place like Hopton would be just as deserving of somewhere in which to experience a spiritual quietness and a sense of the numinous as people living somewhere pretty. Or, indeed, as people living in Ipswich, a much-maligned town, but one where all the town centre churches are open or accessible every day. And the crime rate in Hopton cannot really be that much higher than it is in central Ipswich - can it?
I came back in September 2010, on the occasion of the Historic Churches bike ride. It was towards the end of a reasonably successuful day: I had visited some twenty new churches, mainly in and around Great Yarmouth, and I was now heading south to catch a train back to Ipswich from Lowestoft. I knew that Hopton was taking part, and I was pleased to see a yellow bike ride poster outside of the church gates. I leaned my bike up against a wall, and hurried rather breathlessly up the churchyard path.
Well, the church was locked. I couldn't believe it for a moment. I set off around the building, to see if there was another way in, and then found the nice lady who was signing cyclists in tucked away in the parish room extension on the north side. I mentioned to her that I had found the church locked. "Yes dear", she said. "We didn't want to go to the bother of opening up the church." So, no change there then. However, she was very happy for me to have a look inside, and let me in through the vestry. "Take as long as you like dear", she said.
The most striking impression on entering St Bartholomew is quite how much smaller it feels on the inside than it looks outside. The Transitional-style double lancets do not allow much light inside, and so it is rather gloomy, but this rather suits Teulon's architecture, with his chromatic brick patterns and sombre furnishings. And then you turn to face the chancel, and at once the world comes to life.
The north and south windows contain Edward Burne-Jones' figures of the virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity and Humilty. These are probably among the most familiar of his figures, having been used first at Oxford in 1871. The east window is perhaps less harmonious, depicting Christ's Resurrection above sleeping Roman soldiers as angel musicians look on.
The High Victorian feel of the chancel offsets these works perfectly, with an ornate stone lectern supported by a thoughtful angel, and a pulpit that might have been designed for an Anglo-catholic cathedral in the Colonies. The fabulously ornate organ in the north transept presumably dates from the building of the church. The south transept, reinvented as a Julian chapel, is less successful, not least because of the glass in the three lancets. It would always be difficult for modern glass here not to jar in comparison with the treasures in the chancel, and although there is a quiet simplicity to Paul Quail's work here, it feels like an intrusion.
The nave is really nothing at all in comparison with the chancel, but this is exactly as it should be, and no doubt what Teulon intended. The relatively small marble font matches the lectern and pulpit, and that is about it. There is some truly execrable modern glass in a south side window - what can they have been thinking of? - but I soon found myself wandering up to the chancel again. It occured to me that churches which were kept locked all the time are, according to Church Watch, more likely to be broken into than those which are open during the day, and I wondered if that made these extraordinary windows more vulnerable. The nice lady told me afterwards that they are insured for a million pounds, but of course they could never be replaced.
The best protection against vandalism for an urban church is an open door and a constant flow of people. This doesn't happen overnight. It requires a culture to be built up, a culture of welcome on the part of the church, and a sense of ownership on the part of the people. The great majority of villages and towns throughout England have parish churches which are open every day. It is not just a blessing to the parish, but also a blessing to the church community, who are able, in a very real spiritual sense, to fulfill Christ's Works of Mercy. Or as St Paul said, and he puts it so much better than me, Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
156420 arrives at Earlestown on a Liverpool Lime St service.
The old sand stone station building is obscured by the characterless bridge.
Overhead electric wires will soon be in place
St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk
Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.
The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.
Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.
And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.
This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.
However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.
This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.
There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.
Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.
Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.
The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.
Classic London and in 1934 the year Judi Dench was born as she turns 78 on Dec 9th...And old ad for The Saville Theatre is on display.....No relation to Jimmy different spelling..The Theatre opened in 1931 and is currently a Cinema owned by the Odeon Cinema Group...No hand dipped chocolates here now but an exciting Fox Poker Club which has premises in the characterless 1958 Wingate House.....I know which One you prefer!...
St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland
You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.
The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.
Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.
Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.
The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.
Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
St Margaret's is situated on what was once the main A12 road between Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. I can just remember the days before the by-pass was built, and from the top deck of the bus you could make out the embankment of the railway that used to run between the two towns. Then, but by bit the bridge over Station Road was removed, then all traces of the line.
St Margaret's is another church I must have passed a dozen times, as it is on the way to a friend's house, and yet i never noticed it. But I did on Saturday.
It was locked, but there was someone inside as a car was parked in the grounds, and so maybe I should have gone round to see if I could have got in that way. If i would have known how hard it is to gain entry, then I would have done.
But, as it was, with time getting on, we had to get back to see mother before it was time to head south once again before the heavy rain was forecasted to hit.
And now, over to Simon once more:
-----------------------------------------------------------
And so to Hopton-on-Sea. Like many other explorers and pilgrims, I have not had a very good experience of this church. It is never open, there is no keyholder notice, and its aspect is so forbidding that this alone is probably enough to put some people off of trying any further. I do not know anyone who has visited it on a casual basis during the last ten years or so and managed to see inside. Back in 2008, when I had first come this way, it had been on a grey day in early March. As you may imagine, my hopes were not high. Most East Anglian parish churches are open all day, every day, but in the characterless hinterland of Great Yarmouth, with its suburbs pinned against the sea by the traffic-choked A12, they all seem to be kept locked. And Hopton, I have to say, seemed to me a dismal place on this gloomy, drizzly day. I felt my heart sink as we walked up the path to the church, the great padlock already visible on the south doors.
St Margaret was built in the 1860s by that great eccentric Samuel Sanders Teulon, one of the most prolific architects of the 19th century. He seems to have ploughed a fairly lonely and idiosyncratic furrow, but at this distance the quasi-Norman touches he put to his buildings lend a certain jollity to an otherwise somewhat austere face. This is his major work in Norfolk, although he was also responsible for Brettenham and the near-rebuilding of Rushford on the other side of the county. St Margaret has a powerful central tower, but transepts which seem to fall away to nothing, as if they had once existed but had been demolished. And perhaps that impression was Teulon's intention.
This new church was built to replace the medieval St Margaret, which burned down in 1865. The old St Margaret was out in the fields, and as so often in Norfolk the opportunity was taken to build a new church nearer to the centre of population. At the time, this was a tiny village of just 250 people, but the rise of the English seaside resort coupled with the industrial expansion of Yarmouth has meant that this parish now has several thousand of residents, not to mention the hundreds of holiday-makers who come to stay at the holiday camps on the seaward side of the parish. It may come as a surprise to learn that Hopton-on-Sea was actually in Suffolk until the border was moved in 1974. Because of this, we need to turn to The Buildings of England: Suffolk to read Pevsner's observation that the glass in the chancel is by William Morris and Burne-Jones, about 1881... beautiful and peaceful after Teulon's architecture.
But would we actually be able to see it? A notice behind the barred grill raised my hopes of a key for a moment, but all it said was Sadly, we have had to lock this porch. The shelter and protection we had hoped it would offer has been abused. It was signed by the Vicar. Well, I don't know, but this notice seemed to tell me more about the Vicar of Hopton than it did about the people. And I wondered who the notice meant when it said we. The PCC? The congregation? The churchwardens? There was something a bit smug about it, as if the people of Hopton had had their chance, but they had blown it. Maybe it is just me being eternally optimistic, but I would like to think that people who live in a place like Hopton would be just as deserving of somewhere in which to experience a spiritual quietness and a sense of the numinous as people living somewhere pretty. Or, indeed, as people living in Ipswich, a much-maligned town, but one where all the town centre churches are open or accessible every day. And the crime rate in Hopton cannot really be that much higher than it is in central Ipswich - can it?
I came back in September 2010, on the occasion of the Historic Churches bike ride. It was towards the end of a reasonably successuful day: I had visited some twenty new churches, mainly in and around Great Yarmouth, and I was now heading south to catch a train back to Ipswich from Lowestoft. I knew that Hopton was taking part, and I was pleased to see a yellow bike ride poster outside of the church gates. I leaned my bike up against a wall, and hurried rather breathlessly up the churchyard path.
Well, the church was locked. I couldn't believe it for a moment. I set off around the building, to see if there was another way in, and then found the nice lady who was signing cyclists in tucked away in the parish room extension on the north side. I mentioned to her that I had found the church locked. "Yes dear", she said. "We didn't want to go to the bother of opening up the church." So, no change there then. However, she was very happy for me to have a look inside, and let me in through the vestry. "Take as long as you like dear", she said.
The most striking impression on entering St Bartholomew is quite how much smaller it feels on the inside than it looks outside. The Transitional-style double lancets do not allow much light inside, and so it is rather gloomy, but this rather suits Teulon's architecture, with his chromatic brick patterns and sombre furnishings. And then you turn to face the chancel, and at once the world comes to life.
The north and south windows contain Edward Burne-Jones' figures of the virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity and Humilty. These are probably among the most familiar of his figures, having been used first at Oxford in 1871. The east window is perhaps less harmonious, depicting Christ's Resurrection above sleeping Roman soldiers as angel musicians look on.
The High Victorian feel of the chancel offsets these works perfectly, with an ornate stone lectern supported by a thoughtful angel, and a pulpit that might have been designed for an Anglo-catholic cathedral in the Colonies. The fabulously ornate organ in the north transept presumably dates from the building of the church. The south transept, reinvented as a Julian chapel, is less successful, not least because of the glass in the three lancets. It would always be difficult for modern glass here not to jar in comparison with the treasures in the chancel, and although there is a quiet simplicity to Paul Quail's work here, it feels like an intrusion.
The nave is really nothing at all in comparison with the chancel, but this is exactly as it should be, and no doubt what Teulon intended. The relatively small marble font matches the lectern and pulpit, and that is about it. There is some truly execrable modern glass in a south side window - what can they have been thinking of? - but I soon found myself wandering up to the chancel again. It occured to me that churches which were kept locked all the time are, according to Church Watch, more likely to be broken into than those which are open during the day, and I wondered if that made these extraordinary windows more vulnerable. The nice lady told me afterwards that they are insured for a million pounds, but of course they could never be replaced.
The best protection against vandalism for an urban church is an open door and a constant flow of people. This doesn't happen overnight. It requires a culture to be built up, a culture of welcome on the part of the church, and a sense of ownership on the part of the people. The great majority of villages and towns throughout England have parish churches which are open every day. It is not just a blessing to the parish, but also a blessing to the church community, who are able, in a very real spiritual sense, to fulfill Christ's Works of Mercy. Or as St Paul said, and he puts it so much better than me, Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
St Margaret's is situated on what was once the main A12 road between Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. I can just remember the days before the by-pass was built, and from the top deck of the bus you could make out the embankment of the railway that used to run between the two towns. Then, but by bit the bridge over Station Road was removed, then all traces of the line.
St Margaret's is another church I must have passed a dozen times, as it is on the way to a friend's house, and yet i never noticed it. But I did on Saturday.
It was locked, but there was someone inside as a car was parked in the grounds, and so maybe I should have gone round to see if I could have got in that way. If i would have known how hard it is to gain entry, then I would have done.
But, as it was, with time getting on, we had to get back to see mother before it was time to head south once again before the heavy rain was forecasted to hit.
And now, over to Simon once more:
-----------------------------------------------------------
And so to Hopton-on-Sea. Like many other explorers and pilgrims, I have not had a very good experience of this church. It is never open, there is no keyholder notice, and its aspect is so forbidding that this alone is probably enough to put some people off of trying any further. I do not know anyone who has visited it on a casual basis during the last ten years or so and managed to see inside. Back in 2008, when I had first come this way, it had been on a grey day in early March. As you may imagine, my hopes were not high. Most East Anglian parish churches are open all day, every day, but in the characterless hinterland of Great Yarmouth, with its suburbs pinned against the sea by the traffic-choked A12, they all seem to be kept locked. And Hopton, I have to say, seemed to me a dismal place on this gloomy, drizzly day. I felt my heart sink as we walked up the path to the church, the great padlock already visible on the south doors.
St Margaret was built in the 1860s by that great eccentric Samuel Sanders Teulon, one of the most prolific architects of the 19th century. He seems to have ploughed a fairly lonely and idiosyncratic furrow, but at this distance the quasi-Norman touches he put to his buildings lend a certain jollity to an otherwise somewhat austere face. This is his major work in Norfolk, although he was also responsible for Brettenham and the near-rebuilding of Rushford on the other side of the county. St Margaret has a powerful central tower, but transepts which seem to fall away to nothing, as if they had once existed but had been demolished. And perhaps that impression was Teulon's intention.
This new church was built to replace the medieval St Margaret, which burned down in 1865. The old St Margaret was out in the fields, and as so often in Norfolk the opportunity was taken to build a new church nearer to the centre of population. At the time, this was a tiny village of just 250 people, but the rise of the English seaside resort coupled with the industrial expansion of Yarmouth has meant that this parish now has several thousand of residents, not to mention the hundreds of holiday-makers who come to stay at the holiday camps on the seaward side of the parish. It may come as a surprise to learn that Hopton-on-Sea was actually in Suffolk until the border was moved in 1974. Because of this, we need to turn to The Buildings of England: Suffolk to read Pevsner's observation that the glass in the chancel is by William Morris and Burne-Jones, about 1881... beautiful and peaceful after Teulon's architecture.
But would we actually be able to see it? A notice behind the barred grill raised my hopes of a key for a moment, but all it said was Sadly, we have had to lock this porch. The shelter and protection we had hoped it would offer has been abused. It was signed by the Vicar. Well, I don't know, but this notice seemed to tell me more about the Vicar of Hopton than it did about the people. And I wondered who the notice meant when it said we. The PCC? The congregation? The churchwardens? There was something a bit smug about it, as if the people of Hopton had had their chance, but they had blown it. Maybe it is just me being eternally optimistic, but I would like to think that people who live in a place like Hopton would be just as deserving of somewhere in which to experience a spiritual quietness and a sense of the numinous as people living somewhere pretty. Or, indeed, as people living in Ipswich, a much-maligned town, but one where all the town centre churches are open or accessible every day. And the crime rate in Hopton cannot really be that much higher than it is in central Ipswich - can it?
I came back in September 2010, on the occasion of the Historic Churches bike ride. It was towards the end of a reasonably successuful day: I had visited some twenty new churches, mainly in and around Great Yarmouth, and I was now heading south to catch a train back to Ipswich from Lowestoft. I knew that Hopton was taking part, and I was pleased to see a yellow bike ride poster outside of the church gates. I leaned my bike up against a wall, and hurried rather breathlessly up the churchyard path.
Well, the church was locked. I couldn't believe it for a moment. I set off around the building, to see if there was another way in, and then found the nice lady who was signing cyclists in tucked away in the parish room extension on the north side. I mentioned to her that I had found the church locked. "Yes dear", she said. "We didn't want to go to the bother of opening up the church." So, no change there then. However, she was very happy for me to have a look inside, and let me in through the vestry. "Take as long as you like dear", she said.
The most striking impression on entering St Bartholomew is quite how much smaller it feels on the inside than it looks outside. The Transitional-style double lancets do not allow much light inside, and so it is rather gloomy, but this rather suits Teulon's architecture, with his chromatic brick patterns and sombre furnishings. And then you turn to face the chancel, and at once the world comes to life.
The north and south windows contain Edward Burne-Jones' figures of the virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity and Humilty. These are probably among the most familiar of his figures, having been used first at Oxford in 1871. The east window is perhaps less harmonious, depicting Christ's Resurrection above sleeping Roman soldiers as angel musicians look on.
The High Victorian feel of the chancel offsets these works perfectly, with an ornate stone lectern supported by a thoughtful angel, and a pulpit that might have been designed for an Anglo-catholic cathedral in the Colonies. The fabulously ornate organ in the north transept presumably dates from the building of the church. The south transept, reinvented as a Julian chapel, is less successful, not least because of the glass in the three lancets. It would always be difficult for modern glass here not to jar in comparison with the treasures in the chancel, and although there is a quiet simplicity to Paul Quail's work here, it feels like an intrusion.
The nave is really nothing at all in comparison with the chancel, but this is exactly as it should be, and no doubt what Teulon intended. The relatively small marble font matches the lectern and pulpit, and that is about it. There is some truly execrable modern glass in a south side window - what can they have been thinking of? - but I soon found myself wandering up to the chancel again. It occured to me that churches which were kept locked all the time are, according to Church Watch, more likely to be broken into than those which are open during the day, and I wondered if that made these extraordinary windows more vulnerable. The nice lady told me afterwards that they are insured for a million pounds, but of course they could never be replaced.
The best protection against vandalism for an urban church is an open door and a constant flow of people. This doesn't happen overnight. It requires a culture to be built up, a culture of welcome on the part of the church, and a sense of ownership on the part of the people. The great majority of villages and towns throughout England have parish churches which are open every day. It is not just a blessing to the parish, but also a blessing to the church community, who are able, in a very real spiritual sense, to fulfill Christ's Works of Mercy. Or as St Paul said, and he puts it so much better than me, Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
St Margaret's is situated on what was once the main A12 road between Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. I can just remember the days before the by-pass was built, and from the top deck of the bus you could make out the embankment of the railway that used to run between the two towns. Then, but by bit the bridge over Station Road was removed, then all traces of the line.
St Margaret's is another church I must have passed a dozen times, as it is on the way to a friend's house, and yet i never noticed it. But I did on Saturday.
It was locked, but there was someone inside as a car was parked in the grounds, and so maybe I should have gone round to see if I could have got in that way. If i would have known how hard it is to gain entry, then I would have done.
But, as it was, with time getting on, we had to get back to see mother before it was time to head south once again before the heavy rain was forecasted to hit.
And now, over to Simon once more:
-----------------------------------------------------------
And so to Hopton-on-Sea. Like many other explorers and pilgrims, I have not had a very good experience of this church. It is never open, there is no keyholder notice, and its aspect is so forbidding that this alone is probably enough to put some people off of trying any further. I do not know anyone who has visited it on a casual basis during the last ten years or so and managed to see inside. Back in 2008, when I had first come this way, it had been on a grey day in early March. As you may imagine, my hopes were not high. Most East Anglian parish churches are open all day, every day, but in the characterless hinterland of Great Yarmouth, with its suburbs pinned against the sea by the traffic-choked A12, they all seem to be kept locked. And Hopton, I have to say, seemed to me a dismal place on this gloomy, drizzly day. I felt my heart sink as we walked up the path to the church, the great padlock already visible on the south doors.
St Margaret was built in the 1860s by that great eccentric Samuel Sanders Teulon, one of the most prolific architects of the 19th century. He seems to have ploughed a fairly lonely and idiosyncratic furrow, but at this distance the quasi-Norman touches he put to his buildings lend a certain jollity to an otherwise somewhat austere face. This is his major work in Norfolk, although he was also responsible for Brettenham and the near-rebuilding of Rushford on the other side of the county. St Margaret has a powerful central tower, but transepts which seem to fall away to nothing, as if they had once existed but had been demolished. And perhaps that impression was Teulon's intention.
This new church was built to replace the medieval St Margaret, which burned down in 1865. The old St Margaret was out in the fields, and as so often in Norfolk the opportunity was taken to build a new church nearer to the centre of population. At the time, this was a tiny village of just 250 people, but the rise of the English seaside resort coupled with the industrial expansion of Yarmouth has meant that this parish now has several thousand of residents, not to mention the hundreds of holiday-makers who come to stay at the holiday camps on the seaward side of the parish. It may come as a surprise to learn that Hopton-on-Sea was actually in Suffolk until the border was moved in 1974. Because of this, we need to turn to The Buildings of England: Suffolk to read Pevsner's observation that the glass in the chancel is by William Morris and Burne-Jones, about 1881... beautiful and peaceful after Teulon's architecture.
But would we actually be able to see it? A notice behind the barred grill raised my hopes of a key for a moment, but all it said was Sadly, we have had to lock this porch. The shelter and protection we had hoped it would offer has been abused. It was signed by the Vicar. Well, I don't know, but this notice seemed to tell me more about the Vicar of Hopton than it did about the people. And I wondered who the notice meant when it said we. The PCC? The congregation? The churchwardens? There was something a bit smug about it, as if the people of Hopton had had their chance, but they had blown it. Maybe it is just me being eternally optimistic, but I would like to think that people who live in a place like Hopton would be just as deserving of somewhere in which to experience a spiritual quietness and a sense of the numinous as people living somewhere pretty. Or, indeed, as people living in Ipswich, a much-maligned town, but one where all the town centre churches are open or accessible every day. And the crime rate in Hopton cannot really be that much higher than it is in central Ipswich - can it?
I came back in September 2010, on the occasion of the Historic Churches bike ride. It was towards the end of a reasonably successuful day: I had visited some twenty new churches, mainly in and around Great Yarmouth, and I was now heading south to catch a train back to Ipswich from Lowestoft. I knew that Hopton was taking part, and I was pleased to see a yellow bike ride poster outside of the church gates. I leaned my bike up against a wall, and hurried rather breathlessly up the churchyard path.
Well, the church was locked. I couldn't believe it for a moment. I set off around the building, to see if there was another way in, and then found the nice lady who was signing cyclists in tucked away in the parish room extension on the north side. I mentioned to her that I had found the church locked. "Yes dear", she said. "We didn't want to go to the bother of opening up the church." So, no change there then. However, she was very happy for me to have a look inside, and let me in through the vestry. "Take as long as you like dear", she said.
The most striking impression on entering St Bartholomew is quite how much smaller it feels on the inside than it looks outside. The Transitional-style double lancets do not allow much light inside, and so it is rather gloomy, but this rather suits Teulon's architecture, with his chromatic brick patterns and sombre furnishings. And then you turn to face the chancel, and at once the world comes to life.
The north and south windows contain Edward Burne-Jones' figures of the virtues: Faith, Hope, Charity and Humilty. These are probably among the most familiar of his figures, having been used first at Oxford in 1871. The east window is perhaps less harmonious, depicting Christ's Resurrection above sleeping Roman soldiers as angel musicians look on.
The High Victorian feel of the chancel offsets these works perfectly, with an ornate stone lectern supported by a thoughtful angel, and a pulpit that might have been designed for an Anglo-catholic cathedral in the Colonies. The fabulously ornate organ in the north transept presumably dates from the building of the church. The south transept, reinvented as a Julian chapel, is less successful, not least because of the glass in the three lancets. It would always be difficult for modern glass here not to jar in comparison with the treasures in the chancel, and although there is a quiet simplicity to Paul Quail's work here, it feels like an intrusion.
The nave is really nothing at all in comparison with the chancel, but this is exactly as it should be, and no doubt what Teulon intended. The relatively small marble font matches the lectern and pulpit, and that is about it. There is some truly execrable modern glass in a south side window - what can they have been thinking of? - but I soon found myself wandering up to the chancel again. It occured to me that churches which were kept locked all the time are, according to Church Watch, more likely to be broken into than those which are open during the day, and I wondered if that made these extraordinary windows more vulnerable. The nice lady told me afterwards that they are insured for a million pounds, but of course they could never be replaced.
The best protection against vandalism for an urban church is an open door and a constant flow of people. This doesn't happen overnight. It requires a culture to be built up, a culture of welcome on the part of the church, and a sense of ownership on the part of the people. The great majority of villages and towns throughout England have parish churches which are open every day. It is not just a blessing to the parish, but also a blessing to the church community, who are able, in a very real spiritual sense, to fulfill Christ's Works of Mercy. Or as St Paul said, and he puts it so much better than me, Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Framed by bits of storm debris — grass seeds at this end and distally a piece punched from a pumpkin leaf — this is the successful result of pre-germinating fenugreek seeds. That's right; they went in on the third of the month and have their cotyledons up and unfurling on the sixth.
Of course, I knew it would work; I've done it before. But, shush, don't give away my growing secrets or everyone will be doing it.
Radishes are renowned rocket ships when it comes to germination. So too is, err, rocket, or arugula if you prefer. The first hint of a radish sown at the same time as these is just poking it's head up now, a day and a half later; a veritable sluggard compared to this technique.
I can almost smell one of Cook's lamb and methi pies! She'd use mutton, if she could get it, but for some reason the market can't wait and instead prefers characterless lamb over tasty hogget and magnificent mutton. Enough musing on the urgency of today's consumers; now that I'm down here, how do I get up again?
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
These buildings which are hard to find any information on are/were on the corner of regency road and Churchill road in Kilburn in Adelaide Australia. It is very hard to find any information on these buildings, they are railway buildings on railway land and they may have been a part of the Tube Mills set of factories built in 1938 (seen in old image here, the buildings shape and windows makes me think they are from around the 1940's so this would line up. Unfortunately these buildings time is up, with the local council saying "Old railway land and buildings on north west corner of intersection is an eysore. The site has enormous potential" [1] . I though that these buildings could have been made into a feature, like a library, botanic garden greenhouse, bus interchange even shopping or loft housing. But no they are being bulldozed, sad day to see in my opinion, no doubt to be replaced with characterless concrete prefab buildings.
This is for @dailyshoot s assignment #ds439 Today's theme is red. Red hot? Red paint? Or something else? You decide. These are Red Brick buildings, I would have loved to get closer but a 6" high fence and guards stopped me getting any closer. I really like the windows down the side of the left building and the shadows of the steel girders on the windows. I really do think this is a great loss loosing building of this character. One thing that does make me happy is the other buildings are heritage listed AND are still being used as a tube mill but this time they are for wind turbines.
Here are a few other images and a short wiki article on the tube mills:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Mills_railway_station,_Adelaide
www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/heritage/photodb/imagesear...
www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/heritage/photodb/imagesear...
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
German postcard by Photochemie, Berlin, K.2855. Photo: Rexfilm. Bernd Aldor in Die Liebe des van Royk (Lupu Pick, 1917). Though the woman right of Aldor looks like Ria Jende, she is not named among the actress in www.filmportal.de. the postcard names the character von Royk instead of van Royk.
Plot: The dramatic love story takes place in diplomatic circles in the Middle East. The Dutchman Artur van Royk looks back on a memorable event that happened four years ago. On his yacht, he was celebrating the birthday of the Dutch Queen when he was told that an uninvited guest had climbed onto his sailboat. This man asked for protection because he claimed to be persecuted. Van Royk granted the protection, and today he meets this man again. The persecuted, called Mehmed Pasha (Ernst Rappeport or Rudolf Hofbauer ), is now Chief of Police of Turkestan, where van Royk today takes up his duties as Dutch ambassador. Via Mehmed Pasha, Van Royk meets Lady Mary Romney (Charlotte Schulz). the wife of his English colleague Romney (Magnus Stifter). She is a quiet creature who is maltreated by her characterless man. He wants to divorce her because Romney intends to marry his cousin Ruth (Käthe Wittenberg). In addition, Romney seeks to have custody of and Mary's child and requires his still-wife to sign a waiver in the event of a divorce. But as a loving mother, she defends herself with her hands and feet against this immoral request.
Van Royk falls in love with the benevolent British lady and promises to help Mary when Romney, with the help of a common feint who hatched his secretary, still gets the signature. Van Royk, for Mary's sake, desperately wants to get back the signed signature and disguises herself as a harem lady, so he can go anywhere near Romney. But the British ambassador recognizes his Dutch counterpart. When he pulls out a dagger, it comes to a scuffle, in which Romney dies. In his distress, van Royk tells Mehmed of the bloody deed. Since he once owes his savior a favor, Mehmed Pasha blames the act on a man who is already serving five murders. By his rescue act, van Royk hopes to gain the love of the now widowed Mary. On the way back from Romney's house, van Royk suddenly sees the figure of the dead Romney sitting across the boat. Van Royk must realize that as long as he is with Mary, the widow of the dead, the shadow of Romney would always stand between them. So he voluntarily renounces his happiness and leaves the country without his great love.
Source: German Wikipedia, filmportal.de, IMDB.
Bernd Aldor (1881 - 1950) was a star of the German silent cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, often in films by Richard Oswald or Lupu Pick. Sound film and the Nazi regime broke the career of this Jewish actor.
Upon arrival at Perth with 1S16 on the adjacent platform 7 I had five minutes station time to spare so I decided to take a look behind the wall.
Some seeing this will recall these sidings used for stabling a variety of loco types during the 1970's and 1980's. Classes 08/20/24/25/26/27/37/40/47 were commonplace here. In the early 1970's even the occasional D400 could be seen here.
Its sad to see what the modern characterless unit focused railway has cast aside.
St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk
Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.
I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.
There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.
But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.
Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.
Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.
St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.
It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.
By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.
A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.
I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.
And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
The different profiles of Roe (No.918, left) and Metro-Cammell (933, right) bodywork are readily apparent in this shot of two of Devon General's Leyland Atlanteans, taken inside Newton Rd. garage in July 1980.
Both have been "decorated" with uni-bus ad's, 918 for a local night spot, and 933, (former "Sea-Dog" convertible "Sir Walter Raleigh"), for a Newton Abbot double-glazing firm.
918 had for some years been more or less abandoned with several of its sisters out on the grassy "death row", where it had been cannibalised for spares since withdrawal in 1976.
It was completely refurbished and given a new lease of life, albeit only for a few months.
One of the "Warship" class of convertible Bristol VRs nudges in from the left. These were the rather characterless replacements for Sea-Dogs.
A derelict warehouse sadly destined for demolition and replaced no doubt by a characterless modern structure
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk
Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.
I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.
There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.
But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.
Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.
Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.
St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.
It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.
By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.
A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.
I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.
And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.
St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk
Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.
The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.
Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.
And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.
This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.
However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.
This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.
There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.
Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.
Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.
The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.
St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk
The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.
So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.
Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.
St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk
Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.
The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.
Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.
And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.
This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.
However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.
This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.
There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.
Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.
Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.
The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.
The delightful Leicestershire village of Ashby Magna was once lit by a number of quaint tungsten lamped lanterns mounted beneath wonderfully ornate semi-circular brackets attached to roadside wood poles. Sadly, over the years these little rural lanterns have been replaced with characterless plastic modern affairs (as above).
To attach the dreadful modern side-entry fittings, the original brackets have been butchered to accommodate the replacements. This sort of thing has happened all over the country in the last 20 years or so, which impacts on local heritage, bringing city style blandness to these rural backwaters.
The last of the old tungsten lanterns on the original brackets disappeared about 12-months ago, but thanks to the Clerk of the Parish Council, the complete fitting is now safely saved to my collection.
St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk
Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.
If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.
To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.
The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.
The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.
If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.
Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.
The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.
Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.
There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.
Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.
St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk
Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.
I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.
There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.
But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.
Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.
Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.
St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.
It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.
By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.
A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.
I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.
And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.
It's such a waste to demolish such a well-kept space. This particular section does not really show its age, unlike much of the rest of the site.
Note the proximity of the new school through the wallbars and windows!
Although only a few years separate their completion, the Lower School Buildings seem to be built to a much higher standard than the Upper School extensions, which date from 1969, but seem more bland, characterless and insubstantial.
St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk
Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.
I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.
There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.
But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.
Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.
Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.
St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.
It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.
By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.
A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.
I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.
And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.
St Mary at Stoke, Ipswich, Suffolk
Urban rivers carve allegiances. The Gipping becomes tidal as it enters the Borough of Ipswich, splits around an island, and remerges as the Orwell. 1500 years ago, along this fertile estuary, Anglo-Saxon trading and manufacturing settlements merged to form England's longest continually-occupied town, Gippeswyk, the modern Ipswich. For a while, it was the largest manufacturing and trading town in northern Europe, and even towards the end of the twentieth century Ipswich was first and foremost an industrial port.
The Orwell meets the Stour eight miles downriver, and disgorges into the great German Ocean at the border between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Essex. Not far north of Ipswich was the East Anglian capital at Rendlesham and the great royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo overlooking the Deben. By the time Ipswich had emerged as a proper Borough at the end of the 12th century, its heart was in the quayside parishes of St Peter, St Clement and St Mary at Quay on the north side of the river. Across the river, the gentle hills were quietly settled by farmers and villagers. Stoke Hills overlooked the town centre across the water, but the main road to London was some way to the west, crossing the river at Handford, and so Stoke developed a strong and perhaps slightly smug independence, an identity all of its own. Even today, older Ipswichers can be heard to refer to the part of the town south of the river as 'Over Stoke'.
Stoke was large enough to form two parishes, St Augustine and St Mary. The parish church of St Mary occupies a site on a dramatic bluff overlooking the river, across which it faces St Peter, a couple of hundred metres away. St Mary at Stoke is the only one of the twelve surviving medieval churches in Ipswich town centre to stand south of the River Orwell. The church of St Augustine, which served the quayside area south of the river, is now lost to us. It was still in use in the 1480s, but all traces of it have completely disappeared. It was probably about 100 yards away in Vernon Street. After the Reformation, St Augustine's parish was merged into that of St Peter, and St Mary at Stoke retained its relatively rural feel, so close to the heart of the town. As recently as 1801, the population of the parish was just 385.
And then, as John Barbrook in his excellent guidebook tells us, the railways came. The impact of their coming upon a town like Ipswich, which was already a burgeoning industrial port, should not be underestimated. However, the Stoke Hills, as gentle as they are by Northern standards, proved an impenetrable barrier to the line from Liverpool Street. Consequently. Ipswich's first railway station was built in the south of the parish of St Mary at Stoke, and a mid-Victorian railway town grew up around it. In the 1860s, a tunnel was blasted through the hills so that the line could be extended to Norwich, and a new railway station was built, again in St Mary at Stoke parish, linked to the centre of Ipswich by a major new road, Princes Street. By 1871, the population of the parish had grown to more than 3,000, a ten-fold increase in less than a lifetime, unmatched by almost any other parish in East Anglia.
This development needs to be borne in mind when exploring St Mary at Stoke parish church. From the south, you see a large, blockish Victorian building with flushwork on the porch and transept, a little characterless otherwise. The focus is all to the south, the graveyard dropping away quickly on the other three sides, as if reminding us of the long tradition here of independence from Ipswich over the water.
However, walking around to east or west you discover that behind it there is another church, medieval this time, and still rural in feel. The tower is at the west end of the older church, and the two are joined as if non-identical Siamese twins.
This is a welcoming church, as are most in Ipswich town centre, open to pilgrims and strangers every day. You step inside to the impression of two churches joined together, the near one Victorian and wide, the far one narrower and older. In fact, this impression is almost exactly right. The original medieval church is now the north aisle ahead of you, which is why the tower is off-centre. The 1872 nave you step into is the work of the great Anglo-catholic architect William Butterfield. This church came 15 years after his masterpiece All Saints, Margaret Street. And yet, St Mary at Stoke has nothing like the excitement of that or his other fine London churches. The chequerboard flintwork on the porch and transept are perhaps echoes of St Mary le Tower in the middle of town.
There were two major rebuildings here. The first, in 1864, rather unforgivably destroyed a magnificent Tudor porch in red brick. This rebuilding, by Richard Phipson, the Diocesan architect, gave us the huge, austere transept on the northern side. The intention seems to have been to increase the capacity of the building while tarting it up a bit. Twelve years later, Butterfield's work here was rather more ambitious. He created a large urban church to the south of the original, the joining arcade making an aisle of the old nave.
Standing inside the main entrance, everything appears 19th century, from the font nearby to the grand reredos with the east window above. But this illusion of an entirely Victorian building is dispelled if you walk through the arcade and look up. Here, the north aisle, which was the original church, retains its medieval hammerbeam roof. Because of this, the aisle retains a different atmosphere to the nave, its patterned glass in the aisle east window a counterpoint to Clayton & Bell's typically plodding east window to the south of it. The Heaton, Butler & Bayne glass along the south wall is better.
Halfway along the rather stark north wall is a Great Eastern Railway insignia from a train, a reminder of the industry which almost single-handedly turned this parish into an urban one. In the 20th century, this church had two chapels of ease in the parish, St Etheldreda near the railway bridge on Wherstead Road, and St Edmund beside the school on Ranelagh Road. These have now completely disappeared, but a haunting remnant survives in the form of St Etheldreda's banner on display in the north aisle.
The population of the parish fell sharply in the years after the Second World War because of slum clearance along Vernon Street and Wherstead Road. There was further large scale clearance of terraced houses and industry in the 1990s. However, the continued redevelopment around the docklands has begun to redress the balance, and in any case, and rather pleasingly, St Mary at Stoke turns its back in its traditional manner to the town centre across the river to be the flagship church of the South-West Ipswich Team Ministry, serving, along with the modern estate churches, more than thirty thousand people in the areas of Stoke Park, Thorington Hall, Chantry and Pinewood.
St Andrew, Metton, Norfolk
Metton's is a church that I keep coming back to. It's handily placed for revisits, being set just south of Cromer, one of my regular starting points for bike rides. But there is something else too, something that seems to call me back to experience its quiet, dim stillness above the lonely road of the village.
I first came here with the late Tom Muckley in the summer of 2005, if you could call it a summer that year. Long, sultry days in June gave a promise of things to come, but the promise was never really fulfilled. July was not a particularly wet one, but neither was it very sunny. In East Anglia, we awoke again and again to gloomy cloud and a kind of ineffectual drizzle that eventually petered out, the clouds breaking. But the days never warmed up, and all too soon evening closed in. By early August, the hedgerows were still as green as they had been six weeks previously, and the conservation areas of graveyards had become jungles.
There was an illusion that the summer was still held in a fitful suspense. But already, the barley and wheat fields were being harvested, the lanes clogged by mud from combines and tractors, the signs all around of everything being safely gathered in. The evenings became cooler, the horse chestnuts began threatening to turn. Soon, it would be time for back to school promotions in the town shops, and the excitement of posters for harvest suppers on village noticeboards. Soon, it would be autumn.
But all that was in the future. In the first few days of August, the low cloud began to retreat, and there were high skeins of it dissolving above the rolling hills south of Cromer. Too early in the day to take advantage of it, we headed under overcast skies through tiny lanes banked up with green hedges. All the roads were narrow, and it seemed impossible that we were less than two miles from the nearest A road, less than six miles from Cromer, less than two hundred miles from central London. The fields were silent, the stillness in the air timeless.
Through the high banks we twisted, eventually coming out into the deep cut village of Metton, barely a hamlet really. A few council houses straggled beside the church. There were some larger, older houses to the east, and a farmer had cut a maze through his crops for children to run wild and freely in. We could hear their shouts from the churchyard. It was a lovely place to be, at once ancient and yet full of young life.
Most recently I returned to Metton in June 2019. The weather forecast had promised sunshine, but I'd got out at Roughton Road station under heavy cloud, and my bike ride to Felbrigg, my first port of call, had been into the chill of a wind carrying the occasional misty shreds of a sea fret from the coast, invisible beyond the northern horizon. But as I came into Metton, the clouds parted, and I felt the warmth of the sun for the first time that day like a benediction, and I pushed my bike through the awkward gate into the narrow churchyard.
St Andrew is a simple, aisleless 14th century church, heavily Victorianised with the introduction of late medieval-style window tracery. The high pitched nave roof rather overwhelms it all. As often in this part of Norfolk, refurbishing of the flint has been a cheap option, and that seems to have happened on the tower here. The most interesting feature is at the foot of the tower, for there is a processional way running from north to south, the western face of the tower being hard against the churchyard boundary. The northern side of the chancel is windowless now, but the prospect from the south, away from the village street, is gentle and timeless.
It must be said that this is always a gloomy interior to step into. This is mostly the fault of the Victorian restoration, which ceilured the roof, leaving nothing but a functionless wallplate with fascinating grotesques on it. The restoration here was fairly middle-of-the-road. The town church benches must have seemed the very thing in the 1870s, but today they are characterless and dull, out of keeping with the peace outside. You can't help thinking that the nave would be improved if they were replaced with modern wooden chairs. But the chancel recalls earlier days, rustic and simple, with a pammented floor and bare furnishings. The flowers make it feel a place at once well-loved and well-used, a delight. There are roundels of Flemish glass in the east window, set here by the Dennis King workshop in the early 1960s. A bishop stands and a monk kneels before the crucifixion. Another monk, a donor perhaps, kneels before St Jerome in the desert. An angel holds a chalice and a crucifix.
By the south door, hidden under the table, is a fine civilian brass to Robert and Matilda Doughty. Robert died in 1493, and presumably the brass was put in place before the death of his wife, because the place for her dates has been left blank. There are also a couple of brass inscriptions in the nave. One is directly beside the fine, if over-plastered, Norman tub font, which rather looks as if it was originally designed to stand against a wall or a pillar.
A curiosity is welded to the north wall, beside the door. This is the 19th century parish truncheon, a fascinating survival. These objects were symbols of authority rather than implements of aggression, but all the same I couldn't help wondering if it had cracked a few parish heads, and quite what the 18th century parishioners would say if they could come back and see it so fondly displayed.
I stood for a while, breathing in the silence. A bird started up in the churchyard, but it seemed distant. It was time to go. It struck me, not for the first time, that there is something sad about this church. Not exactly oppressive, for it calls me back again and again, but a feeling that this Victorian interior which had seemed so bright and earnest a century and a half ago has faded. It has seen its congregation shrink, as if they were leaving one by one, leaving only an echoing emptiness, except for services. The patina of the varnish and the tiles has dulled, and the whole place broods beneath the ceilure. Only the chancel still seems alive.
And there was something else, of course. As I signed the visitors' book, I noticed that several recent visitors mentioned their prayers for April. I thought that this was a lovely thing, that they remembered. I remembered too. Thirteen year old April Fabb's disappearance on the edge of this tiny village in the spring of 1969 haunted me as a little boy at the time, and still haunts East Anglia today. It regularly reappears in the news, most recently because of the event's fiftieth anniversary. Outside, beside the porch, an inscription to her memory on a headstone reads: Will you of your charity remember in your prayers APRIL FABB a child who disappeared from this parish in April 1969 of whom nothing has since been heard.
St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk
Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.
If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.
To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.
The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.
The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.
If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.
Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.
The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.
Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.
There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.
Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.
St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk
Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.
If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.
To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.
The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.
The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.
If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.
Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.
The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.
Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.
There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.
Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.