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So there I was pointing my camera at this in the dark when along comes someone - the priest I suspect - and asks if I'd like him to turn the lights on. Very nice of him I thought.
A day out in London of a Saturday morning requires planning. Jools arranged for shopping to be dropped on Thursday afternoon, meaning we did not have to go on Saturday morning.
Then setting alarms so that we got to Priory station at half seven ready for the quarter to eight train.
Jools went to get tickets, and I went to the corner greasy spoon to get sausage and bacon sticks and brews. So that when the train rolled at twenty to, we climbed on board, sitting at a table and starting on our breakfast.
Leaving at that time meant it was already light, so we could see the countryside rolling by until we got to Ashford, then flash by once we got on the high speed line, zooming up to Ebbsfleet and then under the Thames into Essex and on to Stratford.
We got out at Stratford, caught the DLR to the regional station, then changing DLR lines for the trains heading for Lewisham.
At Pudding Mill Lane, where we used to watch steam tours on the Great Eastern Main Line, a new station has been built to allow for the entrances to the Elizabeth Line tunnels, and next door is the Abba theatre.
We have been talking about going, so Jools checks prices for the show, and amazed that some are nearly £200! Prices next June are £99, but still for seeing a video recreation rather than the band themselves.
The train rattled on, turning south where the old Bryant and May match factory used to be. The building is still there but seems to be business units or flats now.
Passing the old factory used to be the cue for my Granddad to get us standing up and gathering our coats and bags as we were five minutes from Liverpool Street.
Instead, we took the line south through Bow and towards the crystal towers of Docklands and Canary and other Wharves.
I texted Graham to say we were on our way, and he replied to say he was 5 minutes from Canary Wharf. I said we would be there in a few minutes, maybe we would meet there?
Through Poplar and into the 21st century hellscape that is Docklands, we get off on platform 1, and our next train is waiting on platform 2. Jools walks over, I lag behind, scouring the platform for Graham.
Then as I reach the doors, and the electronic bleeps announcing departure, Graham reaches us and comes on board.
Doors close and the train departs, taking tight turns around the skyscrapers before heading to the river, and after Mudschute, dives under the river for Greenwich.
We get off at Cutty Sark, so named after a tea clipper, and find the way out signed to a flight of 125 steps to street level.
I sigh and follow Jools and Graham up, regretting my life choices.
But I made it to the top, and a short walk we called in at a coffee shop for a refill and wait for the Cutty Sark itself to open.
Although the story of the Cutty Sark and the other tea clippers is very interesting, I wanted to come for purely photographic reasons, to snap the prow and the glazed roof that protects the old dry dock.
We pay to go on, and enter the ship, going up two flights of steps onto the deck, where the masts and rigging tower high above. Remember, sailors used to have to climb up these and gather in sails, and all weathers and on all seas, no matter their state.
Hardy buggers.
Cabins were small and on deck, as all space down below was for cases of tea only, to keep them dry and in perfect condition.
Then down through the visitor centre to the bottom of the dry dock, and the copper bottom of the ship, suspended so that shots looking along and up the prow could be taken.
Which I took plenty of.
Above the roofs of the shops and pubs,the tower of the parish church, St Alphage, Greenwich, which is an usual dedication, but turns out this was the site where the titular Saint was martyred in the 11th century.
Graham had never found it open, but I had checked online and it was due to open at eleven, ten minutes ago. So we walked towards the church, dodging through the traffic and arrived at the church gate.
The south doors were closed, as were the north, so I began to doubt myself. But a nearby sight indicated that the main entrance was on the south side, so we went back round.
And one of the doors was indeed ajar.
Bingo.
Bango.
Bongo.
We climbed the steps and went in, and were met my quiet the most friendly and informative volunteer I think I have ever met.
Interesting details were pointed out, and those hidden were shown, including the location of the font where King Henry XIII was christened, and the last surviving part of the second church's wall.
The church, which is after Hawksmoor, is a delight, though gutted during the blitz, so most glass is now lost, though the Victorian is of good quality.
We were here for the Mars display in the Painted Hall at the Greenwich Naval College.
We have been here before, but some 15 years back at least, so a return was overdue, though the sumptuous painting would be partly hidden by the 7m model of the planet Mars.
We have seen the artist's Moon work at the Maritime Museum nearby, but also in Denver back in 2017. But seemed to have missed his "Earth", I'm sure it'll come round again.
We walked through the college grounds, into the painted hall, exchanged vouchers for tickets and climbed the two sets of stairs into the hall itself.
The view opened out, and the first impression was amazing, Mars at the far end, suspended and slowly turning, with the painted hall as a background. And a helmeted Mar looking down at the planet named after him, a great juxtaposition.
We took and hour to take it all in, then talked about going to the Chapel, which we were not sure was open.
At the base of the stairs, we found the entrance to a passageway, with sign pointing to the Chapel, could this lead all the way under the formal gardens?
Yes. Yes it could. And did.
Up spiral staircases to the lobby, then up a formal stairway flanked by statues of Faith, Hope, Charity and Meekness, into the church, a delight, without much in the way of painting to match the hall opposite, but stunning all the same, and few folks had made it over, so we soaked up the building and details, and fittings.
Time was getting on, and thoughts turned to food. So, we left and headed out to the narrow path beside the river, where high tide meant water was lapping at our feet, but we powered back towards the High Road, and the cluster of pubs and other eateries.
Beside the Cutty Sark was the Gipsy Moth pub, but that was full, so we walked on and found a table beside the fire in the Spanish Galleon, a Shepherd Neame's pub, but they had tables and a great looking menu.
We got pints of Whitstable Bay, and ordered burgers each, all in a great end to the trip where we did all we set out to do, and now rounded it off with a pub lunch.
We ate the burgers with pints of Bishop's Finger, now a timid 5.2% rather than the 7% in days of yore, but still full of flavour.
Time to go home. Back to Cutty Sark DLR station, down in the lift this time, and straight on a train heading north. Change at Canary Wharf, where our train to Stratford was also waiting.
We said goodbye to Graham, hopped on, and the doors closed, so we moved off north.
Back at Stratford, down the steps to the concourse, and straight onto a train going to the International Station, we got on, and so were on the platforms for Kent a full ten minutes before the train was due.
When it came, there were a few seats, so I got to sit and rest by back after the 11,000 steps done, so while darkness fell outside, I kept up to date with the football, Norwich 2-2 with Luton at half time, but scoring twice in the second half to win 4-2, and make it 12 goals scored in three games over seven days.
By the time final whistle went, we were back home, and supping fresh brews as we rested, taking our shoes off.
A brilliant day out.
The West Ham fans we had seen on the DLR were going to their home game against Arsenal, which was on TV at half five. Not the game they were hoping for, as Arsenal were 5-2 by halftime, though no more goals scored in the second half, but worthy of that first half to have watched.
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St Alfege Church is an Anglican church in the centre of Greenwich, part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich in London. It is of medieval origin and was rebuilt in 1712–1714 to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor.
The church is dedicated to Alfege (also spelt "Alphege"), Archbishop of Canterbury, and reputedly marks the place where he was martyred on 19 April 1012, having been taken prisoner during the sack of Canterbury by Danish raiders the previous year. The Danes took him to their camp at Greenwich and killed him when the large ransom they demanded was not forthcoming.[1]
The church was rebuilt in around 1290, and Henry VIII was baptized there in 1491.
The patronage of the church was given to the abbey at Ghent during the 13th century. Following the suppression of alien priories under Henry V, it was granted to the priory at Sheen with which it remained until transferred to the Crown by exchange under Henry VIII in 1530.[1]
During a storm in 1710 the medieval church collapsed, its foundations having been weakened by burials both inside and outside.
Following the collapse of the medieval church, the present building was constructed, funded by a grant from the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor, one of the commission's two surveyors. The first church to be built by the commissioners, it was begun in 1712 and basic construction was completed in 1714;[2] it was not, however, consecrated until 1718.[3] The church was built by Edward Strong the Younger a friend of Christopher Wren the Younger.
The church is rectangular in plan with a flat ceiling and a small apse serving as a chancel. The east front, towards the street, has a portico in the Tuscan order, with a central arch cutting through the entablature and pediment—a motif used in Wren's "Great Model" for St Paul's Cathedral.[3] A giant order of pilasters runs around the rest of the church, a feature Kerry Downes suggests may have been added by Thomas Archer, who, according to the minutes of the commission, "improved" Hawksmoor's plans.[2] On the north and south sides of the churchwide projecting vestibules rise to the full height of the building, with steps leading up to the doors.[3]
Hawksmoor planned a west tower, in the position of the existing one, which had survived the collapse. However the commission was reluctant to fund it, and the medieval tower was retained. In 1730 John James refaced it, and added a spire. Hawksmoor's design, published in an engraving in 1714, had an octagonal lantern at the top, a motif he was later to use at St George in the East.
The crypt served as an air-raid shelter during World War II. During the Blitz on 19 March 1941, incendiary bombs landed on the roof causing it to collapse, burning into the nave. The walls and the tower remained standing but much of the interior was gutted. The church was restored by Sir Albert Richardson in 1953. As part of the post-war restorations, stencils of Mary the Mother of Jesus and St John the Evangelist were installed either side of the Cross (forming a traditional rood) in the side chapel of St Alfege with St Peter by the tempera artist Augustus Lunn.
The present organ was installed in 2001, having been relocated from the Lower Chapel at Eton College, with some minor changes.[6] It is an 1891 Lewis & Co instrument, with modifications in 1927 by A. Hunter & Son and 1970 by Harrison & Harrison.[7]
Additionally, there is a small, six-stop moveable organ located in the north aisle, by W & A Boggis of Diss from c 1960, with a later restoration by Mander Organs.
he previous organ had a long history. It dated from the 16th century (when St Alfege was recorded as having a pair of organs). The National Pipe Organ Register does not record its present whereabouts. However, a three manual drawstop console is on display at the West End of the South aisle. This may incorporate keys from the time of the composer Thomas Tallis,[9] who was buried in the chancel of the medieval church in the 16th century. The organ was restored in 1706 by Thomas Swarbrick, with further restorations and modifications by Dallam (1765), George England (1770) and J. W. Walker & Sons Ltd (1840, 1853 and 1863).[9][10] It was further restored and rebuilt in 1875 by Joseph Robson and Benjamin Flight,[11] modified by Lewis & Co in 1910[12] and rebuilt by R. Spurden Rutt & Co in 1934. By this point it had grown to 47 stops.[13] It survived the bomb damage of 1941 and was rebuilt, again by R Spurden Rutt, in 1953, with 55 stops.
St Giles Cripplegate, Barbican, London
St Giles has the most startling setting of perhaps any English medieval church. A foundation of the 11th Century, the church was rebuilt after a fire in 1545, that is to say right at the very end of the Medieval period, and looks what it is, a big late Perpendicular East Anglian church, the tower rebuilt in the 17th Century but otherwise looking as if it might be beside the market place in a small Norfolk or Suffolk town. This is disingenuous of course, because the reason for it is the same in both cases, fabulous wealth on the eve of the Reformation.
This parish was particularly badly affected by the Great Plague of 1665, and Elizabeth and Wayland Young suggest this was because of the open drains running through the churchyard. St Giles was too far north to be burned in the Great Fire, but reaped a benefit from it because of the large number of people relocating to the parish from nearer the river. The drains were culverted, and there was plenty of money for repairs and refurbishments. In the 19th Century the church was made more Gothic than it was already with the addition of battlements along the aisles and clerestories.
Along with most of the area to the north of Cannon Street and the south of Old Street, St Giles was completely destroyed on the evening of 29th December 1940, when high winds and the lack of firewatchers due to the Christmas holidays conspired to fan the flames created by wave upon wave of German bombers. For more than ten years St Giles stood a ruin, as the City Corporation pondered what to do with the area. That St Giles would be rebuilt was not in question, but it would need to be as part of the unified whole envisaged for the area north of London Wall, the largest single bomb site in the whole of the British Isles. The usage of the area would need to be largely residential, as the Corporation was concerned about the depopulation of the City, but should also include spaces for arts, recreation and education. Cost was not a factor, there was plenty of money available.
The result was the largest single building project in England during those post-war years. The Corporation accepted the plans submitted in 1956 by its favourite architectural practice Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. The new area would be home to high-rise and low-rise residential buildings all linked together through gardens, with an arts centre at the core. Significantly, it wasn't intended that retail spaces would form a significant part of the scheme. In a brave and revolutionary gesture, the new scheme would be entirely traffic free, the road carried under the site through a tunnel. A revised plan of 1959 allowed for the walkways of the new scheme to be linked into the raised walkways planned to spread like a web throughout the City - although fortunately, apart from London Wall and Upper and Lower Thames Street, this web was never built. The new scheme took its name from the main street which had run through the site, which in turn was named for a medieval fortification to the north of the Wall. And so the Barbican began to rise from the ashes.
With the scheme underway St Giles could be restored, and it reopened in 1960 to the design of Godfrey Allen. Bearing in mind that the interior had been entirely destroyed, and considering the modernist city which was arising around it, the restoration was very conservative, the new interior replicating as far as possible what was there before, some of the furnishings coming from the demolished church of St Luke, Old Street, which had been put in storage. The east end of the chancel was new, but based on architectural details which had survived the 19th Century restoration. There is some decent post-war glass, and memorials to some of the church's worthies including John Milton.
And so it is only outside that St Giles is extraordinary. After twenty years of work the Barbican was opened in 1981, the last great post-war repair project to be completed. The church floats a great ship in a sea of concrete, an illusion furthered by its position beside one of the Barbican waterways. Some memorials have been reset in the brick and concrete. Beyond is the Barbican Centre, and above rise the great shafts of the towers. When they were built they were the tallest residential buildings in Europe, unashamedly modernist in their concrete jaggedness. And yet there is a pleasing harmony to the whole, the contrasting tower of St Giles sticking up perpendicularly to join them. Of course, you wouldn't want every church in this kind of setting, but I think it works here.
There was, of course, an emotional reasoning behind rescuing the City churches after the Blitz, because they had become emblematic of the 'London can take it' attitude. Wandering around the City I am struck that with the possible exception of 30 St Mary Axe, the Barbican towers are still the most refreshingly Modern buildings in the Square Mile, and they are now almost forty years old. Much of the corporate architecture along Bishopsgate is simply dire, especially the awful Heron Tower, and it is hard to remember that the NatWest Tower or whatever it is called now ever looked Modern.
(c) Simon Knott, December 2015
Boats at St Katharine's Dock next to Tower Bridge.
About two minutes after I took this photo, I was detained by the Police because I was 'behaving suspiciously' by taking pictures at a popular tourist spot. :-?
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The south transept east clerestorey windows are filled with glass taken from the former great south transept window by Betton & Evans of Shrewsbury 1819.
Between 1819 & c1890 the 9-light south transept window at Lichfield was glazed with a superb sequence of late Georgian (partially) enamel painted prophets and apostles, eighteen in all (two rows of nine). No photographs have so far been found to show how this appeared.
Betton & Evans of Shrewsbury were prolific in the first half of the nineteenth century in the the western midlands and parts of Wales, and were significant in crossing the transition from enamel painting back to more traditional pot-metal leaded windows (this example combines both approaches)
Most of their compositions were either derived from old master paintings (Rubens etc) or geometric/heraldic work. Where they created new figurative images the drawing was often primitive and naive.
An exception to those rules is this magnificent series at Lichfield where another designer was employed for the 18 standing figures, who was John James Halls, a pupil of Henry Fuseli at the Royal Academy. The painting is bold and vigorous, showing a remarkable freedom of brushwork combined with superb individual characterisation of the figures, making these panels some of the finest late Georgian glass to have survived.
The glass was replaced c1890 by the current transept window by C.E.Kempe with the former window broken up and dispersed. The bulk of it was reinstated in the three adjoining south transept clerestorey windows (a similar window of 1813 by the same company in the corresponding position in the north transept was removed slightly earlier, with all nine historical figures being relocated to Lichfield Guildhall, where they can still be seen)
Of the original sequence of eighteen figures thirteen can still be seen high in the transept at Lichfield, however the remaining five languished in storage in the south tower of the cathedral and more recently were transferred to Norgrove Studios near Redditch where they were restored. There are hopes that one day these can rejoin their brethren in the cathedral.
St. Procopius Church also known as the Red Lake Church at sunset in rural Brule County. Kendra Perry-Koski, Winner.
Bury St. Edmunds is a market town in the County of Suffolk, England. The town first grew around the the site of a monastery built by Sigebert, King of the Angles, around 633. In 903 the body of King Edmund (Saint Edmund the Martyr), who was slain by the Danes in 869 and at the time buried elsewhere, was moved to the monastery and the town not only became a site of pilgrimage but it also expanded. Due to continuing conflicts with the ruling Vikings the body was again moved, this time to London. In 1020, the old monastery was destroyed and King Canute was responsible for a Benedictine abbey to be built in its place, the ruins of which can still be seen in Abbey Gardens. The original name of the town, Beodericsworth, was changed to St. Edmund's Bury around 925 before being given its present name of Bury St. Edmunds. St. James's Church (now St. Edmundsbury Cathedral), the nearby St Mary’s Church, the Abbey Gate and the Norman Tower are all that remain of the mighty complex of abbey buildings that once stood alongside Angel Hill. The town has a population of over 35,000 and it is now the main cultural and retail centre for west Suffolk. Its main industries are a large brewery and a sugar beet processing factory.
St Mary's Church, seen here, is the civic church of Bury St. Edmunds and claims to be the third largest parish church in England. It is also said to have the second longest aisle and the largest west window. It stands on part of the original Benedictine abbey site at the corner of Angel Hill and Honey Hill.
47513 waits at the end of a platform at the pre-rebuilt St. Pancras station on Saturday 1 August 1987
The norman gate, built in the mid-twelfth century as an entrance to the church of the abbey of St Edmundsbury (of which hardly anything remains today). Beyond it the late twentieth-century tower of the current cathedral, created from the church of St James from 1914 onwards.
McArthur St looking towards Victoria Parade. On the right - O'Reillys and Vineyard Restaurant (Old Suva Town Hall).