Fleet St., St Pauls and Golden Tableware

Saturday 30 November 2002. In my revious article we finished on The Strand with a look at St Clement Danes. We'll start in more or less the same spot then walk along Fleet Street to St Pauls, across the river to Shakespeare's Globe and then take a bus to the West End shops.

From St Clement Danes, we turn to admire the facade of the Royal Courts of Justice or as they are more usually known: The Law Courts. This is the home of the UK's High Court and Court of Appeal, although it also tours the circuit to sit in major cities around the UK. For most of England's history such courts were held at Westminster Hall - they are not called "Royal" for nothing.

Creating a purpose-built home for the Justices required two Acts of Parliament to be written and passed into Law and the displacement of families from 450 houses which had to be demolished to make way for the building which commenced in 1873 with the building being officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1882.

Standing opposite the Royal Courts of Justice is the venerable survivor of the Great Fire of London, The Wig and Pen. Named for the tools of the legal profession it was one of no doubt many such establishments catering for the lawyers, judges and clerks in the area. Dating from 1625 it was set up by the Gatekeeper of Temple Bar - then the western gateway into the City of London - as a handy place to buy food and drink from the curious who paused to view the severed heads on poles above the Temple Bar gateway. It lost a lot of regular thirsty customers when Fleet Street ceased to be the centre of newspaper publishing and since the mid 2000s has traded as Thai Square providing flavours probably unknown in the 17th century! Talking of which... Oliver Cromwell is said to haunt the place.

The old gate of the City was a wooden arched wall across the roadway but unsurprisingly that didn't survive the Great Fire of 1666. A new stone archway with three arches was built 1669-72. Once again the good folks visiting London could look upon heads on poles but by the late 1800s the gate was creating a barrier to the vastly increased amount of horse-drawn traffic.

It was dismantled in 1878, each of the 2,700 pieces of stone catalogued and stored and in 1880 it was bought and taken to Hertfordshire to be re-erected as the gatehouse at Theobalds Park. It stayed there until 2003. The following year it was returned to London stone by stone on 500 pallets, the most travelled gatehouse surely in all England. (I haven't researched that - just watch all the comments prove me wrong in the coming weeks...) It now stands just north of St Pauls Cathedral in Paternoster Square. I must go again to see and photograph it sometime.

Nowadays a tall column stands dividing the carriageways of the road and is decorated by the statue of a dragon rather than heads on poles. It marks the meeting point of The Strand to the west and Fleet Street to the east and is halfway between the former royal residences of the Tower of London and Westminster Palace.

Now on Fleet Street we find The Punch Tavern, formerly the Crown and Sugar Loaf it was renamed in the 1840s in honour of Punch magazine, which was published at nearby Fleet Street premises.

St Pauls Cathedral is one of the great visitor attractions of London. Built to the designs of Christopher Wren (who had long wanted to replace the previous incarnation, luckily for him the Great Fire of London gave him an opening). We were not allowed to take photos in St Pauls - which is a bit annoying as there are few postcards on sale. It would have been better to ban flash and tripod photography and let people get on with it as long as there were no services taking place. So no photos of the interior I'm afraid, but we went to see the tombs of both Christopher Wren and Lord Nelson.

Nelson, having travelled back from the site of his death at Trafalgar in a barrel of brandy, camphor and Myrrh, laid in state for three days at Greenwich, was transferred on a State Barge used originally by King Charles II, the coffin transferred to the Admiralty to rest overnight before being taken by funeral procession made up of 32 admirals, 100 captains and 10,000 soldiers to St Pauls.

At St Pauls there was a four-hour funeral service following which his coffin was lowered through the floor of the nave and placed in a sarcophagus originally supposed to have been Cardinal Wolseley's from Tudor times. King Henry VIII had planned to be buried in it himself in a grand monument, but this was never completed and Henry today rests in a coffin in St George's Chapel, at Windsor.

Coming out of St Pauls Cathedral we had our first viewing of the Millenium Bridge. This was after it had been cured of wriggling about of its own accord and before (just!) the spells of dark wizards chasing Harry Potter made it wriggle all over again... So we walked over with confidence, part of a quite large number of people doing exactly the same, but only half of whom were doing it in the same direction!

On the southern bank of the River Thames is the recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The original was built in 1599 using materials from an earlier theatre which had been demolished elsewhere in London. It burned down during a performance of Henry VIII when a cannon used as a prop, misfired and set fire to the thatch and wooden beams. No one was hurt, although one man had his pants catch fire. The flames were put out with a bottle of ale. (I wonder if he was a liar...?)

We had a look, found we couldn't go in, breathed a sigh of relief - I'd had more than enough of Shakespeare at school - and walked back over the Millenium Bridge and caught a Routemaster red bus back towards the West End. Miss Franny, for some strange reason, seemed to want to look around the shops...

I'm not 100% sure where we saw these but it was either Selfridges or John Lewis and I think the latter - a set of 23 carat gold on silver plate full cutlery service. A bargain at the knock down price of £5,675 from the original price of £11,359. A salesman asked if he could help. "I don't really think so..." I said with a note of sympathy for his lost commission. He shrugged, "You never know!" he said.

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Taken for a Run Round Salzburg

Thursday 17 August 2000. After last night, raindrops on noses are not quite one of my favourite things! However I'm prepared to forgive and forget when faced with such a beautiful morning with early morning mist against the mountains and the prospect of a day in Salzburg - the city of The Sound of Music.

We've walked a bit further than usual after breakfast and before the coach leaves and we found the walkers about to board the little train for Zell-am-See.

Coaches are not allowed into Salzburg, except to drop off and pick up at pre-arranged times. John and Keith deliver us into the hands of local guide, Margarethe. After three people though she drops them and asks the drivers, "Please just leave them on the pavement..."

She takes us on a walking tour of the city for almost an hour. She sets off at quite a ridiculously fast pace and soon we are strung out in a long straggly line as we stop to take photos or find it difficult to keep up. Apart from anything else, Salzburg is crowded and we are not sure if the people we are following can see anyone from the coach in front of them or whether we are just wandering aimlessly...

For some reason there were fibreglass cows all over the place, painted in different designs.

Saltzburg has many squares, as we shall see once we get up to the castle! The cathedral stands in a square and a huge stadium had been erected for a concert. There was no way I could take a single photo of it from top to bottom as you couldn't stand far enough back. I took three and have stitched them together.

There are no less than five organs in the cathedral, all of which must be played seperately. The largest, high above the entrance at the back was played only for notable occasions, whilst Mozart himself was not averse to twiddling the ivories of one of the others. He was born in Salzburg and we were to see his birthplace a little later in the tour.

If you watch The Sound of Music You will find a troupe of von Trappers traipsing through this very arch. The only thing we found going through it though was a horse and carriage - but quite splendidly adorned with a miniskirt... In fact there are not many references in Salzburg to The Sound of Music at all. Hollywood has one take on the story. The Austrians perhaps have a different perspective on it.

Hang on a minute, the gang have stopped whilst Margarethe explains something. I couldn't hear her half the time and gave up after a while. Not a von Trapp in sight... Margarethe: please start at the very beginning...

Here's a flight of stairs at the side of a courtyard that may be familiar from the concert sequence in The Sound of Music. It's not in the castle however (which we shall see in the next article).

We come to a large square where a thriving market has been set up. The surrounding palaces are quite something. One of them was Mozart's birthplace.

So a quick look around the market and try to keep Margarethe in sight in the crush of people!

The cheese stall. The market obviously attracts stallholders from all over the place. The young lady was Dutch and in case her cheese wasn't enough, she has a whicker basket full of plain wooden clogs on the ground.

Miss Franny: "Isn't that Christopher Plummer?" Me: "No, it's a fruit and veg stall - they're just ordinary plums..."

Margarethe managed to round us all up and herded us into a very crowded street. "Now ve haf valked you many tvisty turns and you are all lost and disorientated, I leaf you here in zis busy street to find your own vay! Meet back at the bus station vhich you cannot remember and don't be late because der bus can only vait fife minutes! Unt der virst von back ist der sissy!" Disclaimer: she didn't really say that. But, then again, she didn't need to really...

It is a very quaint street with lots of swinging signs outside the shops. We find somewhere for lunch then, successfully fed and watered, we decide to head on up to the castle. Miss Franny stops to admire some plates. Thay are decorated with real gold. I work out the price in UK pounds and push her quickly on...

The Hohensalzburg fortress. It's an impressive chunk of masonry and design, giving an air of both calm beauty and impregnable mass. Should we walk it or take the easy route we wonder? There is a funicular railway that takes you to the lower levels of the castle.

We decide to take the funicular railway up and walk down - we may not be in a rush but we are no fools... This is a funicular railway with a driver's cab! We were at the bottom and were going up. It was crowded and I couldn't see if we had a driver or not.

The car itself was quite steeply racked and had three or four compartments for passengers. At the top of the slope we looked back to watch the cars going up and down for a while. It doesn't look so bad here but I was looking down somewhat - tilt your head to the left a bit!

Ok time to take a few photos and stitch them together to form a panorama. We have arrived at the castle which looms over behind us opposite the view you see here. For those who wish to try their hand at spotting the joins there are four photos...

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Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury is one of England's most famous cathedrals. Building commenced in 1220 - late for an English cathedral, but we must remember that Salisbury grew only once the old hillfort city of Old Sarum was abandoned. The Norman cathedral at Old Sarum was built from 1075-1092.

The famous spire is England's tallest at 404 feet or 123 metres and leans around 27 inches from the vertical.

This is the oldest working clock in Europe. It was made in 1386 and originally installed in a bell tower that was demolished in 1798. It is still ticking away and the cathedral website informs us (and I love this!) that it has ticked more than 5 million times since it first started measuring the time! Actually it is probably two and a half million ticks and two and a half million tocks...

Despite never having been an abbey it has cloisters - not sure what it is about walking around a cloister but I always have to do it when visiting somewhere with one! And this is the largest cloister in England.

The great treasure of Salisbury is the best preserved copy of the original Magna Carta, agreed by King John at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 and which laid down the beginnings of English law, since copied around the world. Thirteen copies of the Magna Carta were made, only four of which still exist. Two are in the British Library and one lies at Lincoln within the castle. The one at Salisbury was taken originally to the cathedral at Old Sarum. It is written in extremely small writing on a single piece of parchment in Medieval Latin.

At Runnymede King John was urged to sign by his half brother, William Longspeé. A sculpture of this moment can be seen in the cathedral and William was buried there between two of the Nave pillars. In another wonderful bit of gossip, the cathedral website informs us that when his tomb was opened after many centuries there was a dead rat with traces of arsenic in it found lying inside his skull. A strange way to die, poisoned by a poisoned rat eating its way into your head - you'd have thought someone would have noticed and shooed it away... One possibility to be considered is that perhaps it was William who was poisoned and that the unfortunate rat chose the wrong head to eat into...

There are some fine carvings in the cathedral and the following photographs concentrate on them.

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Exeter Cathedral

Saturday 26 August 2023. We decided to go into the cathedral at Exeter and have a look around.

Cathedral Close usually, I imagine, is a haven of peace and tranquility but a drumming troupe were being very successful at destroying all of that very loudly and with a great deal of repetition of rhythm, something akin to rhythm, and sometimes (most of the time) just general noisome row.

A craft market was taking place before the door of the cathedral with all sorts of home-made articles from jewellery, to soap, artwork, and beer.

Quite a large number of statues still stand in their niches on the West front of the cathedral. The cathedral was founded in 1050 CE and rebuilt by the Normans whose twin towers still exist. Apart from these and most of the external walls the cathedral was rebuilt again during the late 13th and 14th centuries.

We paid to go inside, but the chancel area and most of the south aisle were roped off due to restoration work. The price was modest but whether that was because of the works restricting access or their usual price I'm not sure. There were no signs to say one way or the other. Consequently you were left feeling a little aggrieved as the chancel with its choirstalls and (especially here in Exeter) the misericords are usually the place to find the best carvings and woodwork. From the back of the nave, though, you get a spectacular view.

Exeter has the longest uninterrupted medieval vaulted ceiling in the world. It is stunning. Moreover, it is well lit by the windows the absence of which can leave many cathedral roofs in shadowy darkness. Henrietta Anne of England, the youngest daughter of King Charles I, was baptised here in 1644.

The Martyrs' Pulpit towards the chancel end of the nave. Carved in the 1870s in sandstone, it has six panels depicting martryrs who have died for their faith. It is dedicated to Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, who only a few years prior to this pulpit being made had been killed in 1871 by the islanders of Nukapu in the Soloman Isles.

Without being judgemental, I'll just point out that being a missionary requires one to persuade a population that the god or gods they have worshipped for centuries if not longer are either worthless or are the same as yours anyway and that your way of worshipping is better than theirs. You won't be able to provide any actual proof of this. Hardly surprising that they might take a bit of umbrage really. And indeed the panel depicting him shows his body being placed into a canoe by three natives, to be returned to his ship. Not the act of a people who killed for fun...

The screen separates the nave from the chancel, where the crossing would be if the cathedral had a central tower. Above it is the organ. The keyboards are on the other side to that which we see here and there is a minstrel's gallery with carved angels playing musical instruments.

The Astronomical Clock has a bottom dial dating from 1484 whilst the upper dial showing the minutes was added in 1760.

At the bottom of the door below the clock is a small round hole dating from the early 1600s. It allowed the Bishop's cat to get behind to chase out (let's be optimistic) the rodents that were attracted to the animal fat with which the clock was lubricated!

The monument to Valentine Carey who, following a spell as Dean of St Pauls in London, was Bishop of Exeter from 1621 to his death in 1626. He had returned to London to die and was buried in St Pauls. Any monument he had there did not survive the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Coach Trip to Sidmouth, August 2023, Index
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Beverley Minster

Tuesday 6 June 2023. Staying for a few days in Bridlington, we caught the 121 bus service from Bridlington to Beverley to have a look at the Minster. Officially it is the Parish Church of St John and Saint Martin. It was originally a Collegiate Church - it is not a cathedral.

The journey took just over an hour and from Beverley bus station it was a short walk to the Minster, with plenty of signposts pointing the way. It has an ancient past. St John of Beverley was Archbishop of York from 706 to c714 and had founded a monastery at Beverley c700. He was canonised as a saint in 1037 - still in Saxon times - and somewhat incredibly his remains still lie beneath the nave of the present church. The Saint John of the church's name is, however, St John the Baptist - not it's own saint.

The original church was destroyed c850 perhaps, if not probably, by Vikings. It was rebuilt and re-endowed by England's first king, King Athelstan, grandson of King Alfred the Great in the first half of the 10th century. It was rebuilt again in stone following the canonisation of the saint, a high stone tower was added several years before the Norman Conquest and the Minster became a place of pilgrimage for worshippers wishing to see and pray at the shrine of St John of Beverley.

An enclosed wooden staircase. I don't know any other details I'm afraid, it may have led to the organ or to somewhere else. I've done searches for it but they all lead to a stone spiral staircase for going up the towers or to an interior staircase set into the internal wall of the North Choir Aisle which led to a now demolished Chapter House. If you know, please leave a comment.

There are some fascinating carvings, both in stone and wood. Whilst we have a look at some of these I'll just carry on with the history a bit.

Nothing remains of the Saxon churches now. A major fire in 1188 left the Minster in need of a total rebuild and the earliest work in the present church dates from this time.

Work to complete the Minster took several hundreds of years. There were a few hiccups along the way. The collapse of a new lantern tower required parts of the building to be started again. The Black Death halted work around 1348 until towards the end of the century.

The Nave was completed by c1400 and the west twin towers were built. It is said that they were the inspiration for the towers of Westminster Abbey.

A bit of stone sculpture instead of wood. Again, I've no idea who this lady represents. Neither can I work out from her expression whether she is in rapt prayer or looking up at her husband and thinking "thou great numpty!"

Standing towards the western end of the southern aisle of the Nave, these two statues flank a doorway. They were cast from lead in 1781 and depict King Athelstan on the left (would he really have dressed like that in the 900s?) and Saint John of Beverley on the right.

The fabulous font of Frosterley marble is a remarkable survivor of the earliest Norman church and dates from c1170. The wooden cover or canopy is 18th century.

Looking west from the back of the Nave towards the organ which was built by John Snetzler and set up in the Minster in 1769. The screen was carved by a local, James Elwell in 1880.

The West Front of the Minster is unusual for the number of statues it still contains. Many of our cathedrals lost theirs in those mirthless Puritanical times. Originally they would all have been bright with paint and gilding.

Bridlington, 2023 Index
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