More Spires Of City Churches
St Lawrence Jewry, Gresham St
I waited so long for a clear day to take pictures of spires in the City of London that, when we were blessed with several, I could not resist taking as many photographs as possible. Such has been my preoccupation that, in future, I shall always be inclined now to think of clear days early in the year as “ideal weather to photograph church spires in the City.”
Yet there were other obstacles beyond the meteorological that I had to contend with in my quest for spires, not just delivery vans parked in the wrong places and people standing in front of churches making long mobile phone calls, but the over-zealous guard who challenged my motives as I stood with my camera upon the public footpath, suspiciously implying I might have sinister intent in photographing church spires – which could have grave implications for national security. “You realise this is the City of London,” he informed me in explanation of his impertinence, as if I could be unaware.
Fortunately, it is in the nature of photographing church spires that I had no choice but to lift up my eyes above these trifles of life and I was rewarded for my tenacity in the pursuit with all the wonders that you see here. In Rome or any other European capital, such a close gathering of architectural masterpieces would be venerated among the finest treasures of the city. In London, our overfamiliarity with these epic churches means they have become invisible and hardly anyone looks at them. Commonly, the ancient spires are overshadowed by the modern buildings which surround them today, yet I found – in many cases – that the act of focusing attention upon these under-appreciated edifices revealed them newly to my eyes.
St Mary Le Bow, Cheapside
St Margaret’s, Lothbury
St Vedast, Foster Lane
Christchurch Greyfriars, Newgate St
Christchurch Greyfriars, Newgate St
St Mary Le Bow, Cheapside
St Mary Le Bow, Cheapside
St Stephen, Walbrook
Whittington’s Almshouses, College Hill
St James, Garlickhythe
St Michael Paternoster Royal, College Hill
1 & 2 Lawrence Pountney Hill – Built in 1703, these are the finest surviving merchants’ houses in the City.
Churchyard of St Laurence Pountney
St Magnus the Martyr, Lower Thames St
St Dunstan in the East, Idol Lane
All Hallows Staining, Mark Lane
St Botolph’s, Aldgate
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The Consolation Of Schrodinger
I believe most will agree that life is far from easy and that dark moments are an inescapable part of human existence. When I feel sad, when I feel confused, when I feel conflicted, when it all gets too much and my head is crowded with thoughts yet I do not even know what to do next, I lie down on my bed to calm myself.
On such an occasion recently, I was lying in a reverie and my consciousness was merging with the patterns of the changing light on the ceiling, when I heard small footsteps enter the room followed by a soft clump as Schrodinger landed upon the coverlet in a leap.
I lifted my head for a moment and cast my eyes towards him and he looked at me askance, our eyes meeting briefly in the half-light of the shaded room before I lay my head back and he settled himself down at a distance to rest.
I resumed my contemplation, trying to navigate the shifting currents of troubling thoughts as they coursed through my head but drifting inescapably into emotional confusion. Suddenly my mind was stilled and halted by the interruption of the smallest sensation, as insignificant yet as arresting as a single star in a night sky.
Turning my head towards Schrodinger, I saw that he had stretched out a front leg to its greatest extent and the very tip of his white paw was touching my calf, just enough to register. Our eyes met in a moment of mutual recognition that granted me the consolation I had been seeking. I was amazed. It truly was as if he knew, yet I cannot unravel precisely what he knew. I only know that I was released from the troubles and sorrow that were oppressing me.
When he was the church cat, Schrodinger lived a public life and developed a robust personality that enabled him to survive and flourish in his role as mascot in Shoreditch. After these years living a private domestic life in Spitalfields, he has adapted to a quieter more intimate sequestered existence, becoming more playful and openly affectionate.
At bedtime now, he leaps onto the coverlet, rolling around like a kitten before retreating – once he has wished me goodnight in his own way – to the sofa outside the bedroom door where he spends the night. Thus each day with Schrodinger ends in an expression of mutual delight.
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Schrodinger’s First Year in Spitalfields
Dicky Lumskull’s Ramble Through London
Courtesy of Mike Henbrey, it is my pleasure to publish this three-hundred-year-old ballad of the London streets and the trades you might expect to find in each of them, as printed and published by J. Pitts, Wholesale Toy & Marble Warehouse, 6 Great St Andrew Street, Seven Dials
Copyright © Mike Henbrey Collection
GLOSSARY
by Spitalfields Life Contributing Slang Lexicographer Jonathon Green
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Tower Hamlets Adverts 1967
Last call for Walter Donohue’s Screenwriting Course on 5th & 6th April. We have just three places left. Click here for further information.
Walter Donohue, Jeanne Moreau and Wim Wenders filming ‘Until The End of the World’ in Australia in 1991.
Stefan Dickers, archivist at Bishopsgate Institute discovered these wonderful advertisements in a History of Tower Hamlets produced by the council in 1967 and I could not resist showing them to you. It is poignant to contemplate these proud images of manufacturing and long-established local businesses which are now all gone.
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Adverts from the Jewish East End
Adverts from Stepney Borough Guide
Postcards From Petticoat Lane
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Today I am sending you postcards from Petticoat Lane. Here are the eager crowds of a century ago, surging down Middlesex St and through Wentworth St, everyone hopeful for a bargain and hungry for wonders, dressed in their Sunday best and out to see the sights. Yet this parade of humanity is itself the spectacle, making its way from Spitalfields through Petticoat Lane Market and up to Aldgate, before disappearing into the hazy distance. There is an epic quality to these teeming processions which, a hundred years later, appear emblematic of the immigrants’ passage through this once densely populated neighbourhood, where so many came in search of a better life.
At a casual glance, these old postcards are so similar as to be indistinguishable – but it is the differences that are interesting. On closer examination, the landmarks and geography of the streets become apparent and then, as you scrutinise the details of these crowded compositions, individual faces and figures stand out from the multitude. Some are preoccupied with their Sunday morning, while others raise their gaze in vain curiosity – like those gentlemen above, comfortable at being snapped for perpetuity whilst all togged up in their finery.
When the rest of London was in church, these people congregated to assuage their Sunday yearning in a market instead, where all temporal requirements might be sought and a necessary sense of collective human presence appreciated within the excited throng. At the time these pictures were taken, there was nowhere else in London where Sunday trading was permitted and, since people got paid in cash on Friday, if you wanted to buy things cheap at the weekend, Petticoat Lane was the only place to go. It was a dramatic arena of infinite possibility where you could get anything you needed, and see life too.
Images copyright © Bishopsgate Institute
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Laurie Allen of Petticoat Lane
The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
Inside The Model Of St Paul’s
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Simon Carter, Keeper of Collections at St Paul’s
In a hidden chamber within the roof of St Paul’s sits Christopher Wren’s 1:25 model of the cathedral, looking for all the world like the largest jelly mould you ever saw. When Charles II examined it in the Chapter House of old St Paul’s, he was so captivated by Wren’s imagination as manifest in this visionary prototype that he awarded him the job of constructing the new cathedral.
More than three hundred years later, Wren’s model still works its magic upon the spectator, as I discovered when I was granted the rare privilege of climbing inside to glimpse the view that held the King spellbound. While there is an austere splendour to the exterior of the model, I discovered the interior contains a heart-stopping visual device which was surely the coup that persuaded Charles II of Wren’s genius.
Yet when I entered the chamber in the triforium at St Paul’s to view the vast wooden model, I had no idea of the surprise that awaited me inside. Almost all the paint has gone from the exterior now, giving the dark wooden model the look of an absurdly-outsized piece of furniture but, originally, it was stone-coloured with a grey roof to represent the lead.
At once, you are aware of significant differences between this prototype and the cathedral that Wren built. To put it bluntly, the model looks like a dog’s dinner of pieces of Roman architecture, with a vast portico stuck on the front of the dome of St Peter’s in the manner of those neo-Georgian porches on Barratt Houses. Imagine a fervent hobbyist chopping up models of relics of classical antiquity and rearranging them, and this is the result. It is unlikely that this design would even have stood up if it had been built, so fanciful is the conception. Yet the long process of designing a viable structure, once he had been given instruction by Charles II, permitted Wren to reconcile all the architectural elements into the satisfying whole that we know today.
I had been tempted to visit the cathedral by an invitation to go inside the model but – studying it – I could not imagine how that could be possible. I could not see a way in. ‘Perhaps one end has hinges and Charles II crawled in on his hands and knees like a child entering a Wendy House?’ I was thinking, when Simon Carter, Keeper of Collections opened a door in the plinth and disappeared inside, gesturing me to follow. In blind faith, I dipped my head and walked inside.
When I stood up, I was beneath the dome with the floor of the cathedral at my chest height. There was just room for two people to stand together and I imagined the unexpected moment of intimacy between the Monarch and his architect, yet I believe Wren was quietly confident because he had a trick up his sleeve. From the inside, the drama of the architecture is palpable, with intersecting spaces leading off in different directions, and – as your eyes accustom to the gloom – you grow aware of the myriad refractions of light within this intricately-imagined interior.
Just as Wren directed Charles II, Simon Carter told me to walk to the far end of the model and sit on the bench placed there to bring my eye level down to the point of view of someone entering through the great west door. Then Simon left me there inside, just as I believe Wren left Charles II within the model, to appreciate the full effect.
I have no doubt the King was thrilled by this immersive experience, which quickly takes on a convincing reality of its own once you are alone. Charles II discovered himself confronted by a glorious vision of the future in which he was responsible for the first and greatest classically-designed church in this country, with the largest dome ever built. Such is the nature of the consciousness-filling reverie induced by sitting inside the model that the outside world recedes entirely.
How astonishing, once you have accustomed to the scale of the model, when a giant face appears filling the east window. I could not resist a gasp of wonder when I saw it and neither – I suggest – could Charles II when Christopher Wren’s smiling face appeared, grinning at him from the opposite end of the nave, apparently enlarged to twenty-five times its human scale.
In these unforgettable circumstances, the King could not avoid the realisation that Wren was a colossus among architects and – unquestionably – the man for the job of building the new St Paul’s Cathedral. The model worked its spell.
Behold, the largest jelly mould in the world!
The belfry that was never built
The single portico that was replaced by a two storey version
Just a few fragments of paintwork remain upon the exterior
Original paintwork can be seen inside the model
Charles II’s point of view from inside the model
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In The Roof Of St Paul’s Cathedral
On the right of this photograph, taken in the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, is the concave wall of the outer dome and curving away to the left is the convex wall of the painted inner dome that sits inside it, just like an enormous boiled egg beneath a cosy. It is a strange configuration which means the lower dome does not have the bear the weight of the dome roof, and which creates extraordinary incidental spaces that never cease to fascinate me whenever I return to scale this majestic cathedral.
Once I am through the main door, passing all the visitors standing and gazing at the vaulted cathedral ceiling far overhead, I go straight to the entrance to the roof. This was where I came the very first time I was ever permitted to visit London on my own as a child, and I have returned consistently through all the intervening years without disappointment.
Leaving the nave and ascending the stairs, you enter a different St Paul’s – no longer the monumental space dedicated to public worship but a warren of staircases and narrow passages that enable people to run like rats within the walls and emerge again to peer down at their world askance. If you are lucky, your initial burst of enthusiasm will carry you clattering up the wide spiral stairs to the height of the nave roof. At the head of these, formal elegance ceases as you turn left into a crooked passage and right, up a steep, tapering staircase which is only as wide as your shoulders, and where you must lean forward when the ceiling lowers to child height, before – without warning and quite unexpectedly – you step out into the cavernous void of the Whispering Gallery.
This was where I was transfixed by vertigo on my first visit. Sitting perched upon the tenuous balcony that circumscribes the dome with my back to the wall, the emptiness was overwhelming and the expectation of imminent collapse tangible. To this day it remains the most intense spatial experience that I know. I see the space contained by the great dome overhead and the aisles stretching below in four directions and it sets my head reeling, and I cannot avoid envisaging the dome spinning out of kilter and collapsing in an apocalypse. I can feel the magnetism to leap into the nothingness as if it were a great pool. Even the paintings upon the dome fill me with dread that the figures will fall from their precarious height. And each time I come there I must sit, while whispers fly around me, and make peace with these feelings before I can leave.
Sobered by the initial climb and awed by the Whispering Gallery, visitors usually take a moment to relax and scrutinise the views from the Stone Gallery that runs around the base of the exterior dome. Here I sat with my father while he recovered himself, when he came to visit me once when I first moved to London. As we discussed the idle spectacle of the view, I became aware for the first time that he was failing and growing old, and was quietly ashamed of my thoughtlessness in bringing him, when I knew it would be a point of honour for him not to admit to any struggle.
From here you climb into the interior of the domed roof – laced with iron staircases, spiralling and twisting around the central brick cone, like a giant pie funnel, that supports the lantern at the very top. Every wall tilts or curves or arches in a different direction and there is no longer any sense of height, you could equally be underground. Let me confide, on this recent visit, to my surprise and for the first time, this was where I experienced disorientation. I found myself in a space without a horizontal floor and barely any vertical services, hundreds of feet in the air, sandwiched between the roof dome with the sky above and the interior dome beneath – promoting morbid thoughts of smashing through this inner dome to fall like one of the figures from the paintings on the other side of the wall.
Yet as before, none of these grim fantasies were realised and I came safely to the Golden Gallery at the very top of the cathedral, two hundred and eighty feet above the ground. There is a spyhole in the floor there – God’s eye view – that allowed me to look right down through both domes to the floor below where the crowds crept like ants. And then, with the great dome beneath me, I could gaze out upon the city from a point of security, and free of vertigo.
When I climbed back down to ground level, I looked up to the dome from underneath and saw the speck of light from the spyhole and knew that to whoever was gazing at that moment I was now one of the ants. In medieval cathedrals, the focus of the architecture was upon the altar but at St Paul’s it is directly under the dome, where anyone can stand and be at the centre of things. The scale and ingenuity of St Paul’s are both an awe-inducing human achievement and one that makes people feel small too – a suitable irony in a great cathedral designed by a man named after the smallest bird, Wren.
I shall continue to return and climb up to the dome as long as I am able, because my trips to the roof at St Paul’s offer contradictory experiences that unlock me from the day to day. It is a reliable adventure which always delights, surpassing my recollections and revealing new wonders, because the vast scale and intricate configuration of this astounding edifice defy the capacity of the human mind to hold it in memory.
At the foot of the stair.
Iron staircases spiral in the hidden space between the inner and the outer domes of the cathedral
Looking through from the top of the lantern down to the floor two hundred and seventy feet below
Looking from the floor to the dome and the lantern above
