Big Churches in Little Europe
Created | Updated Dec 13, 2012
1. Notre Dame (Paris)
I thought I would start with the most famous church in the world. I know that many of you will know that St Peter's in Rome is the most famous or maybe St Sophia's in Instambul. However, I haven't seen St Peter's and St Sophia's is no longer a church. That makes the Cathedral Church of Our Lady (who presumably is also the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokas, God's bearer, aka Mary mother of Jesus) in Paris as my occupier of the role.
Among the most important observations about this magnificent building is that it is a working church, it is in the most romantic city in the world (easy to prove) and it is very, very ugly from the front. All of the best representations of Notre Dame in Paris are either drawings in Disney cartoons or pictures taken from the river looking west. I still think it is an amazing church and deserves its reputation but it is difficult to get a decent photograph of a loved one using the western end as the background. It has a huge frontage with a very flat square look that is exacerbated by the stone railings that run between the two massive towers. These hide any roof line that would provide an interesting angle in your visual composition. The plaza out the front is fairly dusty and featureless in the way that is typical for Paris as well. The busking acts can be quite good.
Once you go inside the feel of the place is very different. There is no fee and although the queues can be very long, they move quickly. Once in the church the crowd moves up one side, around the back and then down the other and out the door. To follow the crowd would be a mistake even if they do manage the whole building quite quickly.
Firstly you can buy big candles to light and remember and pray. Not every one will want to pray but the church is dark and the light means something even when it is massed with the other lights in the candle stand. If you have anything in your life that deserves that candle, then pay your Euros and, more importantly, give some time over to a moment thinking about that thing. If I were less cynical I would suggest that this was a building purpose made for it.
Another thing you can do is go to the centre of the church and sit down. This is a big space hollowed out of a big city and in the dark it is easy to ignore the circling crowds out from which you slipped.
For all of this silence and reflexion talk, Notre Dame is not made principally for introversion. This is a metropolitan cathedral built as a demonstration of wealth, power, civic unity and as a statement of the city's most powerful people of their commitment to God (and perhaps their expectations of God's con-commitment to them). If you want peace, go to the country side. The window glass is extraordinary and quite a bit of it is just short of a thousand years old. The south and north facing round (rose) windows of blue glass captivates me for as much time as I have.
As you go head to the back there is a wooden church within the church (known as the choir stalls) which is used for smaller services. In some cathedrals it fully enclosed with a wooden or stone screen at the front but here it is open at the front so you could see right into it when you came in. The backs of the stalls, as you walk around, have wood medieval carved scenes from the Life of Christ (as it is known) which are not realistic but instructional. Even when the crowds are in full flow, you can still pause at each one. During my last visit the flow took me around them in the reverse order to the story so I wandered back against the flow and looked at them a second time in the right order.
In terms of church services and the like, I can't comment. I have been in the building during the Saturday evening vigil mass. The cathedral remained open to the tourists and the people attending the service sat in the middle towards the front. The service was conducted by a single priest and two singers and it felt as if they didn't try and take over the space. It was a bit wan. However, it was midsummer and many churches loose choirs, clergy and other staff leaving services fairly lean.
One thing that always seems to be true, and this is the only church I have ever seen this, is that two or three of the little side chapels each have a robed priest sitting in them during the day. The chapels have been glassed in and have a desk and comfy chairs giving them a functional privacy. There always seem to be people making use of this facility. If you have a problem and want to see someone then this place is open for business.
This cathedral is the heart of Paris regardless of your views of the roles of Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph or even the Hotel de Ville. It certainly looks the part and through sympathetic management of the space, free entry and easy availability of the staff it keeps its religious function open to all.
2. St Mungo's (Glasgow)
The Glaswegians have done much to preserve their Cathedral. During the reformation in the 16th Century many of their historic churches underwent involuntary refurbishment. In Glasgow the city's entire compliment of master tradesmen turned out and protected their cathedral against its reconstruction. What they preserved is a delight.
Unlike Paris (or London) Glasgow's centre has moved around over the years and the city's cathedral is now quite a way out of the centre. It is only a ten minute walk but you do need to make an effort to get to it.
The building itself is quite small but it is beautifully proportioned. The amount of detail in the construction completely disguises how small it is (my guess is that the main part of the building would seat just about 500). It is a proper medieval building with all of the little stonework jokes that the stone masons inevitably added to buildings like this: little frogs in unexpected places, "green men" with flowers and vines sprouting out of their mouths and so on.
As you go to the front (this isn't a church swamped with visitors, you may even be the only ones) there is an ancient wall that separates the front and the back. At various times it has been bigger and smaller. It originally provided the western wall to the church within a church needed by the monks who used the choir space for their six services a day, allowing the rest of the church to be used for other things. During the reformation, the post-reformed had one half of the church and the pre-reformed had the other and the wall was extended to the roof and used to keep them apart. Now many services are held in the front part of the church (which is a fair proportion of the space) or in the back part, depending on the type of service.
The wall also has two sets of grand stairs leading either side down into the under-church. It was built as a crypt but now it hosts the most delightful space, beautifully decorated with love, containing the mortal remains of Glasgow's patron saint Mungo. It is a fundamental fact of religion that the way people live it bears little relation to formal church policy. I am fairly sure that the official Scottish Reformed rules do not contain provisions for the veneration of dead saints by candles, embroidery and flowers. However, the patron saints of old, major cities like Glasgow do not belong to the clergy and never have. They belong to the people of their city (as do their cathedrals) and those people will do as they damn well please which is often what their parents did before them.
Much of the window glass is German from the same period of the Arts and Crafts period in the UK and France. Unfortunately it was done on the cheap and is fading. It took for ever for the city, parishioners and cathedral authorities to decide to get it. Now they are trying to preserve it. It may be only a short amount of time before it goes into a museum and is replaced.
Church services are pure Scot's Reformed done in a good way but, I will admit, not really to my taste and perhaps a bit out of touch with the pre-reformation character of the building and decorations. I am not a Scot nor terribly reformed so I will leave commenting on the service quality to those who are expert. If you wanted to find a clerical reverend for prayer, assistance or advice I am sure you could ask one of the volunteer staff wandering about and it would be organised quickly and with minimal fuss.
Next door is the St Mungo's Museum of Contemporary Religion which is a wonderful example of its type. It is not particularly centred on Christianity and even includes a nice example of Australian pre-colonial religious art (the painting itself is post colonial) which I didn't expect to see. The second floor of the exhibition is a bit of a dud but it isn't expensive and worth the trip. You can also leave your bags there. The cafe looked to be well priced.
3. St Paul's (London)
If there is a church that is more easily recognisable in the context of its city, I cannot think of one more recognisable than St Paul's Cathedral in London. From the river, it absolutely dominates the city skyline with its huge dome and golden cross. Sometimes I think it is a fabulous civic statement and at other times, especially after reading too much HP Lovecraft, it appears to be a sinister lurking stone toad crouching over the skyline (credit for this thought also to the novel Tipping the Velvet). Most churches in big cities surprise you when you come across them. St Paul's can surprise you from a distance.
The Great Fire of London gave the City Authorities the opportunity to make a contempoary civic statement that would resonate around Europe and the City's trading partners. This building is a message to the world about what London thought its place was in 17th Century Europe both on earth and, perhaps, in heaven.
Iperhaps, then, it is appropriate that it is very expensive to get in. For people from anywhere other than the UK this can be a real shock. I don't know if there is a way to get around the price of entry other than to go to a service. I have never paid and I have gone to quite a few services so I cannot write about what it would be like to see it as a tourist.
The English version of the reformation created some real gems (and quite a lot of dead people). Among the gems were cathedral choirs, matins and evensong. My personal view is to avoid going to Mass or a Eucharist at an English cathedral and instead go to sung matins on a Sunday morning. It is nearly always more intimate, the words are nearly entirely drawn from the bible (and not just the easy bits) and the music is extraordinary - often ethereal, discordant and harmonically challenging and all sung by children and men.
So St Paul's offers a half way decent matins on a Sunday morning (except when they cancel it - check the website). The actual service really does make use of the space. When a service is running, tourists are herded to the back by unfriendly staff who give the impression that they have cattle prods under their jackets and that they would not be afraid to use them (I have never seen this happen but then I have never dared force the issue either). This has good points and bad points. Zero out of ten for approachability but it does mean that when a service takes place and you are there, you have the entire church for your joint contemplation.
And it is quite a good one - very modern for its day and it still has a very clean ambiance. It seats about 2000 people and has a roof height to match. The dome is a lot smaller on the inside but you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. The floors are made of huge slabs of black and white stone that remove any sense of fussiness. There are also only ever enough chairs set out as will be needed which also empties up the space.
Despite the very strong non-verbal message given by the officers at the front doors, if a service is scheduled and you say are you going, then they will let you go up to the front and sit down. Service booklets and any thing else you will need is provided and they don't stint. There is not much support for non-English speakers but nobody is let a microphone at St Paul's unless they have a perfect establishment accent.
The biggest problem with the church service thing is the echo. People laughingly describe a 10 second delay between talking in a place like St Paul's and hearing the echo. In this building it is no joke. Although I have heard the choir sing many times and I believe it is amongst the best in the world, on a Sunday what they sing and what I hear are on different time continua.
Sunday mass is grand and very popular but it doesn't do it for me. There is too much gold, the ritual is too arms length (I am not sure the 10 or so clergy notice the people sitting in front of them much) and the crowd of strangers is too big (often they get 1000 people to a Sunday service of which about 40 are regular attendees). 8am, which is said in the choir stalls, is far better suited to the space but it is very, very traditional which at least is congruous with everything about the place.
A note on the church decorations. The ceiling of the front end is extraordinary and you would be a sad person to get tired of it. The floor is dotted with statues of grand men being adored by classical nymphs (many naked and sometimes being groped by the grand men) which I find amusing. The woodwork of the choir stalls is full of fat faced cherubs which I just don't understand. The grand men (and their nymphs) are there because someone paid a lot of money for the privilege but who paid for the cherubs?
4 San Lorenzo's (Perugia)
Sometime you are wandering through an ex-Roman fortified hill town in northern Italy admiring what the Romans did for others and you realise that the big building ahead of you is possibly a church, or a fort, or a town hall. It is hard to tell. Because around the square with the massive fountain are huge civic buildings that all are roughly the same size, are made from the same stone, have just a few random windows and balconies and share much of the same roof.
It turns out that one of them is a church.
In the ancient order of things in this part of Europe, every big town had a bishop and a cathedral. Parish priests were for rural villages and roving work. In the last hundred years a lot of rationalisation has taken place and the vast majority of these bishops and cathedrals have been downgraded. In Italy it is now traditional to talk about the Duomo for the big church in the centre of a town and nobody uses Cattedrale much unless they are being very precise.
Perugia is in a large hill fort town that the Romans left to the locals and the big building to the north of the square turns out, indeed, to be the Duomo.
Inside it has typical 13th century northern Italy stone work. It is easy to go ho-hum but there are in fact very few buildings that old anywhere in the world that could be put to everyday use. The ceiling paintings are a mish-mash of renaissance styles with a good dose of rococo and whatever else seemed like a good idea. I liked them and spent hours staring up at clouds and colour and splendour. Obviously there is quite a bit of scaffolding around because the only way a building like the Perugia Duomo is going to stay up is if you keep putting it back up faster than it can fall down.
Perugia is an amazingly delightful city to spend a few days in and if you are a musical fan, go there for one of the festivals they hold there. The Duomo hosts quite a bit and the other buildings around the square and in the neighbouring villages do their bit. The local university has one of the best music faculties in Europe as well.
Nobody objects to cameras anywhere including in the church so you can you can take pictures to remember the place. It is easy to compose good photos inside.
Unlike many churches with their strict cruciform layout, Perugia is built like a huge hall with sticky-outy bits. The services take place up the front but there is no special place for the choir to sit - they fit to one side by the organ console (which is also on the ground floor next to a pillar). Behind the altar area is a small chapel with seats fixed in a semi-circular array and I am sure that it is used for private prayer. After my time in the church, my experience is that you could use pretty much anywhere in the church to sit down and contemplate the ineffable because apart from the odd person wearing too little (one girl did get asked to cover up a bit) there didn't seem to be too many rules.
I did stay on for the Saturday evening vespers and vigil mass during my visit. The vespers were completely opaque to me as I don't speak Italian (at least not to the level needed to follow an unfamiliar church service) and the music was a dreary chant by the leader and an even drearier chant by everybody else back. I don't think that the musical tradition of the big church institutions of every part of Europe has the same support as the Anglicans in England gives to theirs.
The mass, though, had the organ playing, which I can report is played by an extremely skilled musician, and a visiting choir who knew what they were doing (they sang a Latin choral setting).
There was something about the church which I came to admire. The understated way that the staff went about their business while setting up before the service, the ability of the organist and the integrity of the people who came along all contributed to a sense of order and significance.
Once I got home, I looked up the Duomo status of Perugia. Not only has the town kept its bishop and therefore the church has kept its role as a cathedral, but the bishop is one of the few Italian Archbishops. To give this some context, England has 2 and the UK has only 5 archbishops in total. This was a church that was free, easy and welcoming (provided you were dressed for a European city and not for the beach) but still had the confidence to take itself and the people it served seriously. Mind you, with Assisi as the next town on the railway line shich also under this cathedral church's protection, a little of religious gravitas was not inappropriate.
5 Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert (Durham)
A famous travel writer describes Durham Cathedral as the best in the world. I have no idea if it is or isn't but it is pretty good.
As you come into Durham on the train (or woosh past at 115 miles per hour) the castle and the Cathedral stand out on the rocky promontory, high against the rush of river and time. When you get closer to the building itself, you are left with the impression that it was built to last. Once you get inside, impressions be damned, you know that it was built to last.
This isn't a light and airy building. It's huge/overwhelming construction is built basically straight upon the rock of the promontory over the river that surrounds the city. There are no foundations. The pillar bases are huge, standing directly on the ground. The pillars themselves a big drums and not slender trees. The far off roof clearly rests on them and the architect does nothing to distract you from their function, drawing the eye to each pillar with striking geometrical patterns carved deeply into them.
The bishop's seat is an amazing testament to power and politics. For many years after the Normans finished their reverse coup (in 1066), the Bishop of Durham was routinely appointed from among the younger sons of the king. The bishop had powers to legislate (since revoked) and run the north west of England as he saw fit. The fact the walled Durham Castle, built as the home of the prince bishops, is collocated with the cathedral is not an accident. The seat in question is on a pedestal 15 feet off the floor and tastefully decorated in a style suited to the younger sons of kings.
The whole cathedral works visually. Yet there was obviously a problem from an engineering point of view because the eastern end fell down within fifty years of it being constructed. It turns out that some of the church was built on rock and some on sand. When you walk around the eastern end, you will notice it is now much lower. That is because they still didn't want to use foundations so the number of steps down matches the amount of material they had to remove to get to the next layer of rock.
I like this place. The floor decorations between the choir stalls are made from swirling patterns or different coloured stone. The embroidery (head downstairs at the eastern end) is very, very good. The roof is simplicity itself with plain rounded arched stone work. The church was built to be a cathedral from the start but also was a monastery. If you walk right through the church at the western end, there is another door that leads to the monk's cloisters - a huge grassy courtyard surrounded by an intricately carved stone walkway. Through all of that there is a dark passage to the Chapel of the Holy Cross which is a cold, simple space that suggests nothing except silence. Given the crowds of people who can descend onto this heritage listed site, the silence can be quite welcome for 10 minutes. There are also some lovely gardens out there too.
If you are a fan of saints you can visit Cuthbert, who is still thought of kindly by the locals, and Bede, who started the modern approach to writing history. Both should still be there when you visit since they haven't gone anywhere in a long, long time.
From the various services I have experienced here, I can say that they are excellent. There are some points that may be too formal - occasionally you wonder where the fine line between dignified and OCD lies. However the organ is good and loud and the choir knows how to sing. I have no idea if they do more contemporary services. The mood of the place is to look back to the Benedictine tradition of the monastery rather than forward to new sounds. I think this is a fair decision.
6 St Peters (Adelaide)
I will admit, and offer no argument, that St Peter's Cathedral in Adelaide is neither a big church nor is it anywhere near Europe.
So, moving on, this is an iconic building for its city and it occupies a site just to the north of the Adelaide Oval (famous for its international cricket matches). A consequence of its location next to the park is that it is easily seen from a lot of places because Adelaide's park-lands are huge and the church is on a bit of a hill.
When Adelaide was built it was built on two small rises a mile apart with parks, the cricket oval and a small, regularly flooding watercourse between them. South Adelaide, as it was then known, became the main city with the shops and rich people's houses. North Adelaide (as it is still known) was where the less exciting and poor people would live. The whole colony of South Australia would be ruled under the British flag, there would be no state religion and oppression would end.
Within a few years the Church of England made a land grab in the centre of South Adelaide to build a cathedral and within a few months and a court case, the non-established church was suddenly looking at possible sites in North Adelaide. The dissenting burghers of the city (rich half) were overjoyed.
With all of that colonial history in mind, a walk around St Peter's shows that an interesting proportion of the church fabric was donated by the wealthy dissenting burghers. The building is a testament of the lure of established religion to all kinds of wealth even when it is not established and neither are the wealthy.
In some ways the building is very plain - the outside stone work is more interesting than the grey cement render used inside - but the wood work is second to none that I have seen. There is a consistent use of oak (both Australian native "oaks" and the European variety) which unifies the extensive panelling on the perimeter walls, the choir stalls, the insanely huge carved back piece and the hanging crucifix in the centre. The various bits were carved, donated and installed at various times over the building's 150 year history and some things are very modern while other things are reassuringly 19th Century fake-old. They do sit well together.
If you would like just to sit in the quiet, the place to go is the semi-circular chapel at the very back. It's soaring roof and huge stained glass windows make it a beautifully proportioned space. The statue of the Mary Mother of Jesus on the wall is a top class piece of modern enamelled sculpture as well and she adds a mixture of vigilance and serenity to the atmosphere.
Church services are run on the smell of an oily rag. The bigger churches in places like Australia have lovely buildings but their only operating cash is what goes into the plate on a Sunday. There are the expected crowds of people up front walking with candles, fetching and carrying obscure items and singing, yet all but one or two are volunteers. Everybody believes in excellence but nobody would be seen to be trying too hard and upsetting the smooth running of the team. Quite Australian in thought and action.
The organ has a terrific tone but don't sit in row J as that is the row where the sound from the back returns in its echo to muddy the sound coming from the front.
7 The Holy and Undivided Trinity (Ely)
Sometimes when you approach a great building, a sense of unity and singularity of purpose washes over you. Other times, no matter which way you approach it, the building looks as if there were four structures leveraged into place by space ships and forcefully jammed together. As it happens I think Ely Cathedral is a great building yet I won't say it is architecturally coherent from the outside.
Ely itself is a tiny village that doesn't even rate a market charter I believe. It is in the middle of a drained marsh that extends for 20 or more miles in most directions and is built on the only hill. In the right light, the cathedral can be seen from 50 miles away (well, if you are standing on the top of the corresponding cathedral tower in Peterborough). The cathedral hillside is surrounded by fields containing farm animals, probably the only place you could farm animals in the fens for millennia until they were drained by Henry VIII.
Once inside you are confronted with an extraordinary long thin tall building. The roof is painted in a pre-Raphaelite style showing a mixture of agrarian vine patterns with the odd transported religious figure. There is a mirror on trolley that you wheel up and down to stare at the ceiling without cricking your neck. In the centre under the eight sided tower (it looks like stone but is made of wood) the swirling leaf and vine patterns get more interesting and the religious figures more transported and surrounded by fabulous blue glass.
Ely underwent a spot of redecoration during the time of Henry VIII, the same one who, as noted before, is also famous for draining the fens. The delight, to my eyes, is that Henry's troops took their orders to rid the church of the faces of every saintly stone figure in a rather strict fashion. Out the side (northern) via a nice little passage you can enter the Lady Chapel, recognisable by the figure of a large, buxom, friendly, blue statue of a lady perpetually throwing herself off the eastern wall under the windows there. Around the edge of the chapel must be a hundred or so statues of saints carved into the stonework, all with their heads very carefully knocked off. There is one head still in place but you have to look harder than, I presume, the soldiers did to find it.
There are few places anywhere that, I think, you see in one space the passion people felt during the reformation for getting rid of the old ways of doing things and bringing in the modern. The Pre-Raphaelite redecoration of the 19th Century shows a corresponding delight of putting things back again but in new ways.
I have never found Ely a particularly good place to find quiet and peace. Partly because outside is already quiet and peaceful (and maybe a bit dull) but also because the Cathedral provides too much in it too see and hear. Conversely to big cities, the Cathedral here is a hub of culture and excitement for the enormous rural community of the fens. It feels like it seeks to make life bigger and better, rather than to provide respite from unrelenting noise, aggression and bustle.
The few services that I have been to were quite good humoured and the singing was as haunting as the images on the roof and the headless saints would demand. Last time I was there was the Sunday evening a week after Christmas and we all sang carols for an hour since it was going to be Christmas until the 6th of January and, heck, we love singing Christmas carols with a big choir, a small orchestra and a noisy organ. I like their attitude.
8 Asakusa Temple and Shrine (Tokyo)
In Tokyo, and the rest of Japan as far as I know, they take their religion very seriously. More accurately, they appear to take their religion very seriously if one is to judge by the vast number of small shrines that dot the back streets of the city. I, of course, have no idea what really goes on. Every couple of hundred yards you find a small site with a little temple or shrine and some written-on stone or wood upright panels placed outside. The buildings are extremely traditional in design and might be models for drawings by Australian children as perfect Japanese buildings.
There are also big, complex places. Given Japan has supported a mixture of native Shinto and imported Buddhist spiritual traditions for a long time now, at the major religious sites there are buildings for both styles existing side by side. Re-enforcing the notion of a religious site are the stalls and street scapes immediately around these complexes. These are shops to buy and sell food, religious items and provide parade routes with traditional archways, colour and displays. Going to these big religious sites is a day out rather than somewhere to sit for 20 minutes in the middle of a busy life.
You can catch a ferry boat from the main ferry terminus in the bay area. As a tourist the cost is about the same compared to travelling any other way. The trip along the amazing and huge canal system (maybe we should call Venice the "Tokyo of the West") is amazing and worth the detour (if, for you, it is a detour).
Japanese culture famously calls for unity of landscape, architecture, body and spirit. Unlike the English who love their church yards to be either wildlife sanctuaries or formal lawns and gardens, the Japanese love their spiritual places to complete in themselves, curated and tended. Gravel is raked into patterns, lakes are shaped to be pleasing and trees are planted exactly with regard to leaf colour, density and pattern. Perhaps they mirror the European monastic tradition where within the boundaries of the religious site should be included representations of the most important things of the whole world.
The complex at Asakusa is a very interesting place and there are signs in lots of languages explaining it all. It is also very busy, even for central Tokyo. You can take photos of everything bar one. One gentleman engaged in ritualised clapping beside a smaller shrine and, after finishing got out his camera and repeated his claps for his camera. The single exception to photography is the Buddhist temples where it is prohibited.
Families come to this place for life events. Two daughters and their parents, in fully traditional dress, headed down the path towards the lake, walking between massive and very ancient carved, stone lanterns.
It is in places like this that many of the similarities of religious experience are obviously common to the human condition but culturally so distinct. The shapes of the buildings and the tending of the garden is localised and quite Japanese, but no more so than the gardens and architecture of Australian churches and churchyards is architypically Australian. It was how people use the space that was very different with a focus much more on action than internal attitude. The Buddhist temple with its shoes off policy and no photos was familiar in that it required the visitor to engage with the space and modify their behaviour. The shrines, on the other hand were simply there in the same way the landscape is there. To pray is to join with the landscape, to landscape a place is to invite prayer.
This complex is in downtown Tokyo, so I'll not get too rhapsodic about its beauty, but the area definitely is a great place. There is a fabulous park and large lake nearby on the other side of the canal near the National Sumo Centre and the Edo Museum (of Tokyo). It was in the lake that we both saw three lucky carp leap out of the water before we caught our plane and got an upgrade to business class. I probably should know better, but I shall never be rude to a lucky carp again.
9 Church of Christ (Canterbury)
There are two or three totally stand-out churches in England and the city of Canterbury hosts one of them. In the middle ages its was the second most visited church in Western Europe after St Peter's Rome. If Henry II thought he was hurting the church in England by assassinating its archbishop all those years ago, he misunderstood the mindset of the pilgrims that flooded the cathedral with cash donations for the hundreds of years to follow. Not that it hurt the English Crown that much financially, as Henry VIII nationalised Canterbury Cathedral several hundred years later and took all of the money and gifts.
One of the consequences of the huge pilgrimage trade, and something Henry VIII could never appropriate, is that the town of Canterbury is full of tiny back streets that curl around the cathedral's walls and end up in clusters at its gates. Another is that the church still doesn't mind hitting the visitor for a sizable donation for entry. At least they have the courtesy to do it at the gate house and not at the church door. If you go within 15 minutes of a service starting, the gates are open to all. If you don't want to go to a service, then wander the extensive gardens until it is finished. Once you are in, you are in.
Within the walls is a huge complex of buildings, a school, hotel, many secret gardens, medieval town wall, administration offices, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Palace and any number of other things. If you stay at the hotel, you get a resident's free entry pass (which is nice) as well as a car park (which is amazing for central Canterbury). It is quite lovely to be locked within the walls at night, able to wander around while the outside world is without.
The building itself is a complex mixture of styles but each bunion (as I believe the Prince of Wales terms "modern" extensions to traditional buildings) seems to be well moulded into the main fabric. For a famous church, many parts of less grand than you might expect, bringing to me, at least, the realisation that this is a working albeit large church in Kent with its own daily issues to contend with (not least things breaking all of the time and needing to be replaced and the fact that ad-hoc solutions can come to stay forever).
Unlike other churches, such as Ely which are journeys through time and within the space in and around them, the Church of Christ in Canturbery is a series of places to explore. It isn't as seasonal as Perugia in Italy or Ely high in its fenland world but instead each room and garden is fixed in time and place - but there are so many it feels as if there is a different one for every day and mood.
There are a good number of services scheduled so if that is what you are after, you should be able to find something to go to. The choir is one of the best I have ever heard and the boys (who were singing when I was there) were as obviously fond of their strict choir master as he was of them. They use the wonderful wooden church within the church - the choir stalls. So evensong is probably a good option for many visitors. They also do very modern styles of church service and they can host up to three concurrent events in the main building (including amplified bands).
Many of the old monastic buildings are still in existence. If you like to potter around very old buildings, the eastern side of the church is the place to go. Once you are in the middle of the old buildings (some in ruins others in use) you may find the "dark passage" into the crypt. Unlike many crypts, this one is actually all above ground: the cathedral above rises to sit a whole story up above the ground leaving the crypt at ground floor level. It is a wonderful space with low arched roofs are supported by a dense array of round columns. Even if the central area gets a bit noisy, there are lots and lots of chapels around the outside, many with tiny doorways. You should be able to find somewhere quiet. It is here that they occasionally hold electronic music events by candle light as no sound ever gets upstairs to interfere with quiet services up there.
The place does get overrun with school children on bus tours from the continent. Canterbury's location is not an historical accident. It has always been the first stop after getting off the boat from France. It made it easy for the bishop to get to London or Paris. The tension between the requirements of London governance and European food and culture has deep historical roots.
10 St Patrick's (Dublin)
When I went to Dublin I thought I would visit St Paddies and view the best of Irish Roman Catholicism. In Australia (as in many English speaking countries) the Roman Catholic version of Christianity was synonymous with the Irish until after the second world war when everybody discovered that Italians were Roman Catholics too. Old stereotypes die hard. So for me, what could be more Catholic that St Patrick in Dublin?
It turns out that Ireland has a troubled religious past (who knew?) and there are lots of traditional worship styles in Ireland including the Church of Ireland. The Church of Ireland, which is associated with the English tradition rather than the Roman one, owns many of the older church buildings.
This meant my visit to St Patrick's for an evening service was firstly, very similar to what happens in England and will be, secondly, associated forever in my mind with the faces of bemused tourists who weren't expecting what they saw or heard.
The building is very old and is the real St Patrick's Cathedral. There is a Roman Catholic cathedral down the road (I didn't ever find it, although I did find a great Polish church with fake prayer candles that lit up electrically for 10 minutes when you put a Euro coin in the stand). When religious freedom was organised, some churches were given to some religious groups and some to others and a few have been left to fall down. I won't even pretend that the division was impartial, reasonable or acceptable.
In some ways there isn't much more to say about this place. They probably charge for entry during the day. The park next door does some great out-door art.
The church is certainly looked after and clearly loved. Unfortunately the impact such an revered and ancient place is lost by its place in the religious segregation. I don't think it would matter who "owned" it if first and foremost the people of its city owned it. And I didn't feel that was the case.
Still, everybody's an expert, except me, so I will stop now.
11 St Saviour and St Mary Overie (Southwark)
The website and posters claim that St Mary Overie (short for "over the river" and not a reference to some unlikely gruesome medieval relic body part) has been the site of Christian religious worship since 606AD. Wikipeadia doubts this. I have no idea but I do know there are only two naturally dry spots of land that close to the south bank of the Thames and the church is built on one. On the other are the southern workings (shortened to Southwark) of London Bridge. Actually for a brief period the southern works of one of the versions of London Bridge were not built on that dry spot and guess what, it fell down.
When you look at St Mary's, it is dominated by a very, very big central square tower. If you look at paintings, drawings and schematics of London from as far back as you like, there is that tower. For a while I could see it from my bedroom window and I used the clock and bells to tell the time instead of having a clock at home. Those were the days before the new buildings came to the Bankside area of London and so I may be one of the very last few in the 700 hundred years of its existence to use that tower for the purpose it was built.
The architecture inside is probably best described as eclectic. Walking eastwards from the main western door there are arches you must pass through. From the south they look to be in one style and size. Coming back from the north they are quite different indeed. It actually doesn't matter for this experiment whether you are on the eastern or western sides because all four arches are all different. Given they hold that very, very big tower up in the middle of marshland, I presume that over the years architects have fiddled as much as they dared and no further.
The main part of the building has been completely rebuilt (the stone vaults on the roof are boringly regular) quite often and quite recently but as you head around the back there is an ancient sequence of chapels all joined together into one space. The roof is low and arched and supported by a thicket of very slender columns. If there were to be a quiet space for relfexion this would be it but alas you are deep in central London somewhere between the London Eye, Tate Modern, Borough Market, the City and the Tower of London. In this part of the world even the libraries are full to bursting.
Given the lack of local government in the UK until after Elizabeth I and not even very much after her (now there is lots), most civil law was run by the church and probably quite well. Lots of famous court cases have taken place in the chapels around the back. When you sit in the space you can easily see it as a court room - a number of people were sentenced to be burned to death under Mary (a fact for those who like a bit of fire in their religion) but good trials happened there too, including hearings to confirm royal appointments.
This part of London was traditionally out of the good burghers of London's control but close enough to host industries to extract their money on a daily basis. The big theatre companies of Elizabeth I's time were here, huge coaching inns and a largely regulated and moderately clean prostitution racket. The regulations, medical care and hygiene were enforced by the Bishop of Winchester (who for centuries also controlled this church - his old London house is right round the corner) but I understand the girls worked for themselves and not for the Reverend Bishop. The upshot is that this is a church, from the Bishop of Winchester's time onwards that has had a very close relationship with actors, prostitutes, play-wrights and other marginally disrepuatable people. So in the very back corner of the back corner is a chapel dedicated to St Andrew and those who have died of AIDS where a weekly service is held. The rest of the church is dotted with memorials to local parishioners who worked in theatre, some of whom are still quite famous five or six hundred years after they stopped working.
If you want to go to a church service, the main Sunday service can be full to standing which is, as far as I know, unique for an English cathedral. The 8am services on weekdays are a lot quieter and if you are stuck in Central London and like to go to church but Sunday is simply not going to happen, then the weekday morning services are a strongly recommended option. In general I would skip evensong as there are better choirs north of the river.
12 Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Calvi)
When I was quite young, my favourite book was "Rebel on a Rock" by Nina Bawden. Living in Australia I could imagine a summer holiday on a rocky, sun drenched sea side town and saving the country from nameless political evil through love, pig-headedness and sheer luck. Some things I just didn't grasp - political terror, village intensity and spatial ancientness. These three things don't exist in Australia (unless you belonged to that 0.03 percent of the population whose families pre-dated colonisation).
Early in my discovery of Europe I was delighted to discover Calvi - a high outcrop of rocks, ancient jumbled buildings, narrow streets, pushed up and out into the Mediterranean sea on three sides and crowned on high by a walled city including with a couple of empty cafes and a Cathedral. There were tourists, policemen, and people eating ice cream but underneath it all were the hints of centuries of political oppression. Calvi and Corsica might be happy and French now, but since that old Cathedral was established, a lot has gone on.
Nowdays, the Cathedral is just a building and a name. The old town perched on its massive walls protecting it from the sea and pirates is not really lived in - the lower town with the marina, roads and railway has the church and the people. However, the old town is still a fundamental part of Calvi.
The church itself was rebuilt in the fifteenth century and replaced the earlier building from the 700s. When you go in, and despite my rampant romanticism above, the area is crowded with tourists in the summer, yet the building feels cool and empty. The decoration is sparse with great empty walls, one or two with a near black painting or statues, which adds to the sense of ancientness. It almost feels as if the building has not only had its bishop and cathedral status taken away but also all of the art and the things communities place in their churches that mark them as owned. Most visitors don't hang around for long.
For me, I found the place an excellent space to sit and do nothing for a while. The empty walls start to tell their own tales as effectively as the statues and paintings tell the stories they were designed to tell. What is space is as communicative as what is object.
Your response may be quite different.
I have been to a music concert there presented in French and English. It was pretty dreadful for pure musical technique - but if that is your only measure, stay in London, Paris or New York. However, in terms of local musical expression in an building that remains central to the identity of the local town, it was great and I look forward to paying my money and going again.
13 St Peter's (York)
St Peter's Cathedral, York (better known as York Minster) contains my favourite window in the world. On the northern side there is a huge square extension to the building (there is a matching one on the southern side too, but that doesn't interest me nearly as much although it may stop the building falling down because there is a huge square tower above their crossing). The entire northern side of this extension is glass from about 3 metres up - all the way to the roof (considerably more than 13 metres further up). It is called the Five Sisters Window or the Jews' Window (guess who paid for it).
The glass in the window is grey and not coloured, although in the 1200's when it was made, nobody knew how to make clear, fully transparent glass. So the delight in the glass comes from its shades of grey and the shapes of the tiny pieces of glass, each of which is surrounded by black lead strips that hold it firmly in place. To see the patterns made by some small pieces of grey glass once is fine, but to see it repeated thousands of times again and again in five windows is amazing.
It is also the first thing you see when you come into the church. It captures the northern Yorkshire light, breaks it up though a thousand lenses and re-presents it to you on a scale you would not think of merely by looking at the open sky. It makes a more profound spiritual statement than any number of pictures of miracles or statues of holy people.
And on a practical note, it also lights the space quite well, which is good really as it is worth seeing.
It is a huge, geometrically driven, three dimensional space defined in stone. The decoration on the walls, floor and ceiling doesn't overwhelm what is there, it de-marks and throws it into relief. The space itself is almost air, enclosed, shaped and dedicated leaving the building as a thin shell which keeps the rain, noise and distraction out, leaving only the purer bit within. This partly my over active imagination but it also is a result of the size and uniformity of the space. The ceiling is white and simple, the walls are largely unadorned and the floor is open and expansive.
This may not all be because of good management. York Minster has had a troubled time from fire and bankruptcy (in the 1850s!). It most recently burnt down in the mid 1980s. This may explain the lack of junk.
Unlike many of England's bigger churches, there is no park in which you can walk. The park is there, in fact about a third of the land enclosed in the ancient city walls are the grounds of the church but it is not easy to access. I suspect there is a school in there amongst other things and that may explain the limited access. A walk around the walls of York (something to be recommended) gives a wonderful view of tress, houses and open grounds.
One thing I haven't really gone into about this place is whether it is any good as a church. I know some people who have gone there weekly and others who have gone there once and not gone back. Whenever I have been through everybody has been friendly enough and coffee in the Chapter house round the back is a delight (the space more than the coffee itself). Each service begins with the bang of a cracked bell which is quite a distinctive sound, so there is personality there. It maybe that each person may have to work out what they think for themselves.
14 Saint-Eustache (Paris)
This is a church that I include even though I do not know it well. My first experience of it was meeting friends at Le Gross Minet (which translates as the fat duck, not the long minute) which is a fabulous cafe in Les Helles right in the centre of Paris - they even have picture flash-cards to show non-French people what the ingredients of their dishes are.
From the street outside, looking North towards Montmartre there is this huge ghostly Gothic church of a scale that makes no sense to the unfamiliar observer. There are many big churches in European cities but the cathedrals and abbeys are often contextualised in the street patterns or buildings. In the same city there is Notre Dame on its island but the river, the civic buildings and the streets surrounding it make it a dominant building in a very, very impressive context.
St Eustace looks like it was dropped in Paris by a Hollywood cartoonist writing a horror story involving the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail and a particularly thick sociologist (but no sex). It isn't that this church doesn't fit into my ideas of what a Gothic church in Paris should look like. It is that it absolutely fulfils those ideas and then some more. It even has real flying buttresses and numbers huge monstrous gargoyles that spout water. All of this is made more pronounced because it is, in fact, very short compared to it height (a ratio of 3:1 for those who care about these things). In all fairness, the church was the centre-piece of Paris's huge fresh food markets, Les Halles, which have been removed and the streets flattened. This parish church's intended community of the market sellers and buyers is now gone, leaving it a lonely relic from the hundreds of years of buzz that characterised that place.
So what is it like inside?
Well, it is pretty empty and dark and overblown and French really. There are cloths on many surfaces that have acres of lace but are a bit higgledy-piggledy. The candles on the altar are numerous and very, very tall but they are discoloured and not quite straight. Me? I like things nice and tidy and clean. I love the design of the over-decorated French style which can jam so many elements into a single structure that your eyes have to open wide just to take it in. But I like it to be tended and spotless.
There is a lot of love in this church (and some obscure doors to get in and out of it - why are markets and secret back-doors almost synonymous?). It has a music programme to rival any of its peers. It is always full of people who staff prefabricated offices stuck behind pillars for this and that. In fact these little offices probably require a mention. The local churches have lots of religious societies which people can belong to for the aid of the poor, Jerusalem, relief from war and so on. Their workers have to be housed somewhere and, for a few cases, that is behind a Saint-Eustache pillar.
It is not a space I would stop and try and connect with the I Am - Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois a bit further south towards the river opposite the Louvre is much better for that. Instead it is my guiding light, my point zero, the site around which my personal map of Paris is oriented.
15 The Holy and Undivided Trinity (Carlisle)
In the good ol' days the Romans and the Scots had an agreement. That agreement was made explicit in a wall built by Emperor Hadrian's orders by his Legions. As a defensive structure it was OK but it did wonders for capturing customs and excise. The Romans left and over the next millennium the Christians eventually took over and prospered, especially in Carlisle. Eventually they built a Cathedral of impressive dimensions, turning swords into plough shears (as the bible would have it) or, more literally, old army walls and forts into a church of fabulous dimensions.
Then it so happened that peace settled on the border and Christians worshipped together happily promoting brotherly love. Well not really. Carlisle was essentially under martial law for the first 500 years after the Normal invasion which meant that the local authorities were able to do what they liked, provided it protected the King's interests and, whatever they did, it didn't bode well for the Scots. The Cathedral was a towering testament to the local powers and, like Durham on the other coast of England, the castle was right next door. The city walls were not there just to help collect tax, they were there for war.
It is of some irony that when Cromwell came through with his model army, he re-militarised the stones from Hadrian's wall leaving the town with half a Cathedral and a much, much larger castle. What the army giveth, the army taketh away (blessed be the name of the army). Even more fun, he used Scots troops to do the work, which is confusing on a number of levels not least because if I were a Scot at that time, I would have wanted neither the castle nor the church.
Going into Carlisle cathedral is good fun. If you have some familiarity with your typical post-Norman cathedral building it is quite a bewildering experience because half of it just isn't there. It isn't as if they are working towards building the next (larger) stage. It is more as if it once was there and now it isn't. What remains is quite magnificent. The roof is a picture of stars, the windows are huge and lovely and everything that is there captures the history as well as implicitly highlighting the bits that aren't. Where the half way point would be, can be seen a huge square tower of similar dimensions to Durham. Where the main part of any church would be and the people would spend most their time, there is a blank wall and then, on the other side, grass. I suppose that makes this one church where every body has to sit up the front together.
I should probably keep this review to half length (or include a tour of the castle). However, there are two delightful things to mention.
One is the very large window in the eastern end which contains, as is typical of these windows, pictures of stories from the gospels in the bible. However, some things are harder to paint on glass than others and Christ's resurrection from a sarcophagus is famously towards the trickier end of these. So look out for the picture of bearded man stepping gingerly out of the deep stone bath wrapped in what looks to be a towel. it is right in the centre.
The other thing is the people. For various reasons I don't go to services in Carlisle very often. However on the occasions I have, the people have been really nice as, indeed, have been the staff (both in robes and out). If you are there and a church service takes your fancy, should they offer you a cup of something warm and liquid afterwards, say "yes" and you should be up for an entertaining half hour.
16 Cathédrale Orthodoxe Saint-Nicolas (Nice)
This is a strange one. I have a fondness for Nice. It has a tendency to Bling that I find quite verges ridiculous but it also has the sublime Matisse Museum and an amazing annual Jazz festival. Oh, and bright, strong, summer sunshine that my Australian bones love.
In this Russian Orthodox cathedral Bling is brought into a unity that is rarely seen. People familiar with the various Orthodox Christian traditions will be aware that pictures framed in gold form the basis of church decoration. In fact they can substitute for much other religious formal expression. There are good points and bad points about this and if you want to read about one of the longer arguments to have taken place in the middle east, search the web (or a good library) for "iconoclastic" and "iconophilic".
For these pictures are the original "icons", after which many things in modern use are now named. They are written (not drawn or painted I am told) and they each attempt to capture a single moment of unending and eternal state of grace experienced by a saint in their daily life. Presumably they did something or lived something that was completely aligned with the perfection of heaven. The matter gets quite complicated, dealing with the economy of God (which is the ordering of our daily lives) and the theology of God (which is eternal and never changing). If I were to tell you that the term "Byzantine" was coined to describe the complexity and subtlety needed to capture this logic that may illustrate the points better. Byzantium is the town where these arguments were formally presented and after which these kinds of distinctions formulated through logic is named.
The Orthodox church in Nice is a quite tiny octagon with the walls and pillars covered in gold and what seems to be hundreds of icons embedded in it. Some are individual and some are in sets. The great thing about icons is they are universal and you need no Russian or Greek to understand them. The problem with them is that depictions of universal states of grace can be tricky to read unless you know the language. Probably more people now the language of the French or the Russians than they do of icons, but once you get into the swing of them you can get a sense of what they are about.
The building is bigger on the outside than the inside, and that is partly because a lot of church services take place behind the closed doors that lead to other parts of the building. Orthodox religious expression is far more focused on the eternal than Western Europe's love of the here and now. So who cares about seeing what is going on every minute at a service that can take three to five hours when you can contemplate an icon and then go outside for a while?
Inside, walk around and find an icon that you like best. Stare at it (light a candle if it will help, really, I am no expert in this), think about what thought/action is depicted that could be eternal and last for ever without change: the love of what is innocent; the desire to learn the unknowable; nurturing a gift in another? Each is a vision by the icon writer of a moment of perfection in the life of a person. Whatever this is, it will be what is now known to contemporary management consultants as a "stretch goal". Look at the person and the thing they hold (if anything). Does the saint focus on what they hold or on you (it could be either - Mary Mother of God: offering child, adoring child, nurturing child etc etc). Give yourself to the moment.
Going back outside you are hit by the sunlight of the south of France bouncing off in all directions from a very colourful and golden building. The church is surrounded by a small park of grass and trees which is choked by the local road system.
17 The Collegiate Church of St Peter (London)
London, centre of Empire, possessor of a degree of self esteem which might be quite tragic were it to be held by a city like, say, Sydney. It is flanked on two sides: to the east is Her Majesty's Royal Palace, Tower of London. On the west is The Collegiate Church of St Peter known more commonly as Westminster Abbey. One is about army, tax, repression and power. The other is about God, authority and power. Both are made of stone, both are huge and both are naked statements of Normal royal power established in 1066 in the capital. God, King and Tax.
Westminster Abbey is undeniably a working church and it probably hosts more religious events in a day than most people eat meals. Items of interior decoration are as likely to be stamped EIIR (Elizabeth the Second, Regina/Queen) as they are "For God so Loved the World" or some other pious phrase.
So, given the fact that I obviously find this big church in little Europe slightly problematic, why have I elected to include it? Firstly if you are touring London you probably will end up visiting despite the vast sums they charge to go in. Secondly there is something profound in this bald statement by William the Conqueror of God's favour on William the Conqueror and his offspring.
I will admit that I have never paid to go in. There are enough services to nearly always allow me access when I feel like it (just tell the man at the gate you are going to a service and, if there is one scheduled in the next 15 minutes, he will let you in but you will be escorted through to make sure you go). Inside it is just another well maintained Gothic abbey church of stunning proportions. There are too many memorials for my taste and the concentration of dead kings and queens in one place is also rather too high for the public's general health (although they are probably less a threat to the public now they are dead than they were while they were alive). The choir is supremely competent. The twin towers out the front are 17th Century add-ons put up by Hawksmore. The staff wear bright red to show that they work directly for the Queen.
However, there is an amazing side to this place. Ignore the front door and just to the right (beside the shop - the fact that there is a retail emporium built-in shouldn't surprise you) is a relatively little (i.e. huge) gateway that lets you into a yard right beside the church (in fact there are two gates, I am talking about the one right next to the shop but the other west facing gateway has a treat behind it too).
Some days you will stopped from entering the yard but if you are insistent (and nice) they will give you a cloister pass for free (it is always free but they won't give them to people trying to sneak entrance into the church by the side door). The medieval abbey's preserved cloisters can be a patch of silence in a very, very busy part of London. They can also be full of school children eating sweeties at the cafe which also in there. Therefore walk through the cloister to the northern corner and there will be a 13th century passage way to the little cloister and from there (head right), open only on very select days of the week, to the College Garden.
Suddenly you are in the quietest and most peaceful space ever. Visually you can see the Abbey, Parliament's two great towers (about 40 metres away) and everything else. You may even jump when Big Ben tolls right over your shoulder but all of these things are gone out of mind.
Head right to the far south western corner and there is a small water garden and a sculpture by Enzo Plazzotta of a naked man steatching up and over the T-piece of a cross, almost being lifted upwards through the length of wood. On one side is a man collapsing against the weight of the same piece of wood and on the other is third man being hefted up on the angle.
There are benches all around this piece of art. Walk around it, sit in various places. Take half an hour, take the rest of the day if you want.
As you leave, remember the placement of this statue is not an accident.
18 Sint Nicolaas (Amsterdam)
Sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad. The good Oude Kerk is in the middle of the bad, and when Amsterdam is bad, it is wicked!
So naive young thing that I am, I was booked to drop some friends off at the Oude Kerk for them to do a day of singing rehearsing while I got to go and explore and scratch that urban planning itch that I get from time to time. The problem for me was that the rehearsals started at some stupidly early hour of the day and I hadn't had breakfast.
For those of you who know Amsterdam will know that trying to buy coffee in the Coffee Shops near this 14th century church is like trying to buy cannabis at the 24 hour diner and donut shop opposite the police headquarters in New York. But completely reversed. I discovered that they really only sell weed. I did get a coffee in the end (cash only sale, out the back, no receipts) and I had the opportunity to drink it at their tables in the square. As I did so, I got to look in through the many big plate glass windows at the mostly quite naked ladies who were purveying their wares at 8am on a Saturday morning. Yes, the church is in the middle of the famous red light district of Amsterdam.
The juxtaposition is confronting if you are there for a choir school or coffee. The church belongs to one of the most rigidly "upright" sects in Christianity. Booze would be iffy, drugs would be out and dancing a complete no-no. This church is not some off-shoot of a minor or neglected sect of do gooders. It is the second largest church in one of the biggest cities in Europe. It has a large number of people who come to church every Sunday and every person who goes has to walk past the biggest legal display of drugs and prostitutes doing their thing in the western world.
And I think this is good, as maybe do the people who go to this church. They could go elsewhere. They choose not to. The participants support the sex workers by their presence. They actively support the homeless (go to the north western entrance from recollection). The the public art in the church yard is unambiguous in its support of the prostitutes who work in the immediate area and elsewhere in the world.
So what are church services like? My one off experience was a bit weird really. My Dutch isn't up to much but the service I was at, they did English translations of some of the material. Most of the rest I could work out given the hand-outs an a vague familiarity with the tunes, psalms and bible passages.
The church is sufficiently plain to be called "stark". The locals' tolerance of their Spanish imperial overlords' religious practices over the centuries did lead to a couple of populist clean-outs. But then you look at the detail. Each slab in the floor is an intricately carved grave stone. The ceiling which appears simply curved plain timber has delightful detailing at every join. Also the sheer scale of the ceiling lifts it to the extra-ordinary. Out of character at the back is a baroque organ, covered in wooden case that would warm the heart of an Imperial Spanish cherub. The preaching happens right in the middle of the church from a high wooden preacher's box.
This is a place I would definitely return to. I would probably avoid dropping past after dark on a weekend because the tourist trade is mostly large groups of loud young men daring each other to drink too much and to try and buy some skin. 8am on a Saturday is much more my time in that part of the city. You do, as I noted earlier, still get to enjoy the character of the area.
19 Holy Trinity, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and Saint Swithun (Winchester)
Britain has an amazing ranking table. Actually, the British have lots of ranking tables: schools, poverty, GCSE results, housings crises and the best city to live in. Winchester probably has lovely schools and GCSE (tertiary entrance exam) results. But for the the crowing glory of ranking is the best place to live in Britain and Winchester often tops. It is an hour from London, small, with wonderful schools, not too many poor people and it has that most important thing for a great British City, a really old Cathedral.
Anybody who has looked at a map of the south of England may have wondered, while idly speculating about which big church I will pick next, why Wells, Salisbury, Winchester and Rochester all have 1000 year old cathedrals and are so close together but not particularly close to anything interesting. The answer is the lay lines (if you draw the line between them you also get Cadbury Castle and Stone Henge) or, more usefully, the major inland trade route between the west and the ports to Europe on the eastern seaboard. The route is now known as the Pilgrim's Way but it precedes Christianity. It also explains why the main streets in all of those towns go east/west rather than radiating from London as they do in most towns since the Romans laid out the road system.
So, what about the cathedral? It is probably the first one I spent any time in when I arrived in the UK excluding Southwark (which was about 100 metres from my front door and whose clock tower was my primary time piece until I could afford to buy a clock for myself). From the outside it is very, very long, low and squat. By low I mean the roof may still be 20 metres high but lacks the loftiness of other European churches. The central tower is extraordinary low which may contribute to the squatness impression.
Inside it is still long but the roof appears to soar up. A curious fact about most of the very old monasteries built in England is that the walls are built as three stories. There are very good reasons to do this, mostly because flat walls made from stone that go very high and which are very long (and which have no internal walls to brace them) tend to flex and fall down. So the chaps who built these places would build a first storey, with a short roof leaning inwards that would rest on an opposing row of internal pillars (essentially a very long but low cowshed of a building). The next storey would be built on the first and more or less repeat it. The top storey would rest on the double storied internal pillars and go all the way up to the roof. This is easier to show in a diagram or in real life so make sure you have this page with you when next visit an ex-monastic English cathedral. This style of building means you get lots of windows and you also get quite a bit of storage space on the middle storey. The clever thing about Winchester Cathedral is that the first storey is double height and their is no second story and that gives it more light at the ground level, more height around the edges and the internal pillars are twice as tall.
The foundations are built in the marshes of the River Itchen. At the beginning of the twentieth century one lone diver spent years of his life rebuilding the entire deeply submerged stone with brick work that holds up the rest of the building. This is not something you can tell from the outside but it is a result of those years of labour that there is any outside left.
In consequence, the under-croft of the cathedral is regularly flooded, a fact that they use to their advantage with an statue of St Swithun on display that is often spookily half in the water and half out.
Most of the medieval stuff around the building was removed in a fit of early reformist zeal but there are some treats round about. If you have read Barchester Towers/The Warden/Framily Parsonage by Anthony Trollop, it is set in Winchester. The little church that occupies the space where the old buildings join together over the road is there. The old hospital for retired sheep shearers (still going) is a walk along the river and it must surely be one of the greatest short walks in Europe, with the river on one side, an eye-wateringly privileged school's playing fields on the other and an old mill and pond half way along.
In many ways, Winchester Cathedral is not so much a building or institution but a complex of cooperating institutions that combine beautifully. The best arts and crafts fair I have ever been to was in the cathedral grounds and even though it was five years ago, it stays fresh in my mind.
The services on a Sunday are pretty lax. The space doesn't lend itself to the friendly approach they take. I understand it is hard to make things work with 200 people in a space that can probably seat 1800 (or 5000 standing, which was how they intended it to be used when they built it). Even so, I would do it differently if I were in charge and so it is probably just as well I am not.
The back window of the church is a re-assembled work from the piles of smashed medieval glass that has been recovered from where it was buried centuries ago. If forms a strikingly coherent image made up from tens of thousands of diverse fragments. So if you go to Winchester, don't go just for a single service. Go for a weekend or as many days as you can spare. Visit the school if there is a tour available, drop past for another of the arts days if the Cathedral is hosting one and go to the old Hospital of St John of the Cross, enjoy the walk and have a cup of tea with the pensioners who live there still. For a real thrill, go to the old Guild Hall further up the hill. There you can see the round table of Arthur and his knights (c.f. above, re: lay lines).
20 Santa Creu i Santa EulĂ lia (Barcelona)
Barcelona, one of the great port cities of the Mediterranean. For a time a client city of the Romans, at another time a stronghold of the Greeks. For a little while, it was the city state that controlled a sea empire from Italy to where-ever. It has always been the gateway to Catalonia, a long time independent state on the Iberian peninsular. For a short time it hosted one of Franco's most notorious death prisons.
The old Gothic Quarter has four churches in the Romanesque style (which is odd - either the architecture in the Gothic Quarter should be Gothic or the earlier Romanesque but what they have called it is not my problem). All are identical and all are almost completely undecorated and unfurnished except for one - the Cathedral (which also has a fake stuck on frontage from a century ago).
Interestingly when people think of churches in Barcelona they think of the Church of the Holy Family by Gaudi. This is fair enough as it is a lot more famous. What they don't necessarily consider is that Barcelona has a tradition of stone trade craft that stretches back a long time and is exemplified in the long shallow arch. Gaudi's great work as an architect is possible because there were stone masons to build his designs, and he designed the buildings he did because he had centuries of unique Barcelonian stone-craft legacy around to inspire him.
Back to the cathedral. Well, next door anyway where is there a Roman undercroft with a long low arch Opposite the cathedral are the remains of a Roman aqueduct, tall pillars with tight, high arches. Inside the church itself the building is a series of cages, pillars and arches all pressing inwards, towards the centre of the church. It gives the building a sense of gravitas but also privacy. Each one of these cages has its own character.
The history of Western Christianity (as opposed to Eastern Christianity or Pentecostal Christianity) begins with the collapse of Byzantium as a European power. Until as late as the 9th century, the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope) was formally appointed by the Emperor of Rome in Constantinople (aka New Rome, Rome, Byzantium, Istanbul - take your pick). Until the 16th century in western Europe people were just Christian. Roman Catholicism with the central power of the Pope and Rome was invented after that time. Until then, the bishops were pretty much free to do as they wanted and, although the Pope was a centre of authority, the first of the bishops and patriarchs, he was not the sole figure of authority we have today.
It is in Barcelona's cathedral with its multitude of spaces, linked by arches and pillars and each one its own space, where you can see each phase of the Western church presented clearly in and on the walls. Some rooms are painted with Byzantine art of a style and quality that you would naturally expect to find in a Greek Orthodox church. Another room, maybe next door, is a medieval painting of western style and taste. Another room, across the main area might host a statue of Jesus with wounds depicted bleeding in carefully anatomically correct detail. Another room is post 1950s and is alive with a post world war two sense of life.
For myself I love the Byzantine, Medieval and modern works. This is a church in a town that has either been critical to the economic growth some of the richest empires in the last 2000 years - or indeed as run such empires. The church captures the sense of the cultural value of every era it has survived or flourished through. It is not a young building and it has seen some ups and downs in the world and city around it.
The question for many people is whether it is a place to go and meditate or is it a cultural/historical tourist's "see the world in 80 ways" kind of place. I think there is something for everybody. There are definitely people on their knees here. There is diversity. Outside in the monks cloisters is a fabulous garden filled with birds and a lake. Off this stone edged square are opulent rooms, even if they are faded from their former glory.
This is a big house and there are many rooms (to adapt a famous text). It is a place you can visit with different goals in mind. You can sticky-beak shamelessly without being judged. You can also enter one of the spaces that matches your mood, aesthetic or seating needs and settle in. You won't ever be alone but if that is your main criteria, I can recommend any of the four near identical churches elsewhere in the quarter or just do the decent thing and go up into the mountains that dominate the city.
21 St Peter, St Paul and St Andrew (Peterborough)
In the good old days there were monasteries in England and they ruled their lands and people wisely under the civil law which pre-dated the Norman conquest, was more powerful than the King's Writ tracing its origins back to Constantine and the Roman Empire. Parliament cast its benevolent shadow over the rest of the peoples and all was well. Until one year parliament and the King had a hankering to rule all of the country under its law and the monasteries were no more.
There was a problem for the government of the day - it left the 25% of the population that had been living under civil (church) law and not parliamentary law in limbo. It might seem an easy fix today but not only was there no local government in the 1540s there was also no civil service. They needed to invent and then implement local government and also a reporting structure back to parliament.
Their answer was to create bishops and cathedrals and have the thousands of parishes throughout report through them. Yes, the bishops and parishes priests were still controlled by civil law but the bishops sat in parliament (along with the barons and other holders royal Letters Patent) and could be part of the great game of inventing the nation state. The parishes themselves were under parliamentary law. Of course the king himself was governed by civil law and not parliamentary law (as were the barons and parliament itself) and indeed this is still the case. If you have ever wondered why a number of lawyers in the UK are commenting that changing the laws about gay marriage are not straightforward, that might be because marriage is a civil law not a parliamentary law and thus it applies to the king, the English nobility and the bishops and parish priests (but not the parishes themselves except in so much there is a parliamentary Act that backs up the civil law). I hope I have conveyed in some small sense what a great big mess it all was, is and ever shall be, England without end.
The bishop and cathedral in Peterborough was one of those created to run the new local government system. At the time nobody thought that parliament in London would ever have the time, interest or resources to invent a schools policy, rules about domestic violence or produce regulations for gas outlet pressure from a standing pipe. The cathedral buildings are, in fact, the old abbey that was deemed suitable for this new use and was usefully located between the ancient cathedrals of Lincoln, Ely and London.
Most of the monastic buildings are now gone - at the time of its re-purposing the abbey was among the ten richest in England. It was run by an Abbot who also oversaw other monasteries that shared the same rules (those were headed by Priors). The walls of the place more or less remain. If you walk to this church from the railway station the town of Peterborough is fairly down-at-heel. As you pass through the gatehouse into the Cathedral grounds you are confronted by the sight of the huge 13th Century building with its three massive 50 metre high doorways at the front. It is quite extraordinary.
Having walked across the grassed area to the church, the doors themselves are somewhat smaller (thank goodness) and you gain entry into a building of extraordinary simplicity. The main part of the church has room for a 100m dash with room to warm up but the ceiling, floor and pillars all combine elegantly. The floor is completely flat without a step to interrupt it. When you are at the very eastern end of the building, behind the raised church within the church, looking from the far back corner to the front again, the long smooth floor stretches out.
Church services here are well done. I don't know much about Sundays but in the evening the choir can hold a tune to a good standard. Personally I find this a restful kind of place. Peterborough is not a major tourist centre because of its general poverty and some mind blowingly bad urban planning decisions and so you can sit quietly pretty much anywhere. After a while you can both tune in and tune out.
One of the last additions to be building is the area right at the back. It was a rule of the monks that they should walk around the back of the church on various occasions. In many monasteries there was an Ambulatory built as part of the original design for the monks to amble through (it also helps people disappear out one side of the church during a service, carrying one set of things, and reappear on the other side, carrying different things, without anybody seeing how it was done). At Peterborough the monks walked through the weather outside for 300 years until an abbot took pity on them and built the most magnificent walking space for them.
Most of this church has a wooden ceiling whose painted pattern has been maintained continuously since it was installed 900 years ago. The new monks' ambleway has a stone ceiling in the, what was, new-fangled 15th Century style of fan vaulting. It is a style used elsewhere but rarely on such a (relatively) low ceiling. The original church building had a rounded end and the new extension has been squared off creating opportunities for intricate patterns. It is a lovely space and some of the art exhibitions they hold there are extraordinary too. While much of the rest of the church might be good for peace, the walk space is good for doing.
It is said that you can see Ely Cathedral from the top of the old tower (most of it was taken down centuries ago after a rash of tower collapses around the country in the 14th Century). The Cathedrals are not very close together but nothing separates them but miles and miles of drained fen land. On a warm, clear day it would be a fine thing to add to the experience and go and find out.
22 Kings College Chapel (Cambridge)
This is my final piece in this series. For a little while in the next few weeks its interior will be shown, candle lit, to the world as once again the Cambridge university college performs its Christmas party piece of Nine Lessons and Carols - broadcast under some likely name such as "Carols from Kings". I presume it gets a new title because Christian lessons are out of favour generally, although you would expect a university college to a great source of lessons of one sort or another.
College chapel life is a strange beast. Cambridge university runs three 8 week terms a year with each day having three teaching sessions: morning, afternoon and evening. All students and staff must be full-time resident in their college during term so chapel services are part of life along with lab work, candle lit sit down dinners, sport and evening seminars. Everything is optional (including lessons) but everything is included.
The university itself is established to promote, inter alia, religion and curiously staff inductions for teaching positions take place in college chapels with oaths sworn over copies of the rules and regulations of the college (I am not making this up). Many colleges were established in the 13th Century, a lot "transferred" here from elsewhere in the country in the 16th Century as various church leaders realised their local tertiary institutions would be better co-located at either of the big collegiate organisations at Cambridge or Oxford. The idea of separating education and religion had not yet having occurred to anyone.
A goodly number of additional colleges were founded using money left over from the Great Church Nationalisation and Rationalisation scheme (also known as the dissolution of the monasteries) invented by Cardinal Wolesy and implemented by Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII. Cardinal's College Cambridge was one of them and no expense was spared. So lovely was it Cardinal Wolsey lost his head over the whole enterprise and bequeathed it (somewhat involuntarily) to the King and it was logically renamed King's College Cambridge. It was continued to be funded with an absurdly large amount of money.
The chapel building is amazing beyond description. The architect who did the lovely roof extension at Peterborough Cathedral completed the entire ceiling here with even better bits. The glass to stone ratio on the walls is a tad mind-boggling. All of the stained glass itself, the work of the best early 16th century artisans whose output is otherwise largely lost, survived the chapel being turned into a stable for the brief period when England had no king after whom a chapel could be named. Presumably the soldiers who slept there with their horses could see who would freeze first with the glass knocked out.
So the question is: how does one best appreciate this church. There are several of ways I would recommend. Firstly get yourself enrolled as a student of the college (expensive in the UK these days and quite difficult to qualify) Secondly become a college staff member (qualification, again, is tricky but at least they pay you rather than you paying them). Thirdly come and see a concert. Lastly come to a morning church service.
I shall ignore the first two options because if they are for you, I presume you are already are executing your own 10-20 year plan and nothing I say here will help you much (although marriage may be a part of a strategy you didn't think of).
Concerts are on here all of the time. Many are free and some are expensive. Those in summer are generally quite popular but it is a surprisingly large building. It is divided into two halves by the huge wooden wall that cuts the chapel into two halves (put there to minimise medieval drafts) and on top of which the pipe organ and organist sits. For organ concerts (as well as evensong) the place to be is the eastern end where the choir sits. For instrumental concerts the western end is the place as they put the seats and stage in front of the wall. The acoustics are punishing to the inexperienced musician with not only a very long echo (about 10 seconds) but also the echo is razor sharp - a duff note will be with you for far longer than you would like either as a performer or listener. There is a joy in sitting in the "wrong" end during a summer concert with so much of the space empty but listening to some of the best musicians surrounded by hundreds of square metres of some of the best stained glass ever made.
All of this is flim-flammery though. The college employs two full time religious types to take services and this they do. The evening service is like a concert with tourists. The choir is probably as good as it is reputed to be, which is the best in the world. However it is not a great religious experience. It doesn't do the building or the people who attend it the justice they both deserve. Don't let me stop you going however (I go when I can and once you zone into the music it can be quite easy to pace your own thoughts).
The best time to go is in the morning for the said morning services. You will be there with two or three other people and everybody who is there is there for a reason (who knows what it will be). They don't advertise the services widely (as most people only think about the choir) but the porters at the main gate will be able to tell you (and let you into the college in the morning) to walk across the sunlight, misty courtyard. It is here murmuring the modern words of the ancient dawn service sitting in a small group that the world reaches a transcendence of community, place and call and response.
I thought I would start with the most famous church in the world. I know that many of you will know that St Peter's in Rome is the most famous or maybe St Sophia's in Instambul. However, I haven't seen St Peter's and St Sophia's is no longer a church. That makes the Cathedral Church of Our Lady (who presumably is also the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokas, God's bearer, aka Mary mother of Jesus) in Paris as my occupier of the role.
Among the most important observations about this magnificent building is that it is a working church, it is in the most romantic city in the world (easy to prove) and it is very, very ugly from the front. All of the best representations of Notre Dame in Paris are either drawings in Disney cartoons or pictures taken from the river looking west. I still think it is an amazing church and deserves its reputation but it is difficult to get a decent photograph of a loved one using the western end as the background. It has a huge frontage with a very flat square look that is exacerbated by the stone railings that run between the two massive towers. These hide any roof line that would provide an interesting angle in your visual composition. The plaza out the front is fairly dusty and featureless in the way that is typical for Paris as well. The busking acts can be quite good.
Once you go inside the feel of the place is very different. There is no fee and although the queues can be very long, they move quickly. Once in the church the crowd moves up one side, around the back and then down the other and out the door. To follow the crowd would be a mistake even if they do manage the whole building quite quickly.
Firstly you can buy big candles to light and remember and pray. Not every one will want to pray but the church is dark and the light means something even when it is massed with the other lights in the candle stand. If you have anything in your life that deserves that candle, then pay your Euros and, more importantly, give some time over to a moment thinking about that thing. If I were less cynical I would suggest that this was a building purpose made for it.
Another thing you can do is go to the centre of the church and sit down. This is a big space hollowed out of a big city and in the dark it is easy to ignore the circling crowds out from which you slipped.
For all of this silence and reflexion talk, Notre Dame is not made principally for introversion. This is a metropolitan cathedral built as a demonstration of wealth, power, civic unity and as a statement of the city's most powerful people of their commitment to God (and perhaps their expectations of God's con-commitment to them). If you want peace, go to the country side. The window glass is extraordinary and quite a bit of it is just short of a thousand years old. The south and north facing round (rose) windows of blue glass captivates me for as much time as I have.
As you go head to the back there is a wooden church within the church (known as the choir stalls) which is used for smaller services. In some cathedrals it fully enclosed with a wooden or stone screen at the front but here it is open at the front so you could see right into it when you came in. The backs of the stalls, as you walk around, have wood medieval carved scenes from the Life of Christ (as it is known) which are not realistic but instructional. Even when the crowds are in full flow, you can still pause at each one. During my last visit the flow took me around them in the reverse order to the story so I wandered back against the flow and looked at them a second time in the right order.
In terms of church services and the like, I can't comment. I have been in the building during the Saturday evening vigil mass. The cathedral remained open to the tourists and the people attending the service sat in the middle towards the front. The service was conducted by a single priest and two singers and it felt as if they didn't try and take over the space. It was a bit wan. However, it was midsummer and many churches loose choirs, clergy and other staff leaving services fairly lean.
One thing that always seems to be true, and this is the only church I have ever seen this, is that two or three of the little side chapels each have a robed priest sitting in them during the day. The chapels have been glassed in and have a desk and comfy chairs giving them a functional privacy. There always seem to be people making use of this facility. If you have a problem and want to see someone then this place is open for business.
This cathedral is the heart of Paris regardless of your views of the roles of Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triumph or even the Hotel de Ville. It certainly looks the part and through sympathetic management of the space, free entry and easy availability of the staff it keeps its religious function open to all.
2. St Mungo's (Glasgow)
The Glaswegians have done much to preserve their Cathedral. During the reformation in the 16th Century many of their historic churches underwent involuntary refurbishment. In Glasgow the city's entire compliment of master tradesmen turned out and protected their cathedral against its reconstruction. What they preserved is a delight.
Unlike Paris (or London) Glasgow's centre has moved around over the years and the city's cathedral is now quite a way out of the centre. It is only a ten minute walk but you do need to make an effort to get to it.
The building itself is quite small but it is beautifully proportioned. The amount of detail in the construction completely disguises how small it is (my guess is that the main part of the building would seat just about 500). It is a proper medieval building with all of the little stonework jokes that the stone masons inevitably added to buildings like this: little frogs in unexpected places, "green men" with flowers and vines sprouting out of their mouths and so on.
As you go to the front (this isn't a church swamped with visitors, you may even be the only ones) there is an ancient wall that separates the front and the back. At various times it has been bigger and smaller. It originally provided the western wall to the church within a church needed by the monks who used the choir space for their six services a day, allowing the rest of the church to be used for other things. During the reformation, the post-reformed had one half of the church and the pre-reformed had the other and the wall was extended to the roof and used to keep them apart. Now many services are held in the front part of the church (which is a fair proportion of the space) or in the back part, depending on the type of service.
The wall also has two sets of grand stairs leading either side down into the under-church. It was built as a crypt but now it hosts the most delightful space, beautifully decorated with love, containing the mortal remains of Glasgow's patron saint Mungo. It is a fundamental fact of religion that the way people live it bears little relation to formal church policy. I am fairly sure that the official Scottish Reformed rules do not contain provisions for the veneration of dead saints by candles, embroidery and flowers. However, the patron saints of old, major cities like Glasgow do not belong to the clergy and never have. They belong to the people of their city (as do their cathedrals) and those people will do as they damn well please which is often what their parents did before them.
Much of the window glass is German from the same period of the Arts and Crafts period in the UK and France. Unfortunately it was done on the cheap and is fading. It took for ever for the city, parishioners and cathedral authorities to decide to get it. Now they are trying to preserve it. It may be only a short amount of time before it goes into a museum and is replaced.
Church services are pure Scot's Reformed done in a good way but, I will admit, not really to my taste and perhaps a bit out of touch with the pre-reformation character of the building and decorations. I am not a Scot nor terribly reformed so I will leave commenting on the service quality to those who are expert. If you wanted to find a clerical reverend for prayer, assistance or advice I am sure you could ask one of the volunteer staff wandering about and it would be organised quickly and with minimal fuss.
Next door is the St Mungo's Museum of Contemporary Religion which is a wonderful example of its type. It is not particularly centred on Christianity and even includes a nice example of Australian pre-colonial religious art (the painting itself is post colonial) which I didn't expect to see. The second floor of the exhibition is a bit of a dud but it isn't expensive and worth the trip. You can also leave your bags there. The cafe looked to be well priced.
3. St Paul's (London)
If there is a church that is more easily recognisable in the context of its city, I cannot think of one more recognisable than St Paul's Cathedral in London. From the river, it absolutely dominates the city skyline with its huge dome and golden cross. Sometimes I think it is a fabulous civic statement and at other times, especially after reading too much HP Lovecraft, it appears to be a sinister lurking stone toad crouching over the skyline (credit for this thought also to the novel Tipping the Velvet). Most churches in big cities surprise you when you come across them. St Paul's can surprise you from a distance.
The Great Fire of London gave the City Authorities the opportunity to make a contempoary civic statement that would resonate around Europe and the City's trading partners. This building is a message to the world about what London thought its place was in 17th Century Europe both on earth and, perhaps, in heaven.
Iperhaps, then, it is appropriate that it is very expensive to get in. For people from anywhere other than the UK this can be a real shock. I don't know if there is a way to get around the price of entry other than to go to a service. I have never paid and I have gone to quite a few services so I cannot write about what it would be like to see it as a tourist.
The English version of the reformation created some real gems (and quite a lot of dead people). Among the gems were cathedral choirs, matins and evensong. My personal view is to avoid going to Mass or a Eucharist at an English cathedral and instead go to sung matins on a Sunday morning. It is nearly always more intimate, the words are nearly entirely drawn from the bible (and not just the easy bits) and the music is extraordinary - often ethereal, discordant and harmonically challenging and all sung by children and men.
So St Paul's offers a half way decent matins on a Sunday morning (except when they cancel it - check the website). The actual service really does make use of the space. When a service is running, tourists are herded to the back by unfriendly staff who give the impression that they have cattle prods under their jackets and that they would not be afraid to use them (I have never seen this happen but then I have never dared force the issue either). This has good points and bad points. Zero out of ten for approachability but it does mean that when a service takes place and you are there, you have the entire church for your joint contemplation.
And it is quite a good one - very modern for its day and it still has a very clean ambiance. It seats about 2000 people and has a roof height to match. The dome is a lot smaller on the inside but you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. The floors are made of huge slabs of black and white stone that remove any sense of fussiness. There are also only ever enough chairs set out as will be needed which also empties up the space.
Despite the very strong non-verbal message given by the officers at the front doors, if a service is scheduled and you say are you going, then they will let you go up to the front and sit down. Service booklets and any thing else you will need is provided and they don't stint. There is not much support for non-English speakers but nobody is let a microphone at St Paul's unless they have a perfect establishment accent.
The biggest problem with the church service thing is the echo. People laughingly describe a 10 second delay between talking in a place like St Paul's and hearing the echo. In this building it is no joke. Although I have heard the choir sing many times and I believe it is amongst the best in the world, on a Sunday what they sing and what I hear are on different time continua.
Sunday mass is grand and very popular but it doesn't do it for me. There is too much gold, the ritual is too arms length (I am not sure the 10 or so clergy notice the people sitting in front of them much) and the crowd of strangers is too big (often they get 1000 people to a Sunday service of which about 40 are regular attendees). 8am, which is said in the choir stalls, is far better suited to the space but it is very, very traditional which at least is congruous with everything about the place.
A note on the church decorations. The ceiling of the front end is extraordinary and you would be a sad person to get tired of it. The floor is dotted with statues of grand men being adored by classical nymphs (many naked and sometimes being groped by the grand men) which I find amusing. The woodwork of the choir stalls is full of fat faced cherubs which I just don't understand. The grand men (and their nymphs) are there because someone paid a lot of money for the privilege but who paid for the cherubs?
4 San Lorenzo's (Perugia)
Sometime you are wandering through an ex-Roman fortified hill town in northern Italy admiring what the Romans did for others and you realise that the big building ahead of you is possibly a church, or a fort, or a town hall. It is hard to tell. Because around the square with the massive fountain are huge civic buildings that all are roughly the same size, are made from the same stone, have just a few random windows and balconies and share much of the same roof.
It turns out that one of them is a church.
In the ancient order of things in this part of Europe, every big town had a bishop and a cathedral. Parish priests were for rural villages and roving work. In the last hundred years a lot of rationalisation has taken place and the vast majority of these bishops and cathedrals have been downgraded. In Italy it is now traditional to talk about the Duomo for the big church in the centre of a town and nobody uses Cattedrale much unless they are being very precise.
Perugia is in a large hill fort town that the Romans left to the locals and the big building to the north of the square turns out, indeed, to be the Duomo.
Inside it has typical 13th century northern Italy stone work. It is easy to go ho-hum but there are in fact very few buildings that old anywhere in the world that could be put to everyday use. The ceiling paintings are a mish-mash of renaissance styles with a good dose of rococo and whatever else seemed like a good idea. I liked them and spent hours staring up at clouds and colour and splendour. Obviously there is quite a bit of scaffolding around because the only way a building like the Perugia Duomo is going to stay up is if you keep putting it back up faster than it can fall down.
Perugia is an amazingly delightful city to spend a few days in and if you are a musical fan, go there for one of the festivals they hold there. The Duomo hosts quite a bit and the other buildings around the square and in the neighbouring villages do their bit. The local university has one of the best music faculties in Europe as well.
Nobody objects to cameras anywhere including in the church so you can you can take pictures to remember the place. It is easy to compose good photos inside.
Unlike many churches with their strict cruciform layout, Perugia is built like a huge hall with sticky-outy bits. The services take place up the front but there is no special place for the choir to sit - they fit to one side by the organ console (which is also on the ground floor next to a pillar). Behind the altar area is a small chapel with seats fixed in a semi-circular array and I am sure that it is used for private prayer. After my time in the church, my experience is that you could use pretty much anywhere in the church to sit down and contemplate the ineffable because apart from the odd person wearing too little (one girl did get asked to cover up a bit) there didn't seem to be too many rules.
I did stay on for the Saturday evening vespers and vigil mass during my visit. The vespers were completely opaque to me as I don't speak Italian (at least not to the level needed to follow an unfamiliar church service) and the music was a dreary chant by the leader and an even drearier chant by everybody else back. I don't think that the musical tradition of the big church institutions of every part of Europe has the same support as the Anglicans in England gives to theirs.
The mass, though, had the organ playing, which I can report is played by an extremely skilled musician, and a visiting choir who knew what they were doing (they sang a Latin choral setting).
There was something about the church which I came to admire. The understated way that the staff went about their business while setting up before the service, the ability of the organist and the integrity of the people who came along all contributed to a sense of order and significance.
Once I got home, I looked up the Duomo status of Perugia. Not only has the town kept its bishop and therefore the church has kept its role as a cathedral, but the bishop is one of the few Italian Archbishops. To give this some context, England has 2 and the UK has only 5 archbishops in total. This was a church that was free, easy and welcoming (provided you were dressed for a European city and not for the beach) but still had the confidence to take itself and the people it served seriously. Mind you, with Assisi as the next town on the railway line shich also under this cathedral church's protection, a little of religious gravitas was not inappropriate.
5 Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert (Durham)
A famous travel writer describes Durham Cathedral as the best in the world. I have no idea if it is or isn't but it is pretty good.
As you come into Durham on the train (or woosh past at 115 miles per hour) the castle and the Cathedral stand out on the rocky promontory, high against the rush of river and time. When you get closer to the building itself, you are left with the impression that it was built to last. Once you get inside, impressions be damned, you know that it was built to last.
This isn't a light and airy building. It's huge/overwhelming construction is built basically straight upon the rock of the promontory over the river that surrounds the city. There are no foundations. The pillar bases are huge, standing directly on the ground. The pillars themselves a big drums and not slender trees. The far off roof clearly rests on them and the architect does nothing to distract you from their function, drawing the eye to each pillar with striking geometrical patterns carved deeply into them.
The bishop's seat is an amazing testament to power and politics. For many years after the Normans finished their reverse coup (in 1066), the Bishop of Durham was routinely appointed from among the younger sons of the king. The bishop had powers to legislate (since revoked) and run the north west of England as he saw fit. The fact the walled Durham Castle, built as the home of the prince bishops, is collocated with the cathedral is not an accident. The seat in question is on a pedestal 15 feet off the floor and tastefully decorated in a style suited to the younger sons of kings.
The whole cathedral works visually. Yet there was obviously a problem from an engineering point of view because the eastern end fell down within fifty years of it being constructed. It turns out that some of the church was built on rock and some on sand. When you walk around the eastern end, you will notice it is now much lower. That is because they still didn't want to use foundations so the number of steps down matches the amount of material they had to remove to get to the next layer of rock.
I like this place. The floor decorations between the choir stalls are made from swirling patterns or different coloured stone. The embroidery (head downstairs at the eastern end) is very, very good. The roof is simplicity itself with plain rounded arched stone work. The church was built to be a cathedral from the start but also was a monastery. If you walk right through the church at the western end, there is another door that leads to the monk's cloisters - a huge grassy courtyard surrounded by an intricately carved stone walkway. Through all of that there is a dark passage to the Chapel of the Holy Cross which is a cold, simple space that suggests nothing except silence. Given the crowds of people who can descend onto this heritage listed site, the silence can be quite welcome for 10 minutes. There are also some lovely gardens out there too.
If you are a fan of saints you can visit Cuthbert, who is still thought of kindly by the locals, and Bede, who started the modern approach to writing history. Both should still be there when you visit since they haven't gone anywhere in a long, long time.
From the various services I have experienced here, I can say that they are excellent. There are some points that may be too formal - occasionally you wonder where the fine line between dignified and OCD lies. However the organ is good and loud and the choir knows how to sing. I have no idea if they do more contemporary services. The mood of the place is to look back to the Benedictine tradition of the monastery rather than forward to new sounds. I think this is a fair decision.
6 St Peters (Adelaide)
I will admit, and offer no argument, that St Peter's Cathedral in Adelaide is neither a big church nor is it anywhere near Europe.
So, moving on, this is an iconic building for its city and it occupies a site just to the north of the Adelaide Oval (famous for its international cricket matches). A consequence of its location next to the park is that it is easily seen from a lot of places because Adelaide's park-lands are huge and the church is on a bit of a hill.
When Adelaide was built it was built on two small rises a mile apart with parks, the cricket oval and a small, regularly flooding watercourse between them. South Adelaide, as it was then known, became the main city with the shops and rich people's houses. North Adelaide (as it is still known) was where the less exciting and poor people would live. The whole colony of South Australia would be ruled under the British flag, there would be no state religion and oppression would end.
Within a few years the Church of England made a land grab in the centre of South Adelaide to build a cathedral and within a few months and a court case, the non-established church was suddenly looking at possible sites in North Adelaide. The dissenting burghers of the city (rich half) were overjoyed.
With all of that colonial history in mind, a walk around St Peter's shows that an interesting proportion of the church fabric was donated by the wealthy dissenting burghers. The building is a testament of the lure of established religion to all kinds of wealth even when it is not established and neither are the wealthy.
In some ways the building is very plain - the outside stone work is more interesting than the grey cement render used inside - but the wood work is second to none that I have seen. There is a consistent use of oak (both Australian native "oaks" and the European variety) which unifies the extensive panelling on the perimeter walls, the choir stalls, the insanely huge carved back piece and the hanging crucifix in the centre. The various bits were carved, donated and installed at various times over the building's 150 year history and some things are very modern while other things are reassuringly 19th Century fake-old. They do sit well together.
If you would like just to sit in the quiet, the place to go is the semi-circular chapel at the very back. It's soaring roof and huge stained glass windows make it a beautifully proportioned space. The statue of the Mary Mother of Jesus on the wall is a top class piece of modern enamelled sculpture as well and she adds a mixture of vigilance and serenity to the atmosphere.
Church services are run on the smell of an oily rag. The bigger churches in places like Australia have lovely buildings but their only operating cash is what goes into the plate on a Sunday. There are the expected crowds of people up front walking with candles, fetching and carrying obscure items and singing, yet all but one or two are volunteers. Everybody believes in excellence but nobody would be seen to be trying too hard and upsetting the smooth running of the team. Quite Australian in thought and action.
The organ has a terrific tone but don't sit in row J as that is the row where the sound from the back returns in its echo to muddy the sound coming from the front.
7 The Holy and Undivided Trinity (Ely)
Sometimes when you approach a great building, a sense of unity and singularity of purpose washes over you. Other times, no matter which way you approach it, the building looks as if there were four structures leveraged into place by space ships and forcefully jammed together. As it happens I think Ely Cathedral is a great building yet I won't say it is architecturally coherent from the outside.
Ely itself is a tiny village that doesn't even rate a market charter I believe. It is in the middle of a drained marsh that extends for 20 or more miles in most directions and is built on the only hill. In the right light, the cathedral can be seen from 50 miles away (well, if you are standing on the top of the corresponding cathedral tower in Peterborough). The cathedral hillside is surrounded by fields containing farm animals, probably the only place you could farm animals in the fens for millennia until they were drained by Henry VIII.
Once inside you are confronted with an extraordinary long thin tall building. The roof is painted in a pre-Raphaelite style showing a mixture of agrarian vine patterns with the odd transported religious figure. There is a mirror on trolley that you wheel up and down to stare at the ceiling without cricking your neck. In the centre under the eight sided tower (it looks like stone but is made of wood) the swirling leaf and vine patterns get more interesting and the religious figures more transported and surrounded by fabulous blue glass.
Ely underwent a spot of redecoration during the time of Henry VIII, the same one who, as noted before, is also famous for draining the fens. The delight, to my eyes, is that Henry's troops took their orders to rid the church of the faces of every saintly stone figure in a rather strict fashion. Out the side (northern) via a nice little passage you can enter the Lady Chapel, recognisable by the figure of a large, buxom, friendly, blue statue of a lady perpetually throwing herself off the eastern wall under the windows there. Around the edge of the chapel must be a hundred or so statues of saints carved into the stonework, all with their heads very carefully knocked off. There is one head still in place but you have to look harder than, I presume, the soldiers did to find it.
There are few places anywhere that, I think, you see in one space the passion people felt during the reformation for getting rid of the old ways of doing things and bringing in the modern. The Pre-Raphaelite redecoration of the 19th Century shows a corresponding delight of putting things back again but in new ways.
I have never found Ely a particularly good place to find quiet and peace. Partly because outside is already quiet and peaceful (and maybe a bit dull) but also because the Cathedral provides too much in it too see and hear. Conversely to big cities, the Cathedral here is a hub of culture and excitement for the enormous rural community of the fens. It feels like it seeks to make life bigger and better, rather than to provide respite from unrelenting noise, aggression and bustle.
The few services that I have been to were quite good humoured and the singing was as haunting as the images on the roof and the headless saints would demand. Last time I was there was the Sunday evening a week after Christmas and we all sang carols for an hour since it was going to be Christmas until the 6th of January and, heck, we love singing Christmas carols with a big choir, a small orchestra and a noisy organ. I like their attitude.
8 Asakusa Temple and Shrine (Tokyo)
In Tokyo, and the rest of Japan as far as I know, they take their religion very seriously. More accurately, they appear to take their religion very seriously if one is to judge by the vast number of small shrines that dot the back streets of the city. I, of course, have no idea what really goes on. Every couple of hundred yards you find a small site with a little temple or shrine and some written-on stone or wood upright panels placed outside. The buildings are extremely traditional in design and might be models for drawings by Australian children as perfect Japanese buildings.
There are also big, complex places. Given Japan has supported a mixture of native Shinto and imported Buddhist spiritual traditions for a long time now, at the major religious sites there are buildings for both styles existing side by side. Re-enforcing the notion of a religious site are the stalls and street scapes immediately around these complexes. These are shops to buy and sell food, religious items and provide parade routes with traditional archways, colour and displays. Going to these big religious sites is a day out rather than somewhere to sit for 20 minutes in the middle of a busy life.
You can catch a ferry boat from the main ferry terminus in the bay area. As a tourist the cost is about the same compared to travelling any other way. The trip along the amazing and huge canal system (maybe we should call Venice the "Tokyo of the West") is amazing and worth the detour (if, for you, it is a detour).
Japanese culture famously calls for unity of landscape, architecture, body and spirit. Unlike the English who love their church yards to be either wildlife sanctuaries or formal lawns and gardens, the Japanese love their spiritual places to complete in themselves, curated and tended. Gravel is raked into patterns, lakes are shaped to be pleasing and trees are planted exactly with regard to leaf colour, density and pattern. Perhaps they mirror the European monastic tradition where within the boundaries of the religious site should be included representations of the most important things of the whole world.
The complex at Asakusa is a very interesting place and there are signs in lots of languages explaining it all. It is also very busy, even for central Tokyo. You can take photos of everything bar one. One gentleman engaged in ritualised clapping beside a smaller shrine and, after finishing got out his camera and repeated his claps for his camera. The single exception to photography is the Buddhist temples where it is prohibited.
Families come to this place for life events. Two daughters and their parents, in fully traditional dress, headed down the path towards the lake, walking between massive and very ancient carved, stone lanterns.
It is in places like this that many of the similarities of religious experience are obviously common to the human condition but culturally so distinct. The shapes of the buildings and the tending of the garden is localised and quite Japanese, but no more so than the gardens and architecture of Australian churches and churchyards is architypically Australian. It was how people use the space that was very different with a focus much more on action than internal attitude. The Buddhist temple with its shoes off policy and no photos was familiar in that it required the visitor to engage with the space and modify their behaviour. The shrines, on the other hand were simply there in the same way the landscape is there. To pray is to join with the landscape, to landscape a place is to invite prayer.
This complex is in downtown Tokyo, so I'll not get too rhapsodic about its beauty, but the area definitely is a great place. There is a fabulous park and large lake nearby on the other side of the canal near the National Sumo Centre and the Edo Museum (of Tokyo). It was in the lake that we both saw three lucky carp leap out of the water before we caught our plane and got an upgrade to business class. I probably should know better, but I shall never be rude to a lucky carp again.
9 Church of Christ (Canterbury)
There are two or three totally stand-out churches in England and the city of Canterbury hosts one of them. In the middle ages its was the second most visited church in Western Europe after St Peter's Rome. If Henry II thought he was hurting the church in England by assassinating its archbishop all those years ago, he misunderstood the mindset of the pilgrims that flooded the cathedral with cash donations for the hundreds of years to follow. Not that it hurt the English Crown that much financially, as Henry VIII nationalised Canterbury Cathedral several hundred years later and took all of the money and gifts.
One of the consequences of the huge pilgrimage trade, and something Henry VIII could never appropriate, is that the town of Canterbury is full of tiny back streets that curl around the cathedral's walls and end up in clusters at its gates. Another is that the church still doesn't mind hitting the visitor for a sizable donation for entry. At least they have the courtesy to do it at the gate house and not at the church door. If you go within 15 minutes of a service starting, the gates are open to all. If you don't want to go to a service, then wander the extensive gardens until it is finished. Once you are in, you are in.
Within the walls is a huge complex of buildings, a school, hotel, many secret gardens, medieval town wall, administration offices, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Palace and any number of other things. If you stay at the hotel, you get a resident's free entry pass (which is nice) as well as a car park (which is amazing for central Canterbury). It is quite lovely to be locked within the walls at night, able to wander around while the outside world is without.
The building itself is a complex mixture of styles but each bunion (as I believe the Prince of Wales terms "modern" extensions to traditional buildings) seems to be well moulded into the main fabric. For a famous church, many parts of less grand than you might expect, bringing to me, at least, the realisation that this is a working albeit large church in Kent with its own daily issues to contend with (not least things breaking all of the time and needing to be replaced and the fact that ad-hoc solutions can come to stay forever).
Unlike other churches, such as Ely which are journeys through time and within the space in and around them, the Church of Christ in Canturbery is a series of places to explore. It isn't as seasonal as Perugia in Italy or Ely high in its fenland world but instead each room and garden is fixed in time and place - but there are so many it feels as if there is a different one for every day and mood.
There are a good number of services scheduled so if that is what you are after, you should be able to find something to go to. The choir is one of the best I have ever heard and the boys (who were singing when I was there) were as obviously fond of their strict choir master as he was of them. They use the wonderful wooden church within the church - the choir stalls. So evensong is probably a good option for many visitors. They also do very modern styles of church service and they can host up to three concurrent events in the main building (including amplified bands).
Many of the old monastic buildings are still in existence. If you like to potter around very old buildings, the eastern side of the church is the place to go. Once you are in the middle of the old buildings (some in ruins others in use) you may find the "dark passage" into the crypt. Unlike many crypts, this one is actually all above ground: the cathedral above rises to sit a whole story up above the ground leaving the crypt at ground floor level. It is a wonderful space with low arched roofs are supported by a dense array of round columns. Even if the central area gets a bit noisy, there are lots and lots of chapels around the outside, many with tiny doorways. You should be able to find somewhere quiet. It is here that they occasionally hold electronic music events by candle light as no sound ever gets upstairs to interfere with quiet services up there.
The place does get overrun with school children on bus tours from the continent. Canterbury's location is not an historical accident. It has always been the first stop after getting off the boat from France. It made it easy for the bishop to get to London or Paris. The tension between the requirements of London governance and European food and culture has deep historical roots.
10 St Patrick's (Dublin)
When I went to Dublin I thought I would visit St Paddies and view the best of Irish Roman Catholicism. In Australia (as in many English speaking countries) the Roman Catholic version of Christianity was synonymous with the Irish until after the second world war when everybody discovered that Italians were Roman Catholics too. Old stereotypes die hard. So for me, what could be more Catholic that St Patrick in Dublin?
It turns out that Ireland has a troubled religious past (who knew?) and there are lots of traditional worship styles in Ireland including the Church of Ireland. The Church of Ireland, which is associated with the English tradition rather than the Roman one, owns many of the older church buildings.
This meant my visit to St Patrick's for an evening service was firstly, very similar to what happens in England and will be, secondly, associated forever in my mind with the faces of bemused tourists who weren't expecting what they saw or heard.
The building is very old and is the real St Patrick's Cathedral. There is a Roman Catholic cathedral down the road (I didn't ever find it, although I did find a great Polish church with fake prayer candles that lit up electrically for 10 minutes when you put a Euro coin in the stand). When religious freedom was organised, some churches were given to some religious groups and some to others and a few have been left to fall down. I won't even pretend that the division was impartial, reasonable or acceptable.
In some ways there isn't much more to say about this place. They probably charge for entry during the day. The park next door does some great out-door art.
The church is certainly looked after and clearly loved. Unfortunately the impact such an revered and ancient place is lost by its place in the religious segregation. I don't think it would matter who "owned" it if first and foremost the people of its city owned it. And I didn't feel that was the case.
Still, everybody's an expert, except me, so I will stop now.
11 St Saviour and St Mary Overie (Southwark)
The website and posters claim that St Mary Overie (short for "over the river" and not a reference to some unlikely gruesome medieval relic body part) has been the site of Christian religious worship since 606AD. Wikipeadia doubts this. I have no idea but I do know there are only two naturally dry spots of land that close to the south bank of the Thames and the church is built on one. On the other are the southern workings (shortened to Southwark) of London Bridge. Actually for a brief period the southern works of one of the versions of London Bridge were not built on that dry spot and guess what, it fell down.
When you look at St Mary's, it is dominated by a very, very big central square tower. If you look at paintings, drawings and schematics of London from as far back as you like, there is that tower. For a while I could see it from my bedroom window and I used the clock and bells to tell the time instead of having a clock at home. Those were the days before the new buildings came to the Bankside area of London and so I may be one of the very last few in the 700 hundred years of its existence to use that tower for the purpose it was built.
The architecture inside is probably best described as eclectic. Walking eastwards from the main western door there are arches you must pass through. From the south they look to be in one style and size. Coming back from the north they are quite different indeed. It actually doesn't matter for this experiment whether you are on the eastern or western sides because all four arches are all different. Given they hold that very, very big tower up in the middle of marshland, I presume that over the years architects have fiddled as much as they dared and no further.
The main part of the building has been completely rebuilt (the stone vaults on the roof are boringly regular) quite often and quite recently but as you head around the back there is an ancient sequence of chapels all joined together into one space. The roof is low and arched and supported by a thicket of very slender columns. If there were to be a quiet space for relfexion this would be it but alas you are deep in central London somewhere between the London Eye, Tate Modern, Borough Market, the City and the Tower of London. In this part of the world even the libraries are full to bursting.
Given the lack of local government in the UK until after Elizabeth I and not even very much after her (now there is lots), most civil law was run by the church and probably quite well. Lots of famous court cases have taken place in the chapels around the back. When you sit in the space you can easily see it as a court room - a number of people were sentenced to be burned to death under Mary (a fact for those who like a bit of fire in their religion) but good trials happened there too, including hearings to confirm royal appointments.
This part of London was traditionally out of the good burghers of London's control but close enough to host industries to extract their money on a daily basis. The big theatre companies of Elizabeth I's time were here, huge coaching inns and a largely regulated and moderately clean prostitution racket. The regulations, medical care and hygiene were enforced by the Bishop of Winchester (who for centuries also controlled this church - his old London house is right round the corner) but I understand the girls worked for themselves and not for the Reverend Bishop. The upshot is that this is a church, from the Bishop of Winchester's time onwards that has had a very close relationship with actors, prostitutes, play-wrights and other marginally disrepuatable people. So in the very back corner of the back corner is a chapel dedicated to St Andrew and those who have died of AIDS where a weekly service is held. The rest of the church is dotted with memorials to local parishioners who worked in theatre, some of whom are still quite famous five or six hundred years after they stopped working.
If you want to go to a church service, the main Sunday service can be full to standing which is, as far as I know, unique for an English cathedral. The 8am services on weekdays are a lot quieter and if you are stuck in Central London and like to go to church but Sunday is simply not going to happen, then the weekday morning services are a strongly recommended option. In general I would skip evensong as there are better choirs north of the river.
12 Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Calvi)
When I was quite young, my favourite book was "Rebel on a Rock" by Nina Bawden. Living in Australia I could imagine a summer holiday on a rocky, sun drenched sea side town and saving the country from nameless political evil through love, pig-headedness and sheer luck. Some things I just didn't grasp - political terror, village intensity and spatial ancientness. These three things don't exist in Australia (unless you belonged to that 0.03 percent of the population whose families pre-dated colonisation).
Early in my discovery of Europe I was delighted to discover Calvi - a high outcrop of rocks, ancient jumbled buildings, narrow streets, pushed up and out into the Mediterranean sea on three sides and crowned on high by a walled city including with a couple of empty cafes and a Cathedral. There were tourists, policemen, and people eating ice cream but underneath it all were the hints of centuries of political oppression. Calvi and Corsica might be happy and French now, but since that old Cathedral was established, a lot has gone on.
Nowdays, the Cathedral is just a building and a name. The old town perched on its massive walls protecting it from the sea and pirates is not really lived in - the lower town with the marina, roads and railway has the church and the people. However, the old town is still a fundamental part of Calvi.
The church itself was rebuilt in the fifteenth century and replaced the earlier building from the 700s. When you go in, and despite my rampant romanticism above, the area is crowded with tourists in the summer, yet the building feels cool and empty. The decoration is sparse with great empty walls, one or two with a near black painting or statues, which adds to the sense of ancientness. It almost feels as if the building has not only had its bishop and cathedral status taken away but also all of the art and the things communities place in their churches that mark them as owned. Most visitors don't hang around for long.
For me, I found the place an excellent space to sit and do nothing for a while. The empty walls start to tell their own tales as effectively as the statues and paintings tell the stories they were designed to tell. What is space is as communicative as what is object.
Your response may be quite different.
I have been to a music concert there presented in French and English. It was pretty dreadful for pure musical technique - but if that is your only measure, stay in London, Paris or New York. However, in terms of local musical expression in an building that remains central to the identity of the local town, it was great and I look forward to paying my money and going again.
13 St Peter's (York)
St Peter's Cathedral, York (better known as York Minster) contains my favourite window in the world. On the northern side there is a huge square extension to the building (there is a matching one on the southern side too, but that doesn't interest me nearly as much although it may stop the building falling down because there is a huge square tower above their crossing). The entire northern side of this extension is glass from about 3 metres up - all the way to the roof (considerably more than 13 metres further up). It is called the Five Sisters Window or the Jews' Window (guess who paid for it).
The glass in the window is grey and not coloured, although in the 1200's when it was made, nobody knew how to make clear, fully transparent glass. So the delight in the glass comes from its shades of grey and the shapes of the tiny pieces of glass, each of which is surrounded by black lead strips that hold it firmly in place. To see the patterns made by some small pieces of grey glass once is fine, but to see it repeated thousands of times again and again in five windows is amazing.
It is also the first thing you see when you come into the church. It captures the northern Yorkshire light, breaks it up though a thousand lenses and re-presents it to you on a scale you would not think of merely by looking at the open sky. It makes a more profound spiritual statement than any number of pictures of miracles or statues of holy people.
And on a practical note, it also lights the space quite well, which is good really as it is worth seeing.
It is a huge, geometrically driven, three dimensional space defined in stone. The decoration on the walls, floor and ceiling doesn't overwhelm what is there, it de-marks and throws it into relief. The space itself is almost air, enclosed, shaped and dedicated leaving the building as a thin shell which keeps the rain, noise and distraction out, leaving only the purer bit within. This partly my over active imagination but it also is a result of the size and uniformity of the space. The ceiling is white and simple, the walls are largely unadorned and the floor is open and expansive.
This may not all be because of good management. York Minster has had a troubled time from fire and bankruptcy (in the 1850s!). It most recently burnt down in the mid 1980s. This may explain the lack of junk.
Unlike many of England's bigger churches, there is no park in which you can walk. The park is there, in fact about a third of the land enclosed in the ancient city walls are the grounds of the church but it is not easy to access. I suspect there is a school in there amongst other things and that may explain the limited access. A walk around the walls of York (something to be recommended) gives a wonderful view of tress, houses and open grounds.
One thing I haven't really gone into about this place is whether it is any good as a church. I know some people who have gone there weekly and others who have gone there once and not gone back. Whenever I have been through everybody has been friendly enough and coffee in the Chapter house round the back is a delight (the space more than the coffee itself). Each service begins with the bang of a cracked bell which is quite a distinctive sound, so there is personality there. It maybe that each person may have to work out what they think for themselves.
14 Saint-Eustache (Paris)
This is a church that I include even though I do not know it well. My first experience of it was meeting friends at Le Gross Minet (which translates as the fat duck, not the long minute) which is a fabulous cafe in Les Helles right in the centre of Paris - they even have picture flash-cards to show non-French people what the ingredients of their dishes are.
From the street outside, looking North towards Montmartre there is this huge ghostly Gothic church of a scale that makes no sense to the unfamiliar observer. There are many big churches in European cities but the cathedrals and abbeys are often contextualised in the street patterns or buildings. In the same city there is Notre Dame on its island but the river, the civic buildings and the streets surrounding it make it a dominant building in a very, very impressive context.
St Eustace looks like it was dropped in Paris by a Hollywood cartoonist writing a horror story involving the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail and a particularly thick sociologist (but no sex). It isn't that this church doesn't fit into my ideas of what a Gothic church in Paris should look like. It is that it absolutely fulfils those ideas and then some more. It even has real flying buttresses and numbers huge monstrous gargoyles that spout water. All of this is made more pronounced because it is, in fact, very short compared to it height (a ratio of 3:1 for those who care about these things). In all fairness, the church was the centre-piece of Paris's huge fresh food markets, Les Halles, which have been removed and the streets flattened. This parish church's intended community of the market sellers and buyers is now gone, leaving it a lonely relic from the hundreds of years of buzz that characterised that place.
So what is it like inside?
Well, it is pretty empty and dark and overblown and French really. There are cloths on many surfaces that have acres of lace but are a bit higgledy-piggledy. The candles on the altar are numerous and very, very tall but they are discoloured and not quite straight. Me? I like things nice and tidy and clean. I love the design of the over-decorated French style which can jam so many elements into a single structure that your eyes have to open wide just to take it in. But I like it to be tended and spotless.
There is a lot of love in this church (and some obscure doors to get in and out of it - why are markets and secret back-doors almost synonymous?). It has a music programme to rival any of its peers. It is always full of people who staff prefabricated offices stuck behind pillars for this and that. In fact these little offices probably require a mention. The local churches have lots of religious societies which people can belong to for the aid of the poor, Jerusalem, relief from war and so on. Their workers have to be housed somewhere and, for a few cases, that is behind a Saint-Eustache pillar.
It is not a space I would stop and try and connect with the I Am - Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois a bit further south towards the river opposite the Louvre is much better for that. Instead it is my guiding light, my point zero, the site around which my personal map of Paris is oriented.
15 The Holy and Undivided Trinity (Carlisle)
In the good ol' days the Romans and the Scots had an agreement. That agreement was made explicit in a wall built by Emperor Hadrian's orders by his Legions. As a defensive structure it was OK but it did wonders for capturing customs and excise. The Romans left and over the next millennium the Christians eventually took over and prospered, especially in Carlisle. Eventually they built a Cathedral of impressive dimensions, turning swords into plough shears (as the bible would have it) or, more literally, old army walls and forts into a church of fabulous dimensions.
Then it so happened that peace settled on the border and Christians worshipped together happily promoting brotherly love. Well not really. Carlisle was essentially under martial law for the first 500 years after the Normal invasion which meant that the local authorities were able to do what they liked, provided it protected the King's interests and, whatever they did, it didn't bode well for the Scots. The Cathedral was a towering testament to the local powers and, like Durham on the other coast of England, the castle was right next door. The city walls were not there just to help collect tax, they were there for war.
It is of some irony that when Cromwell came through with his model army, he re-militarised the stones from Hadrian's wall leaving the town with half a Cathedral and a much, much larger castle. What the army giveth, the army taketh away (blessed be the name of the army). Even more fun, he used Scots troops to do the work, which is confusing on a number of levels not least because if I were a Scot at that time, I would have wanted neither the castle nor the church.
Going into Carlisle cathedral is good fun. If you have some familiarity with your typical post-Norman cathedral building it is quite a bewildering experience because half of it just isn't there. It isn't as if they are working towards building the next (larger) stage. It is more as if it once was there and now it isn't. What remains is quite magnificent. The roof is a picture of stars, the windows are huge and lovely and everything that is there captures the history as well as implicitly highlighting the bits that aren't. Where the half way point would be, can be seen a huge square tower of similar dimensions to Durham. Where the main part of any church would be and the people would spend most their time, there is a blank wall and then, on the other side, grass. I suppose that makes this one church where every body has to sit up the front together.
I should probably keep this review to half length (or include a tour of the castle). However, there are two delightful things to mention.
One is the very large window in the eastern end which contains, as is typical of these windows, pictures of stories from the gospels in the bible. However, some things are harder to paint on glass than others and Christ's resurrection from a sarcophagus is famously towards the trickier end of these. So look out for the picture of bearded man stepping gingerly out of the deep stone bath wrapped in what looks to be a towel. it is right in the centre.
The other thing is the people. For various reasons I don't go to services in Carlisle very often. However on the occasions I have, the people have been really nice as, indeed, have been the staff (both in robes and out). If you are there and a church service takes your fancy, should they offer you a cup of something warm and liquid afterwards, say "yes" and you should be up for an entertaining half hour.
16 Cathédrale Orthodoxe Saint-Nicolas (Nice)
This is a strange one. I have a fondness for Nice. It has a tendency to Bling that I find quite verges ridiculous but it also has the sublime Matisse Museum and an amazing annual Jazz festival. Oh, and bright, strong, summer sunshine that my Australian bones love.
In this Russian Orthodox cathedral Bling is brought into a unity that is rarely seen. People familiar with the various Orthodox Christian traditions will be aware that pictures framed in gold form the basis of church decoration. In fact they can substitute for much other religious formal expression. There are good points and bad points about this and if you want to read about one of the longer arguments to have taken place in the middle east, search the web (or a good library) for "iconoclastic" and "iconophilic".
For these pictures are the original "icons", after which many things in modern use are now named. They are written (not drawn or painted I am told) and they each attempt to capture a single moment of unending and eternal state of grace experienced by a saint in their daily life. Presumably they did something or lived something that was completely aligned with the perfection of heaven. The matter gets quite complicated, dealing with the economy of God (which is the ordering of our daily lives) and the theology of God (which is eternal and never changing). If I were to tell you that the term "Byzantine" was coined to describe the complexity and subtlety needed to capture this logic that may illustrate the points better. Byzantium is the town where these arguments were formally presented and after which these kinds of distinctions formulated through logic is named.
The Orthodox church in Nice is a quite tiny octagon with the walls and pillars covered in gold and what seems to be hundreds of icons embedded in it. Some are individual and some are in sets. The great thing about icons is they are universal and you need no Russian or Greek to understand them. The problem with them is that depictions of universal states of grace can be tricky to read unless you know the language. Probably more people now the language of the French or the Russians than they do of icons, but once you get into the swing of them you can get a sense of what they are about.
The building is bigger on the outside than the inside, and that is partly because a lot of church services take place behind the closed doors that lead to other parts of the building. Orthodox religious expression is far more focused on the eternal than Western Europe's love of the here and now. So who cares about seeing what is going on every minute at a service that can take three to five hours when you can contemplate an icon and then go outside for a while?
Inside, walk around and find an icon that you like best. Stare at it (light a candle if it will help, really, I am no expert in this), think about what thought/action is depicted that could be eternal and last for ever without change: the love of what is innocent; the desire to learn the unknowable; nurturing a gift in another? Each is a vision by the icon writer of a moment of perfection in the life of a person. Whatever this is, it will be what is now known to contemporary management consultants as a "stretch goal". Look at the person and the thing they hold (if anything). Does the saint focus on what they hold or on you (it could be either - Mary Mother of God: offering child, adoring child, nurturing child etc etc). Give yourself to the moment.
Going back outside you are hit by the sunlight of the south of France bouncing off in all directions from a very colourful and golden building. The church is surrounded by a small park of grass and trees which is choked by the local road system.
17 The Collegiate Church of St Peter (London)
London, centre of Empire, possessor of a degree of self esteem which might be quite tragic were it to be held by a city like, say, Sydney. It is flanked on two sides: to the east is Her Majesty's Royal Palace, Tower of London. On the west is The Collegiate Church of St Peter known more commonly as Westminster Abbey. One is about army, tax, repression and power. The other is about God, authority and power. Both are made of stone, both are huge and both are naked statements of Normal royal power established in 1066 in the capital. God, King and Tax.
Westminster Abbey is undeniably a working church and it probably hosts more religious events in a day than most people eat meals. Items of interior decoration are as likely to be stamped EIIR (Elizabeth the Second, Regina/Queen) as they are "For God so Loved the World" or some other pious phrase.
So, given the fact that I obviously find this big church in little Europe slightly problematic, why have I elected to include it? Firstly if you are touring London you probably will end up visiting despite the vast sums they charge to go in. Secondly there is something profound in this bald statement by William the Conqueror of God's favour on William the Conqueror and his offspring.
I will admit that I have never paid to go in. There are enough services to nearly always allow me access when I feel like it (just tell the man at the gate you are going to a service and, if there is one scheduled in the next 15 minutes, he will let you in but you will be escorted through to make sure you go). Inside it is just another well maintained Gothic abbey church of stunning proportions. There are too many memorials for my taste and the concentration of dead kings and queens in one place is also rather too high for the public's general health (although they are probably less a threat to the public now they are dead than they were while they were alive). The choir is supremely competent. The twin towers out the front are 17th Century add-ons put up by Hawksmore. The staff wear bright red to show that they work directly for the Queen.
However, there is an amazing side to this place. Ignore the front door and just to the right (beside the shop - the fact that there is a retail emporium built-in shouldn't surprise you) is a relatively little (i.e. huge) gateway that lets you into a yard right beside the church (in fact there are two gates, I am talking about the one right next to the shop but the other west facing gateway has a treat behind it too).
Some days you will stopped from entering the yard but if you are insistent (and nice) they will give you a cloister pass for free (it is always free but they won't give them to people trying to sneak entrance into the church by the side door). The medieval abbey's preserved cloisters can be a patch of silence in a very, very busy part of London. They can also be full of school children eating sweeties at the cafe which also in there. Therefore walk through the cloister to the northern corner and there will be a 13th century passage way to the little cloister and from there (head right), open only on very select days of the week, to the College Garden.
Suddenly you are in the quietest and most peaceful space ever. Visually you can see the Abbey, Parliament's two great towers (about 40 metres away) and everything else. You may even jump when Big Ben tolls right over your shoulder but all of these things are gone out of mind.
Head right to the far south western corner and there is a small water garden and a sculpture by Enzo Plazzotta of a naked man steatching up and over the T-piece of a cross, almost being lifted upwards through the length of wood. On one side is a man collapsing against the weight of the same piece of wood and on the other is third man being hefted up on the angle.
There are benches all around this piece of art. Walk around it, sit in various places. Take half an hour, take the rest of the day if you want.
As you leave, remember the placement of this statue is not an accident.
18 Sint Nicolaas (Amsterdam)
Sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad. The good Oude Kerk is in the middle of the bad, and when Amsterdam is bad, it is wicked!
So naive young thing that I am, I was booked to drop some friends off at the Oude Kerk for them to do a day of singing rehearsing while I got to go and explore and scratch that urban planning itch that I get from time to time. The problem for me was that the rehearsals started at some stupidly early hour of the day and I hadn't had breakfast.
For those of you who know Amsterdam will know that trying to buy coffee in the Coffee Shops near this 14th century church is like trying to buy cannabis at the 24 hour diner and donut shop opposite the police headquarters in New York. But completely reversed. I discovered that they really only sell weed. I did get a coffee in the end (cash only sale, out the back, no receipts) and I had the opportunity to drink it at their tables in the square. As I did so, I got to look in through the many big plate glass windows at the mostly quite naked ladies who were purveying their wares at 8am on a Saturday morning. Yes, the church is in the middle of the famous red light district of Amsterdam.
The juxtaposition is confronting if you are there for a choir school or coffee. The church belongs to one of the most rigidly "upright" sects in Christianity. Booze would be iffy, drugs would be out and dancing a complete no-no. This church is not some off-shoot of a minor or neglected sect of do gooders. It is the second largest church in one of the biggest cities in Europe. It has a large number of people who come to church every Sunday and every person who goes has to walk past the biggest legal display of drugs and prostitutes doing their thing in the western world.
And I think this is good, as maybe do the people who go to this church. They could go elsewhere. They choose not to. The participants support the sex workers by their presence. They actively support the homeless (go to the north western entrance from recollection). The the public art in the church yard is unambiguous in its support of the prostitutes who work in the immediate area and elsewhere in the world.
So what are church services like? My one off experience was a bit weird really. My Dutch isn't up to much but the service I was at, they did English translations of some of the material. Most of the rest I could work out given the hand-outs an a vague familiarity with the tunes, psalms and bible passages.
The church is sufficiently plain to be called "stark". The locals' tolerance of their Spanish imperial overlords' religious practices over the centuries did lead to a couple of populist clean-outs. But then you look at the detail. Each slab in the floor is an intricately carved grave stone. The ceiling which appears simply curved plain timber has delightful detailing at every join. Also the sheer scale of the ceiling lifts it to the extra-ordinary. Out of character at the back is a baroque organ, covered in wooden case that would warm the heart of an Imperial Spanish cherub. The preaching happens right in the middle of the church from a high wooden preacher's box.
This is a place I would definitely return to. I would probably avoid dropping past after dark on a weekend because the tourist trade is mostly large groups of loud young men daring each other to drink too much and to try and buy some skin. 8am on a Saturday is much more my time in that part of the city. You do, as I noted earlier, still get to enjoy the character of the area.
19 Holy Trinity, Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and Saint Swithun (Winchester)
Britain has an amazing ranking table. Actually, the British have lots of ranking tables: schools, poverty, GCSE results, housings crises and the best city to live in. Winchester probably has lovely schools and GCSE (tertiary entrance exam) results. But for the the crowing glory of ranking is the best place to live in Britain and Winchester often tops. It is an hour from London, small, with wonderful schools, not too many poor people and it has that most important thing for a great British City, a really old Cathedral.
Anybody who has looked at a map of the south of England may have wondered, while idly speculating about which big church I will pick next, why Wells, Salisbury, Winchester and Rochester all have 1000 year old cathedrals and are so close together but not particularly close to anything interesting. The answer is the lay lines (if you draw the line between them you also get Cadbury Castle and Stone Henge) or, more usefully, the major inland trade route between the west and the ports to Europe on the eastern seaboard. The route is now known as the Pilgrim's Way but it precedes Christianity. It also explains why the main streets in all of those towns go east/west rather than radiating from London as they do in most towns since the Romans laid out the road system.
So, what about the cathedral? It is probably the first one I spent any time in when I arrived in the UK excluding Southwark (which was about 100 metres from my front door and whose clock tower was my primary time piece until I could afford to buy a clock for myself). From the outside it is very, very long, low and squat. By low I mean the roof may still be 20 metres high but lacks the loftiness of other European churches. The central tower is extraordinary low which may contribute to the squatness impression.
Inside it is still long but the roof appears to soar up. A curious fact about most of the very old monasteries built in England is that the walls are built as three stories. There are very good reasons to do this, mostly because flat walls made from stone that go very high and which are very long (and which have no internal walls to brace them) tend to flex and fall down. So the chaps who built these places would build a first storey, with a short roof leaning inwards that would rest on an opposing row of internal pillars (essentially a very long but low cowshed of a building). The next storey would be built on the first and more or less repeat it. The top storey would rest on the double storied internal pillars and go all the way up to the roof. This is easier to show in a diagram or in real life so make sure you have this page with you when next visit an ex-monastic English cathedral. This style of building means you get lots of windows and you also get quite a bit of storage space on the middle storey. The clever thing about Winchester Cathedral is that the first storey is double height and their is no second story and that gives it more light at the ground level, more height around the edges and the internal pillars are twice as tall.
The foundations are built in the marshes of the River Itchen. At the beginning of the twentieth century one lone diver spent years of his life rebuilding the entire deeply submerged stone with brick work that holds up the rest of the building. This is not something you can tell from the outside but it is a result of those years of labour that there is any outside left.
In consequence, the under-croft of the cathedral is regularly flooded, a fact that they use to their advantage with an statue of St Swithun on display that is often spookily half in the water and half out.
Most of the medieval stuff around the building was removed in a fit of early reformist zeal but there are some treats round about. If you have read Barchester Towers/The Warden/Framily Parsonage by Anthony Trollop, it is set in Winchester. The little church that occupies the space where the old buildings join together over the road is there. The old hospital for retired sheep shearers (still going) is a walk along the river and it must surely be one of the greatest short walks in Europe, with the river on one side, an eye-wateringly privileged school's playing fields on the other and an old mill and pond half way along.
In many ways, Winchester Cathedral is not so much a building or institution but a complex of cooperating institutions that combine beautifully. The best arts and crafts fair I have ever been to was in the cathedral grounds and even though it was five years ago, it stays fresh in my mind.
The services on a Sunday are pretty lax. The space doesn't lend itself to the friendly approach they take. I understand it is hard to make things work with 200 people in a space that can probably seat 1800 (or 5000 standing, which was how they intended it to be used when they built it). Even so, I would do it differently if I were in charge and so it is probably just as well I am not.
The back window of the church is a re-assembled work from the piles of smashed medieval glass that has been recovered from where it was buried centuries ago. If forms a strikingly coherent image made up from tens of thousands of diverse fragments. So if you go to Winchester, don't go just for a single service. Go for a weekend or as many days as you can spare. Visit the school if there is a tour available, drop past for another of the arts days if the Cathedral is hosting one and go to the old Hospital of St John of the Cross, enjoy the walk and have a cup of tea with the pensioners who live there still. For a real thrill, go to the old Guild Hall further up the hill. There you can see the round table of Arthur and his knights (c.f. above, re: lay lines).
20 Santa Creu i Santa EulĂ lia (Barcelona)
Barcelona, one of the great port cities of the Mediterranean. For a time a client city of the Romans, at another time a stronghold of the Greeks. For a little while, it was the city state that controlled a sea empire from Italy to where-ever. It has always been the gateway to Catalonia, a long time independent state on the Iberian peninsular. For a short time it hosted one of Franco's most notorious death prisons.
The old Gothic Quarter has four churches in the Romanesque style (which is odd - either the architecture in the Gothic Quarter should be Gothic or the earlier Romanesque but what they have called it is not my problem). All are identical and all are almost completely undecorated and unfurnished except for one - the Cathedral (which also has a fake stuck on frontage from a century ago).
Interestingly when people think of churches in Barcelona they think of the Church of the Holy Family by Gaudi. This is fair enough as it is a lot more famous. What they don't necessarily consider is that Barcelona has a tradition of stone trade craft that stretches back a long time and is exemplified in the long shallow arch. Gaudi's great work as an architect is possible because there were stone masons to build his designs, and he designed the buildings he did because he had centuries of unique Barcelonian stone-craft legacy around to inspire him.
Back to the cathedral. Well, next door anyway where is there a Roman undercroft with a long low arch Opposite the cathedral are the remains of a Roman aqueduct, tall pillars with tight, high arches. Inside the church itself the building is a series of cages, pillars and arches all pressing inwards, towards the centre of the church. It gives the building a sense of gravitas but also privacy. Each one of these cages has its own character.
The history of Western Christianity (as opposed to Eastern Christianity or Pentecostal Christianity) begins with the collapse of Byzantium as a European power. Until as late as the 9th century, the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope) was formally appointed by the Emperor of Rome in Constantinople (aka New Rome, Rome, Byzantium, Istanbul - take your pick). Until the 16th century in western Europe people were just Christian. Roman Catholicism with the central power of the Pope and Rome was invented after that time. Until then, the bishops were pretty much free to do as they wanted and, although the Pope was a centre of authority, the first of the bishops and patriarchs, he was not the sole figure of authority we have today.
It is in Barcelona's cathedral with its multitude of spaces, linked by arches and pillars and each one its own space, where you can see each phase of the Western church presented clearly in and on the walls. Some rooms are painted with Byzantine art of a style and quality that you would naturally expect to find in a Greek Orthodox church. Another room, maybe next door, is a medieval painting of western style and taste. Another room, across the main area might host a statue of Jesus with wounds depicted bleeding in carefully anatomically correct detail. Another room is post 1950s and is alive with a post world war two sense of life.
For myself I love the Byzantine, Medieval and modern works. This is a church in a town that has either been critical to the economic growth some of the richest empires in the last 2000 years - or indeed as run such empires. The church captures the sense of the cultural value of every era it has survived or flourished through. It is not a young building and it has seen some ups and downs in the world and city around it.
The question for many people is whether it is a place to go and meditate or is it a cultural/historical tourist's "see the world in 80 ways" kind of place. I think there is something for everybody. There are definitely people on their knees here. There is diversity. Outside in the monks cloisters is a fabulous garden filled with birds and a lake. Off this stone edged square are opulent rooms, even if they are faded from their former glory.
This is a big house and there are many rooms (to adapt a famous text). It is a place you can visit with different goals in mind. You can sticky-beak shamelessly without being judged. You can also enter one of the spaces that matches your mood, aesthetic or seating needs and settle in. You won't ever be alone but if that is your main criteria, I can recommend any of the four near identical churches elsewhere in the quarter or just do the decent thing and go up into the mountains that dominate the city.
21 St Peter, St Paul and St Andrew (Peterborough)
In the good old days there were monasteries in England and they ruled their lands and people wisely under the civil law which pre-dated the Norman conquest, was more powerful than the King's Writ tracing its origins back to Constantine and the Roman Empire. Parliament cast its benevolent shadow over the rest of the peoples and all was well. Until one year parliament and the King had a hankering to rule all of the country under its law and the monasteries were no more.
There was a problem for the government of the day - it left the 25% of the population that had been living under civil (church) law and not parliamentary law in limbo. It might seem an easy fix today but not only was there no local government in the 1540s there was also no civil service. They needed to invent and then implement local government and also a reporting structure back to parliament.
Their answer was to create bishops and cathedrals and have the thousands of parishes throughout report through them. Yes, the bishops and parishes priests were still controlled by civil law but the bishops sat in parliament (along with the barons and other holders royal Letters Patent) and could be part of the great game of inventing the nation state. The parishes themselves were under parliamentary law. Of course the king himself was governed by civil law and not parliamentary law (as were the barons and parliament itself) and indeed this is still the case. If you have ever wondered why a number of lawyers in the UK are commenting that changing the laws about gay marriage are not straightforward, that might be because marriage is a civil law not a parliamentary law and thus it applies to the king, the English nobility and the bishops and parish priests (but not the parishes themselves except in so much there is a parliamentary Act that backs up the civil law). I hope I have conveyed in some small sense what a great big mess it all was, is and ever shall be, England without end.
The bishop and cathedral in Peterborough was one of those created to run the new local government system. At the time nobody thought that parliament in London would ever have the time, interest or resources to invent a schools policy, rules about domestic violence or produce regulations for gas outlet pressure from a standing pipe. The cathedral buildings are, in fact, the old abbey that was deemed suitable for this new use and was usefully located between the ancient cathedrals of Lincoln, Ely and London.
Most of the monastic buildings are now gone - at the time of its re-purposing the abbey was among the ten richest in England. It was run by an Abbot who also oversaw other monasteries that shared the same rules (those were headed by Priors). The walls of the place more or less remain. If you walk to this church from the railway station the town of Peterborough is fairly down-at-heel. As you pass through the gatehouse into the Cathedral grounds you are confronted by the sight of the huge 13th Century building with its three massive 50 metre high doorways at the front. It is quite extraordinary.
Having walked across the grassed area to the church, the doors themselves are somewhat smaller (thank goodness) and you gain entry into a building of extraordinary simplicity. The main part of the church has room for a 100m dash with room to warm up but the ceiling, floor and pillars all combine elegantly. The floor is completely flat without a step to interrupt it. When you are at the very eastern end of the building, behind the raised church within the church, looking from the far back corner to the front again, the long smooth floor stretches out.
Church services here are well done. I don't know much about Sundays but in the evening the choir can hold a tune to a good standard. Personally I find this a restful kind of place. Peterborough is not a major tourist centre because of its general poverty and some mind blowingly bad urban planning decisions and so you can sit quietly pretty much anywhere. After a while you can both tune in and tune out.
One of the last additions to be building is the area right at the back. It was a rule of the monks that they should walk around the back of the church on various occasions. In many monasteries there was an Ambulatory built as part of the original design for the monks to amble through (it also helps people disappear out one side of the church during a service, carrying one set of things, and reappear on the other side, carrying different things, without anybody seeing how it was done). At Peterborough the monks walked through the weather outside for 300 years until an abbot took pity on them and built the most magnificent walking space for them.
Most of this church has a wooden ceiling whose painted pattern has been maintained continuously since it was installed 900 years ago. The new monks' ambleway has a stone ceiling in the, what was, new-fangled 15th Century style of fan vaulting. It is a style used elsewhere but rarely on such a (relatively) low ceiling. The original church building had a rounded end and the new extension has been squared off creating opportunities for intricate patterns. It is a lovely space and some of the art exhibitions they hold there are extraordinary too. While much of the rest of the church might be good for peace, the walk space is good for doing.
It is said that you can see Ely Cathedral from the top of the old tower (most of it was taken down centuries ago after a rash of tower collapses around the country in the 14th Century). The Cathedrals are not very close together but nothing separates them but miles and miles of drained fen land. On a warm, clear day it would be a fine thing to add to the experience and go and find out.
22 Kings College Chapel (Cambridge)
This is my final piece in this series. For a little while in the next few weeks its interior will be shown, candle lit, to the world as once again the Cambridge university college performs its Christmas party piece of Nine Lessons and Carols - broadcast under some likely name such as "Carols from Kings". I presume it gets a new title because Christian lessons are out of favour generally, although you would expect a university college to a great source of lessons of one sort or another.
College chapel life is a strange beast. Cambridge university runs three 8 week terms a year with each day having three teaching sessions: morning, afternoon and evening. All students and staff must be full-time resident in their college during term so chapel services are part of life along with lab work, candle lit sit down dinners, sport and evening seminars. Everything is optional (including lessons) but everything is included.
The university itself is established to promote, inter alia, religion and curiously staff inductions for teaching positions take place in college chapels with oaths sworn over copies of the rules and regulations of the college (I am not making this up). Many colleges were established in the 13th Century, a lot "transferred" here from elsewhere in the country in the 16th Century as various church leaders realised their local tertiary institutions would be better co-located at either of the big collegiate organisations at Cambridge or Oxford. The idea of separating education and religion had not yet having occurred to anyone.
A goodly number of additional colleges were founded using money left over from the Great Church Nationalisation and Rationalisation scheme (also known as the dissolution of the monasteries) invented by Cardinal Wolesy and implemented by Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII. Cardinal's College Cambridge was one of them and no expense was spared. So lovely was it Cardinal Wolsey lost his head over the whole enterprise and bequeathed it (somewhat involuntarily) to the King and it was logically renamed King's College Cambridge. It was continued to be funded with an absurdly large amount of money.
The chapel building is amazing beyond description. The architect who did the lovely roof extension at Peterborough Cathedral completed the entire ceiling here with even better bits. The glass to stone ratio on the walls is a tad mind-boggling. All of the stained glass itself, the work of the best early 16th century artisans whose output is otherwise largely lost, survived the chapel being turned into a stable for the brief period when England had no king after whom a chapel could be named. Presumably the soldiers who slept there with their horses could see who would freeze first with the glass knocked out.
So the question is: how does one best appreciate this church. There are several of ways I would recommend. Firstly get yourself enrolled as a student of the college (expensive in the UK these days and quite difficult to qualify) Secondly become a college staff member (qualification, again, is tricky but at least they pay you rather than you paying them). Thirdly come and see a concert. Lastly come to a morning church service.
I shall ignore the first two options because if they are for you, I presume you are already are executing your own 10-20 year plan and nothing I say here will help you much (although marriage may be a part of a strategy you didn't think of).
Concerts are on here all of the time. Many are free and some are expensive. Those in summer are generally quite popular but it is a surprisingly large building. It is divided into two halves by the huge wooden wall that cuts the chapel into two halves (put there to minimise medieval drafts) and on top of which the pipe organ and organist sits. For organ concerts (as well as evensong) the place to be is the eastern end where the choir sits. For instrumental concerts the western end is the place as they put the seats and stage in front of the wall. The acoustics are punishing to the inexperienced musician with not only a very long echo (about 10 seconds) but also the echo is razor sharp - a duff note will be with you for far longer than you would like either as a performer or listener. There is a joy in sitting in the "wrong" end during a summer concert with so much of the space empty but listening to some of the best musicians surrounded by hundreds of square metres of some of the best stained glass ever made.
All of this is flim-flammery though. The college employs two full time religious types to take services and this they do. The evening service is like a concert with tourists. The choir is probably as good as it is reputed to be, which is the best in the world. However it is not a great religious experience. It doesn't do the building or the people who attend it the justice they both deserve. Don't let me stop you going however (I go when I can and once you zone into the music it can be quite easy to pace your own thoughts).
The best time to go is in the morning for the said morning services. You will be there with two or three other people and everybody who is there is there for a reason (who knows what it will be). They don't advertise the services widely (as most people only think about the choir) but the porters at the main gate will be able to tell you (and let you into the college in the morning) to walk across the sunlight, misty courtyard. It is here murmuring the modern words of the ancient dawn service sitting in a small group that the world reaches a transcendence of community, place and call and response.
