Some churches in England and Belgium
Cathedral lows and highs
Before we get back to What I Did on My Holidays, a quick review of Ecclesiastical Architecture jargon, illustrated by Norwich:
Since I don’t know anything, I relied on two books for dates, measurements, and occasionally vocabulary: Gothic: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting (ed. Rolf Toman) and the 1974 edition of John Harvey’s Cathedrals of England and Wales. As far as I know, only the second of these was written by an ex-Fascist (which mostly comes across in hating the French.)
Norwich Cathedral
Due to cascading effects of train cancellations, I didn’t get to Durham, so this was my most Norman cathedral of the trip. The older style isn’t as easy for amateurs to love as Gothic, but the nave’s lack of abstract decoration is compensated for by the sheer impression of length, exceeding its measured yardage. The church goes on, round arch after round arch, to the screen front, and then it keeps going on after that. The small clerestories play a perspective trick to add emphasis. Most of the later additions to the interior aren’t unique, save for Skeleton Dude and perhaps the star vault, which in my unfair opinion falls in an uncanny no-man’s-land between the pure example of the Ely choir and the overboard example of Christ Church.
The body of the Norman tower is exemplary of its time. While appearing extremely solid, the big rectangles emphasize the vertical, and the arches and circles add variation. The spire can be admired from a distance, and it’s best to do so that way. Much more human scale are the cloisters and their famous Green Man roof bosses, looking down at you with, let’s be honest, judgment. A small price to pay for a little shade.
St Agnes, Cawston, Norfolk
I’m not going to talk about painting until we get to Belgium because I find that English religious painting tends to lack character (at least until Blake.) Except look at the character(s) of these guys!
Whitby Abbey
I was too lazy to detour to Lincoln, the one cathedral British church nerds of all reactionary ideologies agree on, but England’s most famous ruin (among Goths) serves as a reasonable substitute to get a sense of early Gothic in the north. It’s unusual in that the east front is the famous one, if only because unlike the west front it’s relatively complete. East fronts don’t tend to make it to the postcards these days—but it’s evident how much effort went into the one at Whitby, down to the careful matching of heights with the nave (uneven ground notwithstanding.)
Ely Cathedral
Let me kvetch before we get to the good part. Like most English cathedrals, Ely was built over centuries and is a mishmash of quite different styles, and it suffers from this more than most of the great ones—the Victorian ceiling paintings don’t go well with each other, let alone with anything else. The Norman nave is ill-proportioned compared to Norwich: the arcade arches feel like they’re being squished under the upper levels. The Lady Chapel, largely empty after Reformation ransacking save for a contemporary Virgin Mary, remains very fine in all its Lines of Beauty, as does the choir vault, though there isn’t much of it.
None of this matters, because we’re here for the Octagon, one of the great features in any Western European cathedral. After the old tower fell in 1322, Ely built a new one in the then-fashionable Decorated style. The width and height of the interior Octagon impress as an engineering feat, the ribs converge of the central image of Jesus as design. The light that shines through the upper windows makes the crossing below feel sacred.
The early single-tower front was covered by scaffolding on my visit. This also affected my reception of the foiled-arch entrance porch, a pity since I suspect it's the one place the 19th century additions actually fitted in. The shape of the place as a whole, while not matching the English archetype like York, looks a lot better from close range than many of its peers.
York Minster
Some cathedral snobs get sniffy about York—yes, it’s very big and bright, but it’s even more disjointed than Ely, and worse, it feels a little French in its emphasis on windows over good old English stone. Yet it functions as a Greatest Hits of Gothic, and the hits are indeed great. The early English transepts have a straightforward grace, highlighted by the tall and narrow Five Sisters windows, whose grisaille glass appears almost abstract from a distance. The Decorated eight-sided chapter house is an important precursor to Ely’s Octagon, with a wooden roof above the vaulting. (The heavy use of wood at York is due to its size; it has meant that bits of the place tend to burn down from time to time.) Since the ceiling’s lower, it’s more relatable, as the kids used to say. Height is attained in the crossing, again behind only Ely for light and apparent space.
The great Perpendicular East Window, which puts all the angels and stuff up top so the apocalyptic monsters are closer to eye level, is second to none amongst English stained glass—check back after my tour of the French provinces (sadly not in the budget for a few years yet) to see how it holds up internationally. Only with the main church vaulting is the lack of integration really a problem, and even then you can just focus on the little bit of the choir ceiling that’s excellent.
From the outside, York comes very close to the platonic ideal of an English cathedral, lacking only a spire on the central tower. One can only imaging how breathtaking the tower’s solidity tapering into the heavens would’ve been if anyone had got around to (re-)building it. The west front is very fine, with pinnacles rising from the axial towers and the tracery of the Heart of Yorkshire window clearly visible.
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford
The church part of Christ Church College is relatively cozy by cathedral standards. The outstanding feature of the interior is the “pendant” choir vault, which brings the English medieval ceiling pretty close to its final form. The ribs are in star form, while pendants (the hangy things) look precarious dangling to the sides without overshadowing the much older nave. There’s one very good newer (well, 1631) window, Jonah Before Nineveh, and in general the integration of elements from different times is quite tasteful. There’s even a memorial to John and Charles Wesley to tut-tut at if you happened to be reading E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class on the train.
But the real joy of the cathedral is how well it integrates with the rest of the college. The tower, somewhat stubby, nevertheless aspires to heaven thanks to its spire (one of the few surviving Gothic originals) and pinnacles. It’s even more charming across the quad from Wren’s revivalist Tom Tower, like a proud father admiring his better-nourished grown-up son. Similarly the cathedral neatly complements the Great Hall, which has its own cool windows and ceiling. Of the many places in the UK where I was nearly trampled by Harry Potter nerd tourists, this was the most pleasant.
Bath Abbey
With building starting around 1500, this is pretty much the last stop for the English Gothic cathedral (even though it only briefly served as one.) The fan vault, initiated in the 16th century and completed by the Victorians, is the most complex of any cathedral (King’s College Chapel in Cambridge and the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey rival it.) Is it a bit much? I suppose, but it points forward to times that would generally be a bit much. Similarly the nave throws out bay designs perfected over centuries and just piles on a massive clerestory filled with windows, making it feel like they should be growing vegetables in there. It’s impressive, though “beautiful” would be a stretch.
The tower is sui generis—though it ultimately descends from Oxford, the rectangles filled with arches with arches are new to the cathedral tradition. The west front doesn’t have towers, only turrets to which pinnacles were added at a late date. Aside from feeling totally wrong, it’s a thoughtful, elegant effort. In all, it’s a Victorian’s idea of a great Gothic church, and this is far from the thing I’m most sure the Victorians were wrong about.
Coventry Cathedral
I don’t have the vocabulary to evaluate 20th century buildings (except skyscrapers), let alone 20th century building fused with Second World War ruins. It seems tasteful; we’ll see if it still does in a couple of hundred years.
St. Bavo’s, Ghent
In many countries whose cathedral-building tradition derives from France, the emphasis tends to be much less on the building itself than on the Cool Stuff in it. St. Bavo’s, to which I made an impromptu visit after our train to Bruges stopped moving, takes this to an extreme, albeit for an understandable reason. They know you know their van Eyck altarpiece is one of the world’s great masterpieces. To make you feel better about paying sixteen Euros to see it, they lend you a headset so you can take an augmented reality tour in the basement to see a CGI van Eyck paint a CGI altarpiece to the delight of the CGI fifteenth century Ghentians before you see the real thing. The complication is that on my visit, some panels of the altarpiece were under restoration and had been replaced by print-outs (without telling you, unless you’re the kind of person who reads the fine print on their website), and it’d take an eye more exceptional than mine to pick which ones. This raises updated versions of the usual Benjamin questions about art in the age of digital reproduction, but hands up who wants me to rehash those here. No hands, good. In summary, absolutely worth sixteen Euros, which I did not feel good about paying.
Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
For Cool Stuff tourists, Antwerp Cathedral markets their Rubens paintings hard, and it’s probably the best place to feel his religious work. The Raising of the Cross and Descent from the Cross belong on any Best of the 1610s list. The latter in particular combines post-Renaissance compositional rigor and some nice Flemish faces with the weight that the subject matter requires, all presented not too far above your head. The building itself is also of high interest—one of the best illustrations of Brabant Gothic as a merger of French and English ideas (maybe rivaled by Mechelen, which I didn't get to.) The huge bay arches and generous aisles mean the glasshouse feeling is avoided in the nave. Only towards the apse and its chapels do things get fully continental. The 404-foot northwest tower happily still dominates the Antwerp skyline. Its design is exceptional, with the square base giving way to an eight-sided upper section more gracefully than in Brussels’s town city and Bruges's belfry (though the latter might compete if it still had its spire.) I am very pro-skyscraper, but this is one old church I hope remains the city’s high point indefinitely.
Subjects for further research
In England I optimistically hoped to visit Durham, Lincoln, and St. Paul’s on this trip. I’ve mentioned the first two above; the last got cut because we spent too long at the Tate and getting fish and chips was more important. (Golden Union, Soho, best in the world contender.) The other big ones are Canterbury, Salisbury, and Wells; Canterbury is on the way to nowhere (besides France) but I hope to get to the other two on my next UK trip, tentatively scheduled for 2043 because I told a local in a York pub I’d see him in twenty years. Finally, Bruges deserved much more than the four hours it ended up getting.
Nice tour. Recommend Beverly Minster for the next trip, both because it’s a mere parish church and these: https://beverleyminster.org.uk/visit-us-2/medieval-minstrel-carvings/