Transcendent Moments in Clerical Life #983

Swanvale Halt church was refurbished in 2012, as some may recall, as part of which we installed a handsome range of new furniture, benches and chairs made from light American oak. They are light in colour, not in weight; they are substantial bits of kit. When first placed in the church, each had beneath every foot a small plastic roundel holding a felt pad, so that they would move smoothly across the floor when called upon to do so.

Thirteen years have taken their toll and those felt pads that remain are now compacted, but still just about doing their job. But many have disappeared and in some cases even the plastic roundels that held them have also vanished. There is one point in the church, the runnels into which the folding doors that close off the entrance area sit, where if you are not careful they will tear the little fixings off the feet of the chairs and benches, but the latter are moved over them so rarely that it surprises me it's happened at all. 

I love the smooth oak floor of the church building. I remember, when it was newly laid down and before the furniture arrived, Peter the then churchwarden and his wife Paula the pastoral assistant went waltzing across its shiny surface. It is always a moment, then, of horrible distress when I move a bench ready for Toddler Praise or the Pilates class on the second Wednesday in the month only to hear a scratch and realise a tiny fragment of flint caught beneath a leg where a pad should be has just scored a white gouge across the wood.

It takes organisation to move from the pained regret of these moments to actually doing anything about it, as I managed to yesterday, replacing the missing pads with squares of felt cut out of sheets supplied by the local ironmongery. Moving the kneeling-screens and benches back to their places and feeling them slide gently across the floor was more delightful than I know how to tell you.

You think this is banal? Wait until next time when I post about the significance of pickled onions to Church life.

Layers of History

Strangely, perhaps, for someone who has such an interest in history, I rarely look back at my own, or devote much time to thinking about it. But the interlinking of personal and wider history is a different matter. My elder niece has not long since started studying at Sheffield University and is based in the university halls at Endcliffe. On her way to the city centre she walks past the house where her great-great-grandmother was in service, while a couple of miles away is the rather more modest house in Industry Street where her great-grandmother and namesake Grace was born.

Meanwhile, my mum's side of the family came from Somerset. Her grandfather owned Royal Oak Farm at Clanville once upon a time, a building now worth getting on for £850K, quite a far cry from Industry Street, Sheffield. Here it is, as revealed by a popular mapping app. Of course, although these old buildings are part of our history, they're also embedded in other peoples', one of the ways in which lives cross over one another, link, and construct a wider human narrative. 

Nouveau, Arabesque, Gothic

Time ticks on and the next Goth Walk approaches fast: on Thursday I traced the route, discovering that we would be going past the houses of both Noel Coward and Bram Stoker: now what a double-act that would have been. We will (all being well) finish at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea, the one-time home of Ruth Baldwin. Socialite and prodigious drug-taker, Ruth was the girlfriend of heiress and motorboat racer Marion 'Joe' Carstairs, and died from an overdose in the flat of Oscar Wilde's neice Dolly in 1937. I didn't realise the house would look like this: built in 1913 for a Danish aristocrat and stained-glass designer, it's a startling block of Art Nouveau sensibility in a Bohemian portion of London. It's not the only example in the streets nearby, either.

I had enough time to return, after an initial visit twenty years ago, to Leighton House in Kensington, reacquainting myself with its startling neo-Moorish decor. Frederic Lord Leighton's actual art was superb and empty, its classical dullness enough to make me forgive Watts who at least put some soul in his soporific allegories; but his house is another matter, a tiled jewel. Nobody at all mentions the great green-painted iron girders and pillars to its rear, which are just as striking in their own way. 

On the Tube back home I found myself sitting next to a gent who was flicking through what I later discovered was ES, the Evening Standard magazine. He wasn't interested in an interview with Marina Abramovic, and eventually settled on a piece about holidays in Greece, but not before passing a series of photos of young people in what seemed like Gothic outfits. What was it? The paper exhausted the fellow's interest and he stuck it behind him, but although I tried to attract his attention before I left the train to see if I could have it, he was embroiled in Candy Crush and big headphones and so I abandoned the attempt. It was only through a friend that I found out the ES was profiling Slimelight, the veteran Goth club in Islington, and the whole article is on Slimelight's Instagram. It's gratifying to have such favourable coverage, though it does rather give the impression that Goth fashion has been taken over by a fetish aesthetic which, though it does seem quite prominent at the moment (rather like Steampunk was a few years ago and Cyber a few before that), isn't completely hegemonic.

And That Was Easter

If attendance is an indicator of success, our Holy Week and Easter services were successful this year. In previous years I've had to abandon the outdoor Stations of the Cross in which we follow a little route around the centre of the village because nobody had turned up to join me, but this year there were ten souls including Clarke who is 14 and autistic and after each station wanted to know where we were going next whereupon, having been told, he expressed his incredulity with enthusiasm. We had more people at the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday liturgies than I think any time since I arrived in Swanvale Halt, and that was also true of the Dawn Mass on Easter Day. Several congregation members who might normally be expected to turn up later in the day were there for that early service, but the others held up decently too. 74 (including 6 under-16s) at the main mass is no great shakes compared to pre-pandemic days, but it's still a slight advance on 2022.

Once the rain stopped today, I went out for a wander around the paths and lanes east of Swanvale Halt. I'm pretty sure I've been to all these places before, if not approaching them from that direction! As ever the Surrey hills present an intriguing patchwork of textures and visions.

Cumbria 1: Landscapes and Townscapes

The name of Byre Cottage – at Dodbury, at Garrigill, near Alston in northeast Cumbria – suggests it used to be essentially a cowshed, but the owners have turned it into a holiday cottage and it’s where I’ve just spent a week. Unlike some of the more basic places I’ve stayed, it’s modern and bright, and gazes over the valley of the South Tyne. A footpath runs right through the little garden, but I never saw evidence of anyone using it. These photos were all taken the morning I left, when the best weather of the week arrived!

There’s a lot of water about in this part of the world, some of it cascading in rocky falls. Beldy Fall was just yards from Byre Cottage; and Ashgill Force is a dizzying experience. The fall is at the top of a gorge: the bridge you can see in the photo carries a road across the top. You can, if you want to take the risk, stand behind the water and look outward as it crashes from fifty feet above. It’s not that likely that the whole thing is going to collapse, is it? There are gentler manifestations of water, too, at wide Kielder and rainy Ullswater.

You see the odd field of cows, but farming here means mainly sheep. It can’t ever have made for an easy living, but derelict farms like this one at Low Craig somehow express how hard it really could be. Imagine the last years of Low Craig.

That’s a different sort of economic scarring from the kind evident in the towns. Alston, a little market town a couple of miles from Garrigill, clambers over a steep hill with its market square halfway down. It’s clearly kept going by catering to tourists, walkers and bikers, but those are fewer than they once were. One of the cafés is closed, and what you might describe as a knickknack shop is heading that way too. I had a look round on Monday when everything was shut anyway, apart from the Cumberland Inn where I had lunch. So did everyone else: Monday’s always a busy day at the Cumberland, apparently, because there's nowhere else to go.

Picturesque Durham is a student city as much as anything else (I saw a queue of at least twenty outside Greggs at lunchtime) but the presence of lots of young people can’t disguise the closed shops there either. As for Newcastle, the streets around the city centre witness to the pride of a provincial capital, confident in its identity and prosperity: and thus in contrast to the hard times it now finds itself in. In handsome, red-sandstone Carlisle, even the Covered Market is half-empty, which is a bad sign when market stalls require so little investment, comparatively, to set up.

Towns like Penrith and Hexham, small but on the next step up from Alston, seem to be doing a bit better: they have their blank frontages and rubbish-strewn corners, but also their mobile coffee stands and side streets of little shops.

I’ll finish this section with a couple of bits of Art Deco, a bijou former cinema in Hexham and a building in Carlisle which uses the red sandstone in a proper 1930s idiom. 

An Unexpected Find

At some point I will post about something significant, and even describe a few churches, but I haven't the energy for that today. Instead - so it is preserved - here is an image of a battered but still standing Art Deco building in the backstreets of Farnborough which I spotted while on the way to one of those churches. It's a garage now, and inside is utilitarian indeed (though I wonder what the upstairs flat is like - are there any original features left?), and it's lost most of its old glazing bars; but it holds on, and the company using it has chosen a nice jazzy font for its signage. 

Holiday

What a lot I managed to do during my week off. Resisting my natural instinct just to lie in a darkened room for five days, I amassed a pleasing list of folk seen: Ms Brightshades and Fr Fretboard in London, Lady Arlen (visiting Dorset for a festival) and my family in Dorset, Cara and her husband at Emwood, and Dr & Mrs Abacus in Surbiton. Their daughter was so small the last time I saw her that she took some convincing it had ever happened. 

And as well as taking in Art Deco buildings in Dorset, I saw plenty of other nice things too. Adverts on LiberFaciorum kept arguing that I should visit Tower Bridge, so eventually I did. Some of the views of the staircases are positively Piranesian. I was relieved that the walkways between the towers weren't open to the air, but they do have glass sections which children seemed happy to walk over but I found completely terrifying. I sometimes get vertiginous standing on a chair.

Lady Arlen and I had a few minutes to kill before seeing my Mum, so we took a little stroll on Turbary Common. The Speckled Wood butterfly was a pleasure though perhaps not an unexpected one, but we weren't anticipating meeting cows. Later in the day I paid my respects to the Shelleys in St Peter's Churchyard - it always tickles me that Mary, Bysshe, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft have ended up in Bournemouth of all places - and had an ice cream on the beach.

I may share some images of St John's Church in Wotton another day: for now, here's the churchyard and its view into the Surrey hills on Wednesday. The churchwarden let me into the building.

Finally Friday found me at historic sites just into Kent. Bayham Abbey is a ruin in - at the moment - a baking field of dry grass with a little Gothick house adjoining. It was dissolved ahead of England's other religious houses in 1525 as Cardinal Wolsey raised funds to build Cardinal College in Oxford. Apparently the local people rioted in protest, though it's so out-of-the-way it's hard to see where they can have come from. A small riot, perhaps. 

Not far away is Scotney Castle. I hadn't realised that this was the family seat of Christopher Hussey, the architectural historian who did so much to bring to public record both the history of the English country house and of the Picturesque (and so I know his stuff quite well). By his time the family lived in the New Castle built on the top of the hill by Anthony Salvin, while the Old Castle formed a colossal garden feature on its island below a quarry. It's a beautiful site, which I saw in gorgeous sunshine. I bought books in the National Trust secondhand bookshop (including one about the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, in Italian but the pictures are great), and tried the pea-and-mint soup, a decision which didn't go too badly. Betty Hussey's very, very pink bathroom was a bit of a challenge, but interestingly the NT says Scotney has come with a bigger collection of objects than any of their other properties, attics stuffed full of them which they are still cataloguing after 15 years. One of these is this amazing child's fairy fancy-dress costume, laid out in one of the bedrooms. 

And no sooner had I entered the New Castle that I encountered my patron saint. 'Madonna and Child', the caption describes this painting by Luca Longhi, but that's St Catherine: she's brought her wheel along, otherwise she might not be recognised and let into the party. 

Building for the Future?

The house which for the foreseeable future is still only going to have me living in it has been the focus of attention of late, both official and unofficial. The latter came in the shape of a gentleman, and following him a lady who couldn't quite believe the information he gave her, so came to check for herself (I suspect it was the information I gave him that was wrong). They are compiling a survey of all the buildings in the area constructed from Bargate stone, a rather lovely honey-coloured sandstone widely used in Surrey where its main reserves lay. My house is one of these. It has quite a complicated history, beginning as a Victorian cottage, then doubling in size thanks to an extension which I thought was 1930s but is probably 1950s, and finally a second extension in the mid-90s which brought the kitchen to its current unnecessary size. To the rear of the older bit the stone courses are laid evenly and regularly like brick, but I hadn't noticed how even on the side of that portion they are all higgledy-piggledy like the more recent extension. Has that wall been taken down and refaced? It certainly has un-Victorian windows.

So much for the unofficial visits. Recently the diocese has become aware that it doesn't have a proper list of the property it owns and not unnaturally would like to rectify this, so a young man from a surveying company popped round before I was confined with covid to measure the house, a task which these days, notwithstanding my picture here, is done with lasers and cameras that measure things as they take photographs of them. Then yesterday a lady from an energy inspection firm called round to assess the house for an energy efficiency certificate. She didn't have a laser, or at least I didn't see her use one, but unlike the surveyor did need to go into the loft to check the insulation (she was quite pleased it has some, not that it seems to make a lot of difference to my chilly residence). I've always assumed the house was dreadfully inefficient energy-wise so it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

A couple of days ago someone on the big LiberFaciorum holy wells group asked about the Churches selling off assets and yet not being able to keep churches open or holy wells nearby them kept up, in the context of lovely Gumfreston church in Pembrokeshire which I happened to have visited last October. I briefly described the Church of England's financial issues and the fact that historically it's been lumbered with a number of unwieldy properties which it makes perfect sense to offload - even if clergy are left living in less picturesque houses as a result, they ought to be a bit more practical. For instance the incumbent of the parish next to Swanvale Halt when I arrived rattled around (after being widowed) in a ten-bedroom nightmare of a house, built by an Edwardian Lord of the Manor keen that his rector should live in a style befitting a gentleman; there was a decorative plaster frieze around the sitting room. It was no surprise that when he retired the diocese sold it, rented a cottage for his successor, and then built a sensible four-bed house for hers.

It could be that the diocese's current survey is the prelude to a further rationalisation of property. I assume that my freehold tenure here applies to the house as well as the church and I cannot be turfed out without agreement any more than I can be sacked. I did suggest a long while ago that I could move somewhere smaller and less embarrassing to live in, but if that were indeed to happen, could I come back and check on the fish? They seem to be doing quite well at the moment.

Two Museums and a Graveyard

Apart from us all dropping from covid - and even that shows signs of tailing off - the parish is quiet, so it was as well that I went out sightseeing yesterday. Not many people identify the sights of Tottenham and Walthamstow as ones they especially want to visit, but I thought I might take in a couple of suburban museums, and so my journey took me to Bruce Castle and Vestry House.

Bruce Castle Museum in Tottenham sits in its own park. Buried somewhere in its current state is a Tudor mansion but it's been so mucked about with over the centuries hardly any of that is visible. As you go around the galleries hints of the manor house, and then school, the building used to be emerge in the form of its collection of fireplaces, staircase, and great iron kitchen range. I liked Bruce Castle because of its maximalist approach of absolutely packing display cases with stuff, boards with photos, and not-obviously relevant kit such as a statue of a small girl embroidering in a corridor (you almost fall over her). Tottenham is of course a very multicultural part of London but although this gets a mention here and there - there was a great display on textile designer Althea McNish and some information about businesses that served the black community - it remains to be integrated with the rest. Upstairs was a show about Edwardian artist Beatrice Offor, 'Sisters, Sirens and Saints', and I was delighted to find that one of those saints she depicted was kneeling next to a shattered wheel.

I remember Vestry House as having a good name in the social-history museum world once upon a time, but I was less taken with it. Its 'institutional olive'-painted hallways express something of the grimness the building might have had when it was a workhouse, and there was a very nice display about the local music scene in the late '80s and early '90s, colourful and full of personal history, but I was surprised to see the sheer amount of sunlight strafing the objects in the 'domestic life' rooms upstairs. That area is all hessian and 1980s captions and must surely be due a refurb!

But Vestry House is in the most picturesque bit of Walthamstow, even if the parish church was swathed in scaffolding. The view across the graveyard to the Ancient House, allegedly the oldest dwelling-house in London, is as pleasing as you could want.