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Heritage Disliking St Paul's and the bleached bones of Egglestone! |
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Appreciation, maintenance and preservation. Three words that convey the subjects of this virtual rant. With my varied interests in art, architecture and history, I have visited numerous historical sites across this country and beyond. Some have impressed and enthralled me; surpassing expectations whilst others have, however, failed to live up to their reputation or potential. The current focus of my more negative opinions is the famous St Paul’s Cathedral in London, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. It is not without some merit; the image it conveys, soaring imposingly enough at the end of Fleet Street, redeems it slightly. However I cannot help but find fault and see the building as a somewhat botched and flawed ‘would be’ masterpiece; not by any means entirely the fault of Wren. The least successful features are the west front towers which hark inharmoniously back to the form of a medieval cathedral facade, this and other elements placing the build in a kind of stylistic limbo without the quirky success that can be seen of the St Eustache church in Paris. Though somewhat bizarre, this Parisian church is nonetheless appealing with its amalgam of renaissance details upon a gothic form. As for St Paul’s; I find the building cold, and strangely unsettling. There is something harsh and jarring about the interior in particular and the overall setting of any such building in this location is of course affected by the current state of its surroundings, hemmed in as it now is by other often unsympathetically placed and very dominant structures. It is a pity that it was not constructed and hence preserved according to the original concept of Wren, a model and plans for which can still be seen and would have been, at least architecturally, a far more worthy creation. Some monuments however are more a victim of subsequent maintenance than any flaw in the design. A good example is that of another well known monument; Westminster Abbey. It’s treatment in recent centuries has badly compromised an otherwise spectacular, soaring gothic church. One of my chief criticisms concerns the number of often appalling, second rate and completely inappropriate 18th and 19th memorials which overwhelm many areas of the church, eating into the very fabric and lending the place the air of a sculpture warehouse. Vast and hideous monoliths of marble that are so profoundly and obviously out of place that one has to wonder as to the sense of those responsible for their construction. That aside, a visit to this building on a winters evening many years ago, was so off-putting and disappointing for a different variety of reasons that I did not return for nearly six years. The interior was lit up with harsh artificial lighting, competing horribly with the glare of the orange street lamps through the windows, bathing the uncontrolled cacophony of manic tourists that overwhelmed the interior. The vaults echoed to the confused babbling of thousands and hyperactive children ran screaming along the choir steps. It had all the atmosphere of a frantic gift buying dash through Oxford street on Christmas Eve. When I finally returned one summer, years later, the experience was fortunately far better and I was able to focus more on the qualities of the place rather than wilt under an assault to my senses, though it was predictably still too crowded for my liking. My third and final set of thoughts in this area regards the maintenance of ruins, usually in the guardianship of English Heritage. Surprisingly, my criticism here is that in some ways these properties, chiefly the monastic ruins, are perhaps too well maintained to the detriment again of their aesthetic appeal and in a way to the sense of their progress through history, from having being neglected and forgotten for centuries; often used as stone quarries, to their later growing appreciation as romantic ruins and monuments of a vanished way of life. Clearly the overall preservation of such structures is important for their survival and for the safety of visitors, however with some sites it would in my opinion at least be preferable if they were allowed, in a carefully monitored way, to return to a more natural state. There is virtually nowhere nowadays for a visitor to appreciate an elaborate ruin, as many early visitors from the 18th century onwards saw them, whether the casual tourist, a poet or artist. Ivy clad columns, fallen and overgrown carved stones and long grasses, with the shelter of trees and other random foliage. Nowadays, ruins often have an over cleaned and exposed look, with bare walls and trimmed lawns, resembling bleached whale bones on a beach. I recently viewed a mid 19th century print of the ruins of Egglestone Abbey in County Durham, which I have visited on many occasions. The difference between this atmospheric image of nature run riot and the current appearance of the ruins was so great that it took sometime, and then only on a second viewing to recognise these ruins. Many such places would benefit from the control rather than the annihilation of nature; be allowed to overgrow without greatly compromising the safety and preservation of the site. This would add more variety to such and restore a lost period in the history of ruins and the early appreciation of them. On a final note; a lone example of such a ruin is that of Jervaulx Abbey in Yorkshire. Slightly more tidied now then when I first visited some years ago but nonetheless still retaining much of its wild, overgrown appeal. It would be nice to see more of this balanced approach applied to the care of our ruined heritage. finis.
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