The Pearl of Flanders

St Pancras (left) was built for trains to Mercia and Northumbria, not for those going the other way. Sandwiched between Euston and King’s Cross, it offers continentals easy connections to the most parts, though Wessex understandably comes off worse. Barlow’s red bricks, white mortar and sky blue roof provide a thrilling front door to modern Britain.

The Gare de Lille-Europe is another story, a steel and concrete cave of desolation that could double as a film-set for 1984. Only the rats are missing. The cult of maniacal ugliness that began with Le Corbusier is thriving in France. It is propelled into the future through being taught as dogma in schools of architecture worldwide. But what of its past? Where does it come from, this notion that humanity has ‘done’ beauty and cannot be allowed to return to it?

The best antidote is a weekend in Bruges, where horrors do exist but are mercifully few. Belgium is as British as it can be without ceasing to be Belgian. It has pubs. And chips. Red pillar boxes. Quirky eccentricities. Tintin. Considering how many times the map of Europe has been redrawn, we in Britain may think that our institutions of State provide us with an unequalled continuity. In fact, in many parts of the continent, that continuity is provided by other, local traditions that we have neglected. Bruges, with its almshouses and ancient fraternities, can be reminiscent of Salisbury or Winchester, though like both it faces a constant battle against developers and modernisers. I suspect that its guilds and processions do have more life in them than ours and are not maintained just for the tourists.

One of the fraternities is the Noble Brotherhood of the Holy Blood, formed to protect and promote a relic, supposedly of the blood of Jesus, brought back from the Crusades. The relic rests in a rock crystal container, inside a gold and glass one dated 1388, inside an ornate shrine, in an upstairs chapel next to the Town Hall. There are very few places in England where it is possible to get as close to the Middle Ages as this, even if the gilded bronze statues outside (above) were made in 1893. The relic has been well-guarded, surviving the Calvinists, the Jacobins and two world wars.

Wessex had its own such relic, the Holy Blood of Hayles, a gift to Hayles Abbey near Winchcombe from Edmund, the son of its founder, Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans. Edmund had bought it from the Count of Holland, complete with certificate of authenticity. Come the Reformation, the relic did not even outlast the abbey. It was suspected that the blood was actually that of a duck, regularly renewed. The offending piece of quackery was taken to London in 1539 and examination concluded that it was “honey clarified and coloured with saffron”. It was then burnt at Paul’s Cross after a suitably fiery sermon against idolatry.

On BBC4 in 2008, Jonathan Meades presented ‘Magnetic North’, a brilliant evocation of that seaboard region stretching from the northern tip of France to wrap around the shores of the Baltic, taking in all those cities so influenced by the trading links of the Hansa. Look at the stepped gables, the canalside warehouses, the market squares and pinnacled public buildings, towering above all the Gothic in soaring brick and try to guess the country. Not a chance. This is generic northern European, as ubiquitous as the herring.

The wealth of Flanders came from woollen cloth, a fact not lost on Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who founded the Order of the Golden Fleece at Bruges in 1430. Two of the city’s many churches – mostly the size of small cathedrals – were venues for later meetings of the knights during that century. In both cases the event was marked by placing above the choir stalls painted boards bearing their coats of arms. Those of King Edward IV – France’s lilies quartered with England’s lions – are included. Edward’s host at his installation was Louis de Gruuthuse, known as Lewis de Bruges, whom the king made Earl of Winchester for his troubles.

More ancestral heraldry is to be found on the tombs of Charles the Bold, the last of the Dukes, and his daughter Mary of Burgundy, in the Church of Our Lady (left). Mary’s step-mother was Margaret of York, sister of that Edward IV. William Caxton was Margaret’s secretary. Burgundian trade depended on good relations with England, relations that King Louis XI of France did all he could to poison, including undermining Edward's credit with the international bankers in a bid to render him unable to fund Margaret's dowry. Clearly, Edward could have done with that treasure chest from Passport to Pimlico.

Our Lady’s Church was founded to house relics of St Boniface, one of the most successful of Wessex exports, whose silver reliquary is displayed in the choir. Others with Wessex connections followed him to Bruges, including his niece St Walburga (745); Emma, the widow of King Cnut (1037-40); Gunhilda, the sister of King Harold (1067-87); John Wycliffe (1374); the exiled King Charles II (1656-59); and the Bristolian poet Robert Southey (1816). And so should everyone who wishes to see Europe at its best.

Tides of the March

This morning I was at Blaise Castle House Museum in Bristol, a neo-classical mansion set in a splendid park by Humphry Repton, not far from Blaise Hamlet, the famous Regency assortment of mock-rustic cottages. Bristol’s museums are still run by Bristol, in contrast to many places where the assembled evidence of a common identity is no longer seen as anything to do with the expression of a common voice and will.

One room is hung with pictures, mostly landscapes, including several early 19th century views of Bristol by W.J. Müller. They repay close study, identifying the still-familiar landmarks. There’s the cathedral; there’s the Arnolfini; St. Peter’s, St. Mary-le-Port, Temple Church. St. Mary Redcliffe, before the spire was finished off.

My reason for being there was a talk by Toby Jones, the man from Oregon, in charge of conserving the Newport Mediæval Ship. A story he knows well and tells compellingly. Older than the Vasa, older than the Mary Rose, this is Wales’ own triumph of maritime archæology. She remains nameless but dates from the mid-15th century, a time from which shipping records start to survive and so research is continuing. Warwick the Kingmaker, no less, is thought to have owned such a ship and to have sent her to Newport for repairs. The dendrochronology is clear that she was not originally from the Bristol Channel area; there is some evidence she may have been built at Bayonne in Aquitaine.

Pulled up a pill beside the River Usk, she slipped into the mud and stayed there until 2002, eventually seven metres below ground level. Newport City Council has now built a theatre and arts centre on the site. It was in the final stages of rescue archæology during those building works that the ship was discovered. And nearly lost. Worried about rising costs, the Council thought of abandoning her. Protesters held a vigil on site until minds were changed. The ship was to be excavated and recorded but not preserved. At last the Welsh Assembly Government stepped in with the funds to enable her to be lifted and for conservation work to begin.

Here some practical issues intervened. The concrete piles for the building had already been driven, 13 of them through the ship, nailing her to the bedrock. Lifting her whole being impossible, the only option left was to disassemble her, sawing through countless oak pegs swollen for five centuries. Still digging its heels in, the Council refused to excavate the stern as too difficult a job. Building a “cultural” centre that requires the loss of real, irreplaceable culture is the sort of thing one expects of such folk. Spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar.

Now the task for conservators is to put back together again the 95% of the surviving timbers recovered – all 1,700 of them. Newport, the council who also managed to demolish half their castle for a road junction and now also deny the public access to the rest, seem at last to be waking up to the huge tourism asset they have done their best to destroy. Should she have taken them by surprise? Core samples were taken ahead of piling – the proof is visible on the ship – and cores with huge quantities of oak in them should have alerted somebody. Surely the Taffia could not have had a hand in maintaining the silence? Honourable men, in Newport, all honourable men…

Spa Gazy

My mother recalls when Cheltenham was home to retired Indian Army officers and colonial civil servants. Sikh attendants in turbans. Ayahs wheeling perambulators. Connaught Place, New Delhi, dropped into colder climes.

Connaught Place has been spruced up, for the Commonwealth Games last year, after decades of post-imperial decline. Cheltenham remains shabby. No-one seems that bothered to uphold good taste in its environment. It lacks the badge of World Heritage status that keeps Bath finely balanced between commerce and conservation. Commerce has not had everything entirely its own way; much of central Cheltenham was designated a Conservation Area in 1973 but sadly the horse had already bolted. The concrete cage of the Quadrangle sits brooding on one corner of Imperial Square, while across it the 13 storeys of the Eagle Star building loom over the rooftops like the uncouth guest at a wedding. Among the cream-painted, grey-slated villas and terraces festooned with ironwork, modern blocks of flats poke up like weeds in a once-elegant border. The insensitivities of one generation will take centuries to mend.

In places, small-scale mistakes are being undone. One terrace (left) is a mixture of genuine Georgian and recent replica. One of the tallest houses was the home of Dr Edward Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination, stupidly demolished in 1969 and rebuilt 25 years later. The block to its right carries the date ‘2008’. If it has the advocates of brutal minimalism crying into their beer, so much the better.

What is ‘contemporary’ architecture? Any architecture that happens now, whatever its derivation. Never to copy is never to learn. To see the Strozzi Palace for real it is necessary to go to Florence. Cheltenham has its own (left), a copy in smooth industrial brick that dates from 1900 and started life as an electricity sub-station. It could have been so much less charming.

Regency Cheltenham is overlain on an older town with a mediæval, monastic past. Around the parish church, tall narrow buildings (left) hint at ancient burgage plots. A painting in the town’s museum shows it with timber-framed houses and a coaching inn (long before it became the 20th century’s great coaching interchange). Today's conjunction is a curious one: the orderly regularity of the neo-classical dictates the proportions of windows, doors and roof-lines, yet the buildings must conform to plots defined by the winding back lanes of an Anglo-Saxon ham. Such fragments of townscape are tiny in the context of the town but they need to be treasured. Is it too much to ask that where they have been lost a far-sighted council might make plans to put them back – as an education for architects and a delight for the eye?

Barging Ahead

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”
George Bernard Shaw

Last week, I was at Stratford Park in Stroud (left). This is a 17th century mansion, extensively remodelled in the 18th, which stands in a much-loved public open space. It now houses the town’s museum, which is one of the best in Wessex, especially strong on the local industries, such as cloth-making. I must declare a personal interest, as past owners the Winchcombe family were among my ancestors.

James Winchcombe was a shareholder in the Company of Proprietors of the Stroudwater Navigation (seen below at Blunder Lock, near Eastington). This waterway opened in 1779 as the first eight miles towards linking the River Severn to the River Thames. The remaining 28 miles, the Thames & Severn Canal through to Lechlade, followed ten years later.

Attempts at canal-building in Stroud stretched back to the time of Elizabeth I. All had failed because, while the mill-owners wanted a canal, they insisted that it must not compete with the mills for the use of water. An interesting technical problem! It was solved by not using locks but instead craning goods in crates from a boat on one section across the weir to a boat on the next. This then just plied up and down as required. It was possibly the world’s first example of containerisation, but not the first successful example, as the cranes kept breaking down. By the end of the 18th century, mill technology had moved on. Steam was taking the place of water-power and the need was now to get coal in at the lowest possible price.

Not only does the Company of Proprietors still exist - a heritage asset in its own right - but it still owns the canal and all the property that goes with it. Traffic having ceased during the Second World War, it was overlooked in the general nationalisation of transport in 1948 and is today the oldest private canal company in the world. A majority of the 200 shares is held by a local trust for the benefit of the people of Stroud. The company archive, held at Gloucester, is thought to be one of the most complete in the industry. The venerable company, with roots going back to the 1730’s, is committed to digitising the lot.

At the museum, a well-attended talk was being given by Ken Burgin, Chief Executive of the Cotswold Canals Trust (and a director of the Company of Proprietors into the bargain). I had expected a largely historical account – and history was not neglected – but most of what was said concerned the phenomenal energy now being put into re-opening the canals. All 36 miles of them, including Sapperton Tunnel, at over 2 miles once the longest tunnel in the world and a major geological challenge. The project enjoys huge public support, with total commitment from the local councils and the Heritage Lottery Fund. The possibility that the re-opened route might be used to convey water from the Severn to the thirsty south-eastern corner of this island has yet another group of stakeholders on board.

Abandoned for over half a century, the canals need much tender loving care. Many of the 18th century over-bridges have been saved from collapse in the nick of time. Diversions are being planned where later development poses too intractable an obstruction. A new route under Junction 13 of the M5 is being provided, using part of the channel for the River Frome while maintaining the full river width in times of flood: a clever piece of engineering. Massive road works are underway in the centre of Stroud to once more accommodate the canal. At Brimscombe, there used to be a complex canal basin that served as a bustling inland port. Here goods would be transhipped from the short, wide Severn trows to the longer, narrower Thames barges. Filled-in and redeveloped as an industrial estate, it seemed lost forever. Plans were made for a diversion. Now it has been acquired, the industrial estate will be going and the water returning, funded by the leisure craft the new basin is expected to attract. Other sections are to be quarried for gravel and the canal re-instated in full at the developer’s expense.

The scale of the ambition is matched only by the absolute determination to see it through. The restoration campaign is nearing its 40th year and it must be very gratifying for those – like Ken Burgin – who have been with it from the start to now see it so definitely underway. Canals are such a civilised form of transport that they inevitably attract many, many friends and hardly ever an enemy. Those farmers and landowners who cannot see the potential for diversification will not be around for ever and even if they were, the councils already have all the compulsory purchase powers they need. British Waterways, who were the lead partner, have now taken a back seat, their own future in the balance as the Axis of Evil applies the axe to public enterprise. But other partners are stepping forward, with new ideas and new sources of money.

It will be a day to remember when the first craft passes once again from the Severn to the Thames. There are – and will be – many days to remember, as canals, railway lines and stations, all gone but not forgotten, return as the backbone of 21st century transport. I am a life member of the group working seriously hard on the re-opening of the Somerset & Dorset Railway. Where these pioneering projects lead, many more will follow. And all will agree with Shaw.

Returning Home

Time passes. It was the end of last month that I went to Bristol one Monday evening to hear the University’s Professor Mark Horton lecture at the City Museum and Art Gallery. Admission was free and that included the wine and the nibbles. No wonder tuition fees are set to rise.

The talk was entitled ‘Eadgyth – Bones of an Anglo-Saxon Princess’. Professor Horton spoke about Bristol University’s involvement in the process of identifying bones from Magdeburg Cathedral as those of Queen Eadgyth of Germany, a grand-daughter of King Alfred the Great. With help from more expert colleagues he explained the science behind the conclusion and also went through what else was found in the tomb. Fragments of ancient textiles, 16th century beetles and the remains of floral tributes. He finished with some photographs of the re-interment of Eadgyth in October, the bones placed in a new casket of titanium and silver, engraved in German and Latin. Next time the tomb is opened, German may perhaps be extinct but there will always be Latin.

Mark Horton is an archæologist and it was not his brief to say much about the historical context. Indeed, having described Eadgyth as the mother of Europe, he then confessed to finding royal genealogy boring. Nevertheless, he had to admit that the Germans found Eadgyth fascinating, with huge crowds attending the re-interment. She and her sisters had been much sought after as brides by the continental elite of the 10th century. Apparently, it was all because the Wessex line could claim great antiquity; the upstarts who filled the void after Charlemagne could appreciate that.

Anglo-Saxon England has tended to be the special preserve of rampant nationalism, yet in its own time it was anything but insular. The Anglo-Saxons came from the continent and continued to be part of it: Beowulf is set in Scandinavia. They received clergy and scholars from Italy, Greece and France and sent missionaries to the Frisians and the Germans. Offa corresponded with Charlemagne. Aldhelm, Ine and Alfred visited Rome. Edgar the Atheling – the last Englishman acclaimed King of the English – was born in Hungary. Harold Godwinson’s daughter Gytha married the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus and it is through this marriage that all English sovereigns from Edward III can claim descent from the House of Godwin. The continent is a recurrent part of our history, and therefore to some extent 'home'. Joint ventures like the research on Eadgyth’s bones can only make us realise still more a once obvious fact.

Relics of Ruin

On Thursday I was in Cirencester, an ancient market town of the western Cotswolds, once the second largest city of Roman Britain. The Perpendicular Gothic tower of St John the Baptist, financed from the wool trade, still dominates the scene, though today the mediæval streets and courts offer wholefood cafés and an inexhaustible variety of shops selling posy home furnishings and fabrics. For everything else, there’s Tesco’s.

At the Corinium Museum, recently redeveloped with lottery money, Tim Porter was giving a talk on the theme of ‘Recycling the Monasteries’. For nearly ten centuries they had laid claim to the best of everything. In five years they were all gone. So what happened to all that material wealth? It is a fascinating question, the answer tracked down by meticulous detective work and well presented with slides of re-used choir stalls, pieces of vestments, bits of stained glass, floor tiles and stone. Lots of stone.

Lowland monasteries with easy access to rivers have largely disappeared altogether. Cistercian abbeys in their remote fastnesses survive as roofless ruins, uneconomic to remove from the landscape. Urban abbeys and friaries have had mixed fates, some destroyed, others converted into homes and workshops by the ascendant bourgeoisie. In areas like East Anglia, with only flint to build from locally, recycled monasteries are easiest to spot. Quality stone imported from other regions and built into humble houses and barns is a tell-tale sign, even more so when the mediæval carvings are turned outwards. How much more is turned inwards we may never know, short of demolition.

The purchasers of monastic lands were the new men, those who had made their money through industry and the law. One issue still open to research is how they financed the purchases. To be a rich merchant is one thing but if the money is all tied up in the business then further investment can only be made by borrowing against it. The cloth trade had well established links with the Low Countries and with Italy. The intriguing possibility is there that the Protestant Reformation in England was paid for by the bankers of Catholic Italy, who at this time already had their London branches in Lombard Street. That’s how it goes. Business is business.

Blest is the Eye, twixt Severn and Wye

It’s cold in the Forest of Dean. It was bitter yesterday and usually is, in my memory. When as a child I would visit my grandfather in Cinderford at Christmas, my father would, with weary resignation, announce that we were off to Cinderberia. Bed-sheets were like ice-sheets and I would awake to Jack Frost’s crystal etchings upon the window panes.

Yesterday, winter had yet to come to the Wye Valley. The leaves were still on the trees, in all shades of red and brown, yellow and evergreen. The first landmark north of Chepstow is Tintern Abbey, the first of 15 Cistercian houses in Wales. It was the remote and rugged world the Cistercians were seeking and they were what Wales needed at the time. Their austere piety harked back to the world of saintly hermits who had inhabited the post-Roman twilight; their political skills were soon at the disposal of Welsh princes and marcher lords in their struggles against each other and against the Anglo-Norman kings. And they suffered in the process. It was a Cistercian monastery at Aberconwy, burial-place of the princes of Gwynedd, that Edward I removed to build the castle and walled town of Conway (though he did pay for a replacement).

One of those buried at Tintern Abbey was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, the lord of Raglan Castle, beheaded in 1469 for siding the wrong way in the Wars of the Roses. It was his descendant, the 9th Duke of Beaufort, of Badminton in south Gloucestershire, who, to pay death duties, in 1901 sold the Abbey and its lands back to the Crown in the shape of His Majesty’s Commissioners of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues, today represented by the Forestry Commission.

Crossing into England, one soon reaches St Briavels. The village castle (left) has much older links with the Crown, having been for centuries the administrative and judicial headquarters of the Royal Forest of Dean. The stone hunting horn that sits atop a chimney (below) reminds all who pass by.

In mediæval times, the miners of the Forest served in the Scots wars of Edward I (him again), doing good service in undermining the walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed during a siege. This may have been the occasion for a grant of mining rights in the Forest still maintained today, though it is also claimed that the rights exist “tyme out of mynde”. To be a freeminer it is necessary to be born in the Hundred of St Briavels and to have worked underground there for a year and a day. It is no easy qualification, now that the local maternity unit has been removed to Gloucester, far beyond the hundredal boundary. The freeminers vigorously defend their rights, which have persisted before, during and after nationalisation. The first Chief Executive of the Coal Authority had a rough time of it on visiting the Forest in 1996 when the freeminers protested, strongly but unsuccessfully, against the imposition of new licences and regulations they had managed well without.

The church at St Briavels is dedicated to St Mary. No doubt the Celtic saint was there first, ousted by the Norman abbey of Lire who took over after the Conquest and rebuilt the church in the late 12th century. One of the mouldings over an arched doorway ends in a primitive, snarling dragon’s head. The village pub is the George, its blazing log fire a welcome respite from the weather.

The next place to St Briavels is called Mork. No sign of Mindy though.

North of St Briavels lies Newland. It was new around the 12th century, when land was being assarted out of the primæval woodland. If St Briavels was the secular heart of the mediæval Forest regime, then Newland was its sacred counterpart. The church (below) is known as ‘the cathedral of the Forest’, an apt description for a vast interior that is a heavy burden for a now tiny parish. The mediæval Forest had no churches of its own, being extra-parochial, and it was from Newland that priests would set out into the clearings to minister to mining communities in the form of the ‘Morrow Mass’. All Saints, Newland houses the memorials of the royal officials whose job it was to protect the ‘vert and venison’ from the covetous common folk, whose ancestors no doubt once helped themselves to nature’s bounty without fear of challenge.

The range of unusual monuments to unusual people is the chief charm of All Saints. A forester, a bowman, a miner. Knights and their ladies. Priests in their vestments. Marble plaques, extolling the virtues of later gentry and judges, occupy a chantry chapel founded by Edward I (him yet again). Nearby, hatchments hang on the walls. The churchyard is peppered with the fine stone tombs of yeoman farmers.

A board lists the headmasters of the local grammar school, from 1447 until its closure in 1968. How could one decade, between 1965 and 1975, have witnessed such an orgy of institutional destruction? Ancient schools, ancient boroughs, ancient courts, ancient counties, all swept away with many a plea to retain even the most harmless links with the past rebuffed. This was the cross-party handiwork of a generation born between wars that were fought for an England considered worth defending. This is how they did it and now so many ask where society has gone. The search for novelty seems, bizarrely, a peculiar affliction of secondary education, hallowed ethos regularly sacrificed to zealous reorganisation at the drop of a White Paper.

The school’s first founders were local landowners, the Greyndours. J.K. Rowling, growing up in these parts, perhaps passed this way. Is Greyndour the inspiration for Griffindor? It seems too good to be coincidence.

Opposite the church door stands a row of 17th century almshouses, now empty and undergoing severe renovation. After nearly 400 years, the sole trustee of the charity, the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, put them up for sale, to re-invest the proceeds in another charity they manage in Monmouth. You just can’t trust those City types with anything these days.

Last call of the day was Ross-on-Wye. The town’s grandest buildings are quintessential Herefordshire – pink sandstone, black-and-white half-timber. Its more modest buildings and streets though could be anywhere in the Welsh marches – Chepstow, Abergavenny, Monmouth, and on up to Ludlow and Shrewsbury – little towns little altered since the 18th century.

The A40 leads, through a string of unchanging villages, to Gloucester and the unquestionable modernity of the M5. Despite all the devastation that has befallen the city in recent decades, the cathedral tower of the one-time St Peter’s Abbey still dominates the skyline, as sure a landmark today as for merchants and pilgrims in centuries past. Controlling what was long the land route to south Wales, Gloucester has been a pivotal city since Roman times, its earls and dukes the close advisers and often relatives of kings and queens. It was at Gloucester in 1085 that William the Bastard held court and commissioned the Domesday Book. At such a crossroads of the kingdom it is easy to see why. Conquerors come and go but geography persists and analysing it is the key to success of many kinds.