Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW: An Odyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

7. St. Paul's  Pt. II: St. Paul's Cathedral

 

We had to approach it from here, climb the hill, mercifully free of the obstructive archway. Having placated, exorcised the vortex and, in return for a spinning head, appraised all vantage points, the exterior elevations.

 

Westminster RC is the spiritual home, the sanctuary (uncapitalised) - of calm, cool marble and mosaic to salve frayed commuter nerves. The Abbey is the repository of collective memory, the sanctuary of myth-making and psychogeographic beguilement. But this, architecturally speaking, is home. And the cool white Portland stone, inside and out, the geometrical perfection and clarity, is its own balm.

 

This is where, Dear reader, I have to thrust in front of you my book. Oh yes. The Ladybird Book of London. Oh, and the Ladybird Book of Cathedrals (an ‘Achievements’ Book – let’s be thorough about this). Both have images – up close, in the former case, with the blue dome (it is blue in the drawing) set back in the foreshortening of perspective, sunk down so the drum is absent and the dome seems to rise directly out of the facade; the other is taken from some imagined perch up high where the full scale and impact of the drum and dome simultaneously soar and weigh down upon the western towers and facade, establishing their true relationship. Both views stencilled in memory. Both worked subliminally and subconsciously upon a then untutored and receptive brain.

 

But all was put right by Bannister Fletcher, many years later with, alongside the endless cut-aways and elevations of St. Peter's in Rome (another drum obscured when viewed close up), St. Pauls itself – clearly BF’s favourite as it takes the frontispiece and plenty else. No surprise, then, that we found his own small yet inestimable contribution hereabouts.

 

These books fostered the development of my budding interest in architecture. From illustrations in newspapers and magazines there developed a fascination with the shapes and forms of buildings, great buildings that is and none more so than the great English cathedrals. One of the earliest influences was Salisbury, etched indelibly as it became on the memory, as clearly as the silhouette it cut on the page, all soaring spire and gabled ends. The nearest I ever got to seeing the real thing was the smaller, near replica at Chichester. And then, of course, there was St. Paul's, which actually confused matters - I had a drawing of Old St. Paul's, which of course also had a spire.

 

With my growing collection of Ladybirds, Observers and the like, I would while away the hours alone in the bedroom, much I think to the jealousy and annoyance of Tweedledee, lost in a world of cathedrals and mountains and Great Men: Richard the Lionheart, Nelson, Wellington .... and the rest. But the buildings dominated. My books took me to York, a silver mass of pinnacles rising above the huddled roofs; the immensity of Romsey, evanescent space of Ely and ... here, the superimposed clustered columns and soaring dome.

 

Reading was the refuge, and has remained so ever since. One resorts to books and bookshops for "escape". It was a fact that things in books were usually more exciting than reality. Secure on the flat page, the cathedrals, ships and planes, battle scenes, could be freed in the unfettered space of the imagination. Certainly, the surroundings in New Malden could not compete. The row of semis, the all-pervasive brick, tarmacadam and paving, the obscuring fences, held little interest.

 

Enough! This reverie is offered by way of an apology for this whole exercise. But now we must resume our business.

 

England has few major buildings in the Renaissance style, of course, just a handful, by Wren and his contemporaries. Meagre when measured against the Continent. But this, certainly, is one building which can look Paris in the eye. If we take that example, it has, of course, more than its fair share of splendid domes: Collège des Quatres Nations, Les Invalides, Val de Grace and Sorbonne, Pantheon, St. Augustin .... but Wren’s beats them all, perhaps because it derives directly from Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome, itself based on Serlio’s drawing (Wren would have seen) of the Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli. The smooth, pure curving form, unencumbered by ornament, provides a wholly satisfactory counterpoint to the clutter of rectangular glass City blocks, as well as intentionally its own complex west towers. More than that, of course, we know, the curvature was calculated so as to be appreciated, to achieve its most efficacious result, from below.

 

Unlike Paris, it stands alone. This despite Brompton Oratory and other more recent attempts at the form. The number and variety of domes in the Metropolis is of course beyond quantifying or qualifying sensibly (See ‘Interlude: Domes’). From the early attempts at classical archaeology at The Colosseum (→ 21.M’bone) and The Pantheon (→ 18.West End) to 155 Bishopsgate with its oriel turret and skeletal openwork (→ 10.City 2); from the shallow saucers of ‘our cathedral’, Woolwich Town Hall (→ 9.East) and indeed here, and not forgetting Abbey Mills Pumping Station (→ 12.NE Wedge) to the Imperial War Museum’s steep-sided, ungainly profile (→ 32.South Bank). Perhaps the finest of all was Wren’s Great Model with its volutes (and western segmental ‘umbrella’). And if, by comparison, Paris fares rather better, with a nigh unassailable array, then St Paul’s perhaps compensates by surpassing them all.

 

This happy result was not achieved in one go, of course – we know the story, none is more celebrated, more symptomatic of the old English disease of compromise. This is not to the place to relate the story of the Fire (“the stones of St. Paul’s flew like grenades” recorded Evelyn), of Old St. Pauls with Jones’s portico, the first use of the ‘giant order’ in these isles yet rather like Northampton All Saints, in one opinion. One pauses only to imagine this medieval wonder – as long as present day Liverpool Cathedral, with a 500 foot spire, immense rose window and the cloisters which accommodated the teeming multitudes (captured so well by Hollar) – the heart of the capital, a role now fulfilled by ‘our cathedral’, despite its peripheral location.

 

In the first design, that of the Great Model in the cathedral crypt, we see the dome with curved buttresses, or consoles, recalling those on the model Michelangelo built for St. Peter’s. Gibbs’ Radcliffe Camera and Longhena’s St. Marie della Salute would opt for variations on the theme but at St. Paul's they were, like Michelangelo’s, dispensed with in the final plan.

 

After that came the infamous Warrant Design – a testament to committee-driven compromise if ever there was one. But, of course, it was never Wren’s intention to keep it; juts a fob to the committee. Interference continued to try him - famously the balustrades Wren characterised as ladies’ fringe. Late on, he produced a magnificent revision, something similar to Les Invalides, before arriving at the building we see now.

 

The dome dictates all and everything is subservient to it, though not, of course, to the extent Wren had initially hoped. Instead, we have a nigh conventional procession eastward down the nave toward this vast central space, beyond which lies the choir. The way the central space envelopes the aisles may have been inspired by Ely, where Wren’s uncle was bishop. As also the chains he used at both St. Pauls and Salisbury.

 

With the conceit of hidden flying buttresses, the elevations in the Gibbs manner enlivened after Perrault (East range of the Louvre) create a solid, massive structure to give the visual support needed for the soaring dome. This has all the movement of the High Baroque, with none of its excess. Challenging in its vertical dominance of the transeptal elevations, free of buttressing, it soars to its smooth, curving summit, divested of detail, a shining lead hemisphere, somehow able to support the lantern atop and the golden ball and crucifix.

 

All of this achieved by sleight of hand - to which I’ve already alluded. In fact, this engineering gymnastics, pyrotechnics, seems to have been as compelling to Wren as the pure aesthetics – something he shares with the latter day G.G. Scott, though I would never associate the two despite the latter’s elevation (which has something of the Morrissey Penguin Classics about it ... a symptom of a more egregious age).

 

And, with all the avowed admiration bordering on adoration (several contemporary examples of imitation, such as James Smith, or Colin Campbell’s plan for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Hawksmoor’s for Greenwich Palace) one cannot be altogether uncritical of Wren. His buildings can leave one, in many cases, cold. Take the Royal Hospital at Chelsea (we’ll come to → 26.Chelsea): a stark brown brick quadrangle onto which are attached (as appears) these white porticos, in excessive, painfully exquisite contrast. This may, to some, seem clever but, perhaps too clever. The effect, far from pleasing, risks losing conviction, the appending porches so insubstantial against the warehouse-like walls as to acquire the nature of stage-sets. Too stagey to be entirely convincing, at least from a functional standpoint. Again, Hampton Court: the Fountain Court with its pink brick and white Portland stone facades, like some Imperial Russian palace by Rastrelli transported into the English countryside (as then was → 28.West). Look at Greenwich: to the converted, his finest building, the paired domes sentinel to the vista of columns racing away to the Queen’s House, yet, to my mind, too many columns (to coin a phrase), monotonously arranged (a problem, incidentally, he avoided in the drum of St Paul’s), creating another stage-set, Jones’s work reduced to a doll’s house in the middle (→9.East).

 

A “doll’s house” is an apt description of much of Wren, in fact. All those churches – in the end, the works by which his greatness must be judged – cold and bare, with their all too exquisite proportions and constructional acrobatics. Wren turned these out like other people draw sketches. Indeed, they were done in a hurry. Most he never visited. To enter St. Magnus-the-Martyr or St. Clement Danes is to find oneself in someone’s doodle, idea, an empty shell, a lifeless monument to one individual’s vaulting ambition and confidence which borders at times, if not on egomania, then glorious self-possessiveness. Even St. Paul’s, with its numerous conceits (false clerestory wall hiding the flying buttresses, triple dome, geometric staircase, false tribunes leading off the central space) has, in some ways, the feel of an empty stage-set.

 

Well, there it is, I’ve said it, got it off my chest. I seek forgiveness by dint of encomiums to individual works elsewhere in this erratic and inconsistent roller-coaster ride. And as for the cathedral itself, it is of course saved by the detail, of furnishings and fittings, decoration - the lemon radiance of fenestration; the swirling, deep carving of Gibbons, glittering screens of Tijou, frescos of Thornton (though a disappointment to some), sculpting of Westmacott, Flaxman, Chantrey, Stevens, et al; Richmond’s mosaics. The sheer space, the whiteness, lightness ..... It is cold but it has its own numinosity, aesthetic, for sure.

 

Perhaps I’ve said enough, and I don’t want to get carried away. By way of achieving balance, let me cite one building that really ‘works’ and stands, as well as a product of genius, humane, uplifting, pragmatic and enjoyable architecture: the Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, completing the justly famed view across The Backs to the Chapel and Gibbs's Fellows' Building.

 

And yet! This was another Wren never visited. One take one’s hat off to the man but, notwithstanding this great work, he is a hard man to love. We know the reasons for this – the splendid English compromise between Counter-reformation Baroque on the Continent, and the austere historicism of Calvinism. The exemplar of all this is Wren’s masterpiece.

 

The whole building is a step in the direction of that white sepulchral death which is Washington DC but mercifully stopping short - thanks chiefly to the interior decoration – as we’ll come to in a moment. And one should not overlook the exterior architectural carving of Kempster, Gibbons, Pierce and Maine, Cibber (Phoenix Rising From the Ashes), above all, Francis Bird (western pediment).

 

Listen! The bells are clanging away. 3.00 p.m. It's time to go.

 

And what we find inside, curiously, is (as I think AA Gill aptly observed) a replication of the exterior, with all these elevations in Portland stone exactly as you’d expect having seen the outside. If I may take this useful analogy further, like one of those Airfix models where the inside is, indeed, an exact inverted replica of the outside - a mould. The effect is amplified by the uniform matt cream stone, a choice based on necessity but in some ways as effective as the glossier finishes Bernini was able to employ at St. Peter’s. It goes with the dry understatement which is everywhere apparent: the sepia ‘cartoons’ by Thornton around the inner dome, darkened wood stalls and organ case by Gibbons, white stucco ceilings. In fact, this latter’s form could not be guessed from the exterior: a sequence of flying-saucer-like shallow domes, plain white in the nave, mosaic encrustation in the chancel (a Victorian afterthought). All runs away into that central space, so vast in proportion to the whole, expanding unfettered to the aisles, going way beyond Ely and Sienna to encompass the whole building as vistas run off in all directions.

 

The best way to appreciate all this is indeed at Evensong – avoiding the tourists and the heavy entry fee. The first time I went, I sat under the dome. The Feast of St. John the Baptist ....

 

The choir enters from the right (south) transept – presumably the Dean’s Vestry - and processes into the vast space ....

 

‘There is a Land of Pure Delight’ (Watts, Westminster, James Turle). The organ weighs in behind the soaring voices ....

 

The procession moves up the steps and into the choir, between the tiers of stalls. At one time a screen would have had to be negotiated. It was dismantled in 1860s and re-assembled in three places: here, at the western end of the stalls; in the south transept porch and in the Chapel of St. Michael and St. George.

 

‘Welcome!’ Oh, yes, CoE, reach-out, all that. Mention of - was it Janani Luwum? If so, I read some more about him coincidentally in my evening read of Mick Escott's diverting account, who was in St. Woollos in Newport where the subject also came up, also in connection with St. Paul’s.

 

Anyhow, normal service is resumed with the Responses (Thomas Ebson) and Psalm 82 ‘God Standeth in the Congregation of Princes’ (Walter Parratt) - more organ. The Magnificat and Nunc Dimitis (Chichester Service, Walton) follow in good order then the Anthem ‘Vox dicentis: Clama’ (Edward Naylor) brings the stunning account one expects from this renowned choir. I’m getting dizzy looking into the Thornhill frescoes.

 

Time to join in:

‘O For a Closer Walk with God’ (ah, Cowper, my local man - Caithness Scottish Psalter)

and:

‘Through the Night of Doubt & Sorrow’ (Ingermann trans. Baring-Gould; Marching Martin Shaw)

 

The sermon is by the Dean, The Very Revd David Ison - on today’s 2nd lesson, Matthew 11. 2-19: ‘What did you go out to the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?’ What did we expect St. Paul’s to be, or the service (a good question)? Did it meet, surpass, or disappoint our expectations? Mm. I was studying the elided segmental arches supporting the dome – the way the top of the cornice – the fillet and cyma recta - is not carried along the broken entablature – only the cyma reversa and corona.

 

‘As comedians use humour to confound our expectations, so Jesus mocked the crowd .... ‘

 

He may well have. I was trying to remember term for the Whispering Gallery supports (modillions I later verified). And appreciating the tunnelled out false ‘gallery’ openings beyond. From this reverie I was awoken by the rustle of collection baskets – having not availed ourselves of the Gift Aid envelopes it was nothing for it but a coin in sight of all.

 

The spectacular service was brought to a close by Howell’s Organ Voluntary, Rhapsody No. 3.Exiting via the North Transept and view of Holman Hunt (a gift of Charles Booth, he of the poverty maps).

 

The next time I was with one of those whom I'd met at Victoria Station, one Dr. Fegg, and we sat in the stalls. Well, we were initially ushered to a seat under the dome but, just as I began to wonder whether I could put up with an irritating voice behind, were called through! I felt like a lottery winner. No-one asked for a Golden Ticket as we just went through, into those extraordinary galleries with the little lamps aglow against the woodwork! Faced with a choice I took the high road, the topmost row with the armrests, backing onto the row of hidden stalls, the ‘opera boxes, those extraordinary rooms behind.

 

A woman priest led the service, with an American choir, no sermon. But nothing could dampen the thrill of our location. This enabled a slow and very deliberate examination of the spandrel and ceiling mosaics. Put in by Sir William Richmond (to whom Holman Hunt gave his backing - whilst in Ravenna!) these truly ‘glitter & sparkle with the warmth of electric sunshine’ in the words of Mordaunt Crook whose book on William Burges gives the best account of the story behind them. The victory of the High Church Party was a delayed vindication of William Burges, as was the post-War baldachin by Dykes Bower and Godfrey Allen - Wren’s original vision realised at last in oak after the war had destroyed the marble Victorian reredos - and which now I could ponder tightly squeezed into the sanctuary, along with the giant-sized Corinthian capitals, the false triforium arches under the dome, the Tijou screens ....

 

And the stalls wherein we sat! With the flowing sculpted cherubs and garlands (swags, festoons)- in limewood against the German oak - right over my head. The ‘opera boxes’ behind – my opinion of Gibbons was undergoing a rapid revision.

 

On the way out, I asked an usher what the ‘rooms’ were for. I could see immediately my question had failed to ignite a spark. ‘Just rooms’ came the reply. I persisted: ‘Yes, but for what?’. ‘For storage’ she shot back. OK, right, but what were they before? No, they were always for that and she gave me a look of pity, or disdain, and headed off.

 

No way. Nohow.

 

Lucky I had my Observer’s! For there, on page 194[ii], was a neat diagram showing everything clearly: the separate stalls for the Bishop, Canons, Minor Canons, Residentiary Canons, Treasurer, Suffragan Bishops, Chancellor, Precentor and Archdeacon of London. The grandest were for the Mayor and the Bishop – in the latter case his (or her) ‘Domestic Stall’ as there is also, of course, the Throne.

 

But what of those rooms behind? This is where the Observer’s book is supplemented by the model made by William Burges illustrated in Mordaunt Crook[iii] and also reproduced in the St. Pauls Official Guidebook (2011)[iv]. Finally, we have Wren’s drawings in the Cathedral Archive available via the website. All this indicates a series of rooms which dignitaries and important personages could use to come and go without interfering with the service (much as Louis XIV at Versailles, say). Get changed. Or nod off, probably.

 

But oh, what oh! Where do these places lead? For there are not just rooms on top but others below. Where do these stairs lead? To what unbidden labyrinths – all the way to Henry V’s turret stairs?

 

Of course there is another stairway here .... geometrical. It curves without support! We knew there were forces at work here. Magnetic or electrostatic? Casimir?

 

The Double helix at Chambord has 278 steps to separate the classes, eulogise, vindicate, fulfil and obey their DNA.

 

Hidden aisles .. hidden stairs

 

Slipping in and out of reality in and out of dimensions, wormholes ties in the Harry Potter-Alice –passageways

 

Into the past ...

 

Or a reference to the subterranean Tertiary residue? Inoceramus clams. Ammonites. The Horse Guards pebbles. The Tate’s nautilus shell cut away to reveal its logarithmic spiral of cells ....

 

The cyclical imperative begins to overwhelm. There is now just one more thing. We need to ascend to the summit.

 

THE VIEW

And what do we see? A crush of glass and concrete – and we can point those out with glee. But, as already indicated, I have a thing about that. About labelling. Once labelled, things quickly become their labels, lose something .... But more of this anon (Heron Tower →10.City 2).

 

Below and around us, the parade of steeples and pinnacles: St. Martin Ludgate, St. Sepulchre (and the Old Bailey), Christchurch, St. Vedast, St. Mary-le-Bow (above the carapace of New Change), St. Mary Aldermary, St. Augustine, St. Nicholas, St. Mary Somerset, St Benet, St. Andrew .... more; and the giddying vortex down into Paternoster Square. Across to the beckoning City. We’re there, now, nearly!

 

BTW good view also of the London Wall area, including Grimshaw, Farrell, Parry et al.

 

The view pans wider, the various glass irises and Brutalist chimneys, the innumerable spires lost among the modernist blocks in turn succumbing to PO-MO burgeoning apartmentville. The cranes, the voids, the viaducts of new rail connections. And beyond, still further, the undulating horizon: Hampstead Heath and Highgate, Muswell, Shooters, Sydenham and Crystal Palace (transmitters). And the river snakes it reflective path, unbestirred by the activity yet hastening in the apocalypse according to the men in white coats and pinz-nez invoking climate change.

 

Framed by the golden pineapples atop Baroque fugue of twin towers. Directly below, the false clerestory walls and buttresses revealed. The ‘ladies’ fringe’. All visible.

 

Back outside.

 

In the end, it’s those strangely restrained set-pieces at the ends of the various projections – the apsidal east and transepts – which most engage. Each a masterpiece, tour de force of disciplined composition within a tight armature, an exercise in proportion that finds its parallel in the numerous City churches. It seems Wren was at his best when faced with a challenge, a restricted site, a purposeless elevation, a dome too high to be appreciated within .... attempting the seemingly impossible, spatially.

 

We are left with the iconic view, of the dome rising directly above the street, all 366 feet of it, over the south transept, is for me the finest of all, though hard to dislodge the imperishable images of the ‘dome in the smoke’ of WWII or the Ladybird Book’s blue dome over the clutter of white columns.

 

And now, a 15 year renovation project has at last been completed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/8580467/St-Pauls-Cathedral-emerges-from-15-year-restoration.html