THE CLOUD-CAPP'D TOWERS OF ENGLAND

 The English are often thought to be phlegmatically practical and they reserve their fantasies for their literature rather than for their buildings. Other nations build their pyramids, ziggurats and Babels or ruin their lovely capital cities with the likes of the Eiffel Tower, so much at odds with the genius loci of Paris. The English are certainly more cautious but imagination does explode at times, all the more welcome for being so unexpected.

That mixture of the practical and fantastic is well illustrated by 16^th century St Botolph’s, Boston (The Boston Stump) at 272 ft once one of the highest buildings in Europe, whose elegant English Perpendicular proportions remain a beacon over The Wash and served as a guide to bombers returning home to the many wartime airfields of Lincolnshire.

The Boston Stump

The Shard

                

                                          

Height in itself is not enough – the Empire State Building and newer erections in Chicago and Kuala Lumpur beat records but do not make the spirits bubble. I suspect Londoners will come to like The Shard, the 1,017 ft glass tower to be completed in 2012 – its eccentricity and modernity are appealing and it merely dominates the presently unlovely environs of London Bridge Station.

London of course has its own Tower but frankly my blood runs cold when I enter its forbidding precincts, redolent of chains, torture and executions – not a comforting place. Heroic Nelson lords it over Trafalgar Square on his mighty Column, a landmark to be sure but maybe not an artistic success. I much prefer the skyline from the Thames created by Wren as he rebuilt much of the City following the 1666 Fire. St Paul’s Cathedral itself is a wonder with its huge dome, not to forget the elegant Monument on the site of the source of the Fire, but I am always cheered by his playful wedding-cake tower of St Bride’s, Fleet Street on its cramped site, combined with so many other fine towers of the City churches.

St Bride's, Fleet Street

St George's, Bloomsbury

          

 

For extraordinary eccentricity the steeple of St George’s, Bloomsbury takes some beating.  The church was completed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1731, in his usual strikingly monumental style. It is crowned by a stepped pyramid, at the bottom of which a heraldic lion and unicorn fight and at the top stands a statue of George I, looking uneasy in a Roman toga. This steeple is an adaptation of Pliny’s description of the 350 BC Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, a Wonder of the Ancient World and certainly a wonder now in bourgeois Bloomsbury, though not easy to view from the busy street below.

Salisbury Cathedral

One of the great sights of England (I write as an Anglophile Scot) is the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, inspiringly reaching for the heavens in its Gothic Decorated glory, with its incomparable setting of manicured lawn and civilised Close. It epitomises so much of the essence of England. I love too the Tudor romance of turreted Burghley House completed in 1587, traditional and aristocratically self-confident.

                                    Burghley House, near Stamford

I suppose I have covered the cloud-capp’d towers, the solemn temples and the gorgeous palaces, but I want to return to a Tower. A dear friend, Philomena de Hoghton, now sadly gone, for many years lived in, cared for and loved Hoghton Tower a venerable stately home in Lancashire. Its tower does not rival some others but it has been maintained and cherished for many generations with dedication and love. No doubt in time its stones will crumble but her proud values and those of her magnificent England are eternal.

Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

SMD

30.05.12

Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2012