Meanwhile, Round The Back

Just as with humans, old doors don't have to be gussied up in ornate bling to be beautiful.

The original Norman north door at the back of St. Margaret's Church at Hales reassures me that 'old, knackered and worn out' is still a good look, so that's what I'm going for.

What's The Time? Buggered If I Know; The Sundial's Stopped Working.

 

Here be Tim and Erin on a church-crawl, peering out from behind the shamelessly over-the-top south door (which dates from around 1120 CE) at Kirby Bedon St. Andrew's Church.

Dig those doubled-over C-straps! That blacksmith was trippin' balls!

Anyhoo … That's not why we're here. Take a look to the right of the cushion capital of the right-hand pilaster and you'll see what was quite common on mediæval churches: a sweet little sundial.

Here's a closer look at it.

To check when to start the service, they'd stick a stick in the hole and read off the time, though only of course if the sun was shining.

Trouble is, someone built a porch over the door in the fifteenth century and the poor little sundial has not worked since. Starved of sunshine it has sat sadly these six-hundred years, recklessly robbed of its raison d'être.

Sometimes, I surprise even myself at the sheer, mind-numbing dullness of things that fascinate me.

A Door Fetishist Writes …

Hokay …

So as I'm back on the Planet I felt it about time I started (yet) another photo-post series. This one is inspired by Lynn, who you may recall has a penchant for fondling ancient doors.

Check out the blacksmith bling on this beauty!

According to Jane Geddes (who wrote the Bible on the subject), the door and ironwork for this, Haddiscoe and Hales churches (you'll see them another day) were made around 1100CE by the same joiner and blacksmith.

This one is the south door at Raveningham St.Peter's Church, (about half-an hour's drive from Lynn's parents' house next time we get to enjoy a Norfolk day out).

Wednesday Window - Below Stairs

The butler's dining table below stairs at Blickling. Lovely view of the garden but …

… not quite the same as above stairs. Ah, death, taxes and inequality: our constant companions.

Biblioporn Thursday

This week, Car Porn Thursday has been invaded by books. Meet my favourite room in all the world.

Lynn liked it so much she had to take a closer look …

Hidden Norfolk - Cinema With Style

Whilst wandering witlessly around the city yesterday, gaping in slack-jawed wonder at the first sunshine we've seen since February, I happened past the Theatre Royal and popped in to book third row centre tickets for Angela Hewitt's upcoming Beethoven-fest together with object-of-my-more-moist-dreams Alina Ibragimova with the Britten Sinfonia (WOOT!) …

Anyhoo, just down the hill from the theatre nestles this rather beautiful building where I took refuge from all the scary blue stuff in the sky and enjoyed a second breakfast and the Guardian Book Review in their elegant coffee and cake house.

This photo also contains a surprising hidden gem: a teeny-tiny arthouse cinema - The Noverre - lurks inside the white building on the right.

You go in through the middle one of the three doors you can see (blow up the photo and you might make out "NOVERRE" over the door) and the cinema is straight ahead of you, housed in the red brick building you can just see on the right of the picture.
No popcorn (yay)!

As well as being a haunt for the caffeine-and-cake-deprived, the main building - known as The Assembly House - boasts a spiffy banqueting hall, a music room for chamber concerts (it's been going a while; Liszt and Paganini both played there), a pair of ballrooms and a rather fine restaurant.
Boffo all round.

Come and visit.

Boring Stuff About Bendy Old Houses

Here's an example of all the messing about that old houses can undergo over the centuries (see yesterday's comments box).
This one's much older than Anna Sewell's house and much of the structure still dates from the original 1380s great hall.
This would have been the hall of a local landowner grown rich from the wool trade. It sits opposite the church and would have originally been surrounded by the mud and dung-built hovels of the rest of us.
It would have been one big room, open to the roof, with a central open hearth, smoke holes in the gables and a maybe a small window or two, with real glazing, unlike the hovels. A timber panel to one end would have housed the solar, where the owners slept. Cooking and crapping was done outside.
Sometime in the 1500s the roof was raised and a second floor put in, together with a large brick chimney and much larger windows (the two vertical panels to the left would have been a window).
In the eighteenth century, the 'lord of the manor' who lived here moved out into his newly built, elegant brick house at the head of the market square on the other side of the church (it's still there, though now it houses a restaurant), and this house was split into three homes. Even later, it had Victorian casement windows inserted and the old windows filled in and a brick outshot was built on to the side.
And much more recently someone moved in who clearly has no colour sense whatsoever.
Very few old buildings look anything like they did when they were built.
Much like the rest of us, really …
Hey ho.

Cute House

 Surviving German bombing and the equally destructive 1960's "Let's rip the heart out of the mediæval town and fill it with 'modern, American-style' big roads and vast car parks and a one-way system that only a brain-damaged octopus could have designed" misguided planning authorities, this cute little house sits in Great Yarmouth, between - on the one side - St.Peter's Church, and on the other, a needless arterial road leading nowhere, a supermarket and acres of massive ugly car park.
Great Yarmouth does have its treasures but they are regrettably few and far between. Any fan of Dickens on a David Copperfield pilgrimage will do better to stay home and read the book unless they are also masochistically addicted to disappointment.

 People who enjoyed Black Beauty during their childhood can, on the other hand, find Anna Sewell's little house still standing. I suppose the only thing that can be said for the dreadful desolation around it is that at least visitors will find a place to park.
The house itself is part of a late 16th century range that has been considerably knocked around over the centuries; the mix of Georgian windows to either side and of later replacement leaded casements to the house itself, plus Victorian added porches makes quite a charming medley.
Behind the house on the left is what remains of the mediæval monastery attached to St.Peters, but the whole area had the shit bombed out of it so there's not much left.
Anna Sewell's little house still cheers me whenever I drive past.

It Gets Dark So Damned Early These Days

In another month it will be dark at half-three up here in the frozen north. I long to hibernate through these most depressing three months of the year. But at least I get some eye candy when I walk out of the office after work. Yesterday afternoon this is what greeted me from the car park. The spire of the Cathedral all lit up gold behind the stair turret of Pull's Ferry makes it look vaguely Disney.

What Remains

After yesterday's peek through the window of what has become known as St.Mary's Chapel in Cockley Cley, let's check out some more of it.

Meandering through the woods away from the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village, the more adventurous wanderer might come across this sight.
Is it an old barn? Let's take a look.

That ain't no barn. And that door and window are pre-Norman, so we're looking at a Saxon church here. Cockley Cley already has a big late Saxon church only a few minutes across the fields, and that was probably built when this small church could no longer cope with the growing population.

 It was still in use between 1000 and 1100, as this Saxo-Norman doorway tells us, though by the time of the Reformation it had fallen into disuse and became derelict until squatters started living in it. People were still living there in 1952, with no water, drains or electricity.

Mercifully, someone realised what was hidden underneath all the decay and it has been slowly recovering since then, though it still has a temporary roof as the people who call themselves Christians these days prefer to waste their time and money on tax fraud, tawdry TV shows, pædophilia or bitching about one another's culty little cliques and so a few grand for some timber and thatch to protect one of the first places in Northern Europe to hear the word of Jesus is not a priority.

 Below the floor of the main body of the church are the remains of an earlier church and below those the remains of a Roman temple. The early Christians usually re-used old pagan sites as a derelict building is cheaper to repair and use than building something from scratch, and these were places where people had been coming to worship for centuries, so there was a ready made congregation ripe for conversion. Saint Fursey and his followers would have preached here because there was already an old ruined temple on the site which would act as a focus to draw people and as a shelter to live in.

The stone jambs to the opening are later, tenth or eleventh century additions to both shore up and decorate the old walls. The original building was all flint.

 This is the Roman lead coffin I was telling you about yesterday, dating from 350AD and sitting on some Roman floor tiles found locally.

 The sign over the wooden box in the apse explains that four feet below that spot were found the bones of the brother of Saint Fursey who lived and preached here and died on pilgrimage in 650AD (check him out if you have a copy of Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica" (yes, of course I do; you know better than to ask) - he's in book III, chapter IXX.

The people who first heard about Jesus in this little space in a woodland clearing would have been aghast at what horrors their religion unleashed upon the world in the ensuing centuries. Fortunately this tiny chapel really does retain a sense of the innocence and hope of the early church and it's nice to pop in there from time to time to step back into a simpler world. I don't feel the message of Jesus in any modern church but I do in here.

Wednesday Window

And so to my favourite cinema.
Yes, this is a cinema - Cinema City to be precise, a fiercely independent little arthouse place hidden in a warren of fourteenth century houses. The flint wall is the back of the cinema itself and the oriel window is part of the cinema's restaurant.
Yes, this is the place that does "popcorn free" cinema. A cinema for people who actually want to enjoy a film without being surrounded by the disgusting racket of crunching and slurping that comes with the normal sticky-floored, stinking cinema "experience".
You enter through a lovely stone arch and eat your food in the restaurant or the courtyard café before or after the movie, thus allowing me to enjoy the film without wanting to kill you.
That's right. A cinema for considerate people! A cinema with no food or drink allowed in the theatre! What civilised bliss!
If only all the world worked this way.

Crazy Name, Crazy Guy

Another local hero.
Sir … er … Cloudesley Shovel.

This statue lurks in a dark corner of Stranger's Hall in Norwich (scene of many a past post).

Anyone think it's time to bring back poodle wigs for middle-aged men?

Random Norfolk - Local Heroes Come In Many Flavours

More Boring Norwich Stuff

This is Hook's Walk, the little winding street I take between Bishop Bridge and Cathedral Close on my lunchtime perambulations into the city. This view is looking back from the Cathedral toward the river.

Last week's heatwave may have been stupidly sweaty and unpleasant but it sure made for some sweet photo opportunities.

It's Behind You

Popping out of the office to buy a paper I noticed these two enjoying a romantic lunchtime by the river. Why they're facing this way is quite beyond me. The view they're looking at is of my 1960s brutalist concrete office block and a bunch of crappy fibreglass pleasure boats; the view behind them across the meadows is of one of the most beautiful buildings on this or any other planet.
I guess some people are just born to face the wrong way.

Wednesday Window - Duck! Here Comes Autumn

Random Norfolk - Matins

Gloria tibi domine qui natus es de virgine cum patre (et) sancto spiritu in se(m)piterna sæcula. Amen

From the underside of a lectern in the choir stalls at St.Helen's Church, Ranworth.

Random Norfolk - Angels

These lovely guardian angels are high up on the south wall of Norwich's splendid Art Deco City Hall (see many a previous photo post) and were carved by Eric Aumonier, one of the artists - together with Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore and Eric Gill - responsible for those cool 1930s sculptures dotted around the London Underground system.

The reason the picture looks a little stretched is that every brick in City Hall was made two inches longer than standard to reflect the proportions of the building (which is … er … very long).
A magnificent mélange of Art Deco bronze, stone, rare woods and hand-made brick, City Hall - while minimalist on the outside - boasts some spectacular sculpture and detailing inside, reminiscent of the Chrysler Building (the lifts are spiffy beyond words; I shall have to sneak my camera in one day) and the longest balcony in the country. It was also - somewhat distastefully - Hitler's favourite building in England and thanks to the misguided taste of that dismal failure of an artist was spared being bombed during WWII (he intended to use it as his centre of government after the invasion when London was flattened, probably dreaming of strutting up and down the balcony). What a dick.

Anyhoo … Angels. Enjoy.

Random Norfolk - Thirsty

We're back in my home village for today's post, standing on a boat house jetty on a summer's evening and yearning for a pint of local real ale.
You might be able to make out a pub just across the river, the excellent Coldham Hall. Unfortunately, living in the watery maze of rivers and lakes that is the Norfolk Broads, served with few roads and fewer bridges, it takes me almost forty minutes to drive there. Cadging a lift on a boat is all very well early in the evening but at closing time in pitch darkness it's either a swim and a squelchy trudge up the hill to my house (no thank you) or a very long walk home, which is why I only visit the place once in a blue moon.
Fortunately the beer is just as good this side of the river.

Random Norfolk - Rubbed Brick Extravaganza

Currently undergoing restoration, this Georgian confection has to be one of the most bizarrely beautiful doorways I've seen. The arch takes rubbed headers and stretchers to extreme lengths of absurdity and yet still works. Even the tiny details are lovely, like the little cubes at the corners of the door panels.
Spiffy.