Stamford

Watching the river flow....

Wish I was back in the city

Instead of this old bank of sand

With the sun beating down over the chimney tops

And the one I love so close at hand

If I had wings and I could fly

I know where I would go

But right now I'll just sit here so contentedly

And watch the river flow

Bob Dylan

Watching the River Flow

Error:  I set my teleporter to take me to Stamford Bridge, to watch Chelsea play FC Dynamo Moscow in front of a crowd of 100,000 in 1945....  However, my Time Machine is fairly crap, so somehow both the year and the location are wrong....

So, with (a 2019 replacement) Mercury waving me on above the jewellers, I have to make the most of the Stony Ford over the River Welland, where the Romans engineered their northbound Ermine Street....

Later, thanks in part to the souped up chariots of Boudicca, it was the Great North Road that came through here, with royalty (alive - H III, Liz I, Chas I, Queen Victoria, The Duke d'Edinburgh, Priceless A -   or dead - Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1204) stopping off for a change of horses at The George Hotel (f'r'instance)....

But then, in the age of steam, Peterborough (that much maligned town - see my last piece https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2025/11/peterborough.html) attracted the railways and Stamford was left out in the cold, to find occasional glory as a bit part player in Middlemarch, Bleak House, Pride and Prejudice, The Crown and the da Vinci Code..... [FFS - Ed]

I will be Frank [That is not your name! Ed] I thought I had been here before..... And there was a reason to visit today, connecting Kenya and Michael Wood (the Flying Doctor) a life time ago..... Lake Turkana, Lake Baringo, the Ngong Hills....  All very Out of Africa......

But, that was then.  This is now (of a sort....) and so I will explore.....

*****

Stamford has more than its fair share of churches, and fine old buildings.  Some of which have glasses half filled, from ever so long ago, like St Martin's.....

Which is where you will encounter a number of Cecils - gentlemen who descend from the first Elizabethan era, and who inhabit(ed) nearby Burghley Hall, as well as sundry other swells: 

This memorial (to John Cecil, Baron of Burghley, Earl of Exeter, son of the great Burghley's grandson, and in no wise unworthy of his renowned progenitor.....  

But among all those things which make life more blessed, being ever mindful of mortality, when he was in Italy, whilst he thoroughly examined and as curiously collected the works of choicest art, there he caused this monument to be made, where it could be most exquisitely done, for himself, and the most dear consort of his bed and travels, and all his cares.......) this memorial, as I was saying, is ever so Italian in its marbellous incongruity.....

Aaaahh.....

Meanwhile others, like All Saints, which dates back to the 13th century, is better known, perhaps, for having encouraged (with pea gravel, since 2021) Peregrines to nest on the tower....

And, I suppose, that's a good use of old buildings.....

Of which there are many in this little town (I now know that the entire population of Stamford could be seated at Stamford Bridge with a seat between each citizen.....)

Yes, old buildings are the thing:  some of which have seen better days:

Some of which have changed little:

Others of which have perhaps changed their purpose:

Or which, like this bakery (the branchild [sic] of Tim Hart of Hambleton Hall), at 1, Ironmonger Street, have moved in and reintroduced old and valuable crafts to the neighbourhood:

And wandering the streets and narrow alleys of this stone gem of a town I feel a kind of nostalgia..... (the town offers a remarkable journey through English architectural history, with buildings spanning medieval, Tudor, Georgian, and Victorian periods, all unified by the consistent use of local oolitic limestone) and has been called, by Nikolaus Pevsner: The English country market town par excellence.....

The best town we have, (Sir John Betjeman)

Stamford town is as fine a built town all of stone as may be seen; it’s on the side of a hill which appears very fine in the approach, (Celia Fiennes, 1690)

On reflection, I think I may have learned something. Stamford is perhaps a museum piece, a fossil, an antiques store,

with its conservation status, its 600 listed buildings (the most for any town of its size in the country), its coaching inns, its churches and squares, its river and meadows.  It is no wonder that George Eliot and Jane Austen made their films here, and no wonder that Sir William Cecil (later 1st Baron Burghley, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I between 1555 and 1587) built Burghley House, one of the largest and grandest surviving houses from the 16th century here.  

And it attracts the crowds - when I arrived on Sunday the place was teeming, traffic was at a standstill and there was nowhere to park. The hostelries were all full, and it seemed a bit like a theme park, or Disney-type World.

The present is the funeral of the past, 

And man the living sepulchre of life.

John Clare 1793–1864

But then on Monday morning, as people went to work and shops (like the Hambleton Bakery) were opening, I found a different town, one that is a part of reality, not fantasy, and which is possibly a good place to live (according to a Sunday Times survey in 2013 it is one of the top places to live....)

And before leaving, I take another walk in Burghley Park, and, to my surprise, discover a memorial grove to Diana, Princess of Wales.  It is a pleasant, fenced, wooded garden with benches and paths, and I think of her, and her untimely death.  And I think of her family....  And I think of grief, and how loss can never be repaired, or forgotten.  But then, in the growing trees, I think of how, although nothing is forever, the world goes on and we have to make what we can of life out of respect for those we have loved and lost.  My thoughts may be trite, and obvious, but there we have it.....  In the midst of life we are in death.....

And so my brief trip to Stamford comes to an end and I turn to drive home, first stopping by Barnack (where the oolitic limestone used to build Peterborough and Ely Cathedrals as well as much of Stamford comes from).  The church of St John the Baptist here boasts an 11th century anglo-saxon tower, which is topped by a 12th century spire - possibly the earliest in the country....

And then passing through Helpston, in memoriam John Clare (https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2013/02/john-clare.html), and then across the Fens, where in a bizarre flip from my earlier thoughts The Ouse Valley Singles Club comes to mind, with their crazy hit, My Girl From The Fens: 

Well she smells of onions

She's got hair like wheat

She's my potato-eyed girl

Sweet like sugar beet

And she keeps all my wishes in a pickling jar

Our love is bigger than a combine harvester

She's my girl from the Fens

She's my girl from the Fens

*****

I realise now that though I thought I had been to Stamford before, though I thought I had stood on Stamford Bridge before and watched the Welland flow past - now I think about it, it might have been Melton Mowbray I visited (I may have muddled Stilton with Stamford, forgive me.....)

We all make mistakes.....

Flow, river, flow.....  

Take the watercourse way.....

*****

'Cause all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of

And all the times, they will change, it'll all come around

I don't know

Ella Marija Lani Yelich O'Connor (Lorde) 

and Jack Michael Antonoff

*****

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another's grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

William Blake

Songs of Innocence

On Another's Sorrow

*****

Peterborough

The Writing on the Wall...

The Book of Daniel, Chapter 4

I was here before - I don't know when - but I remember the face of the cathedral as if it were yesterday [And it wasn't..... Ed?]

Young woman, the Town Hall

Now look, this is a picture essay.  I cannot tell you the whole truth, the nothing but....  The time is passing and, to be very Francis, it is sad.....

Peterborough Cathedral, West Front

Peterborough (named, possibly, after my dad, but little (?) to do with Petersburg, nor Petrograd, nor Walpole St Peter, nor even Chalfont St Peter....) is a town that hangs near the middle of a map that is centered on Peterborough [Is that surprising?  Ed.]  What else can you say?  It is on the way from here to there, from many other places to other places.

View of Peterborough from the Cathedral West Front

And I am here.  

I was there.....

Pace/Roper Crucifix, 1975

I came to scale the heights of one of the finest Norman Cathedrals in the Universe.....

As Simon Jenkins wrote in England's Cathedrals (Little Brown, 2016) Peterborough has long been the poor relation of the great East Anglian cathedrals. It is buried in a new town of the 1960s, since bleakly expanded, with none of the suavity of its neighbours, Ely and Norwich.....

I am not going to attempt to describe the extraordinary architecture of the cathedral nor the depression of the town around it.  I am very grateful to Rod and Paul who took me to the heights and to all those who worked their fingers to the bone to produce such a god-given masterpiece as the Cathedral of St Peter, St Paul and St Andrew.  

I am not going to try and tell you how sad I felt to wander the streets of this Cambridgeshire city on the River Nene that now has a population of some 200,000 (it was little more than 1,000 when the cathedral was rebuilt in 1170) - that is a different story - but I will offer you a selection of pictures from my visit and you can draw your own conclusion:

Please feel free to observe.  My eyes are damp and failing - you will see more than me:

The museum (above) is fascinating: there's a collection of portraits of the grand and the good but on the top floor I find one of the earliest of any operating theatres:

And a celebration of gender diversity:

And on the middle floor there is the skeleton of a marine crocodile [Steneosaurus durobrivensis, Ed.] being skipped around by tiny children delighted to be out of the classroom.....

Is this an unparalleled universe?  I am lost....

Wandering, hopelessly, around the town centre, I photograph random sights and people.  I don't mind saying that my spirits are a little low.   Try as I might, nothing seems to make me feel that life was quite what I wished it to be:

Not even the Westgate Arcade(!) uplifts.....  

Nor even the inverted cathedral, really....

Even though it is, undeniably, marvellous......

Whichever way you look.....,

{How did they do this?  No cranes; no computers......}

Other architectural masterpieces have fared less well:

Or been adapted:

Though the nearby church of St John the Baptist has a breathtaking altarpiece:

While the River Nene carries on regardless:

And multiculturalism paints the walls:

When the lonely night falls:

And I look toward the sheer brilliance of the cathedral facade:

There is little solace in the neighbourhood:

And then the following morning brings another tale of the cycle of life:

And the young woman under the Town Hall at the top of this piece morphs into the woman who walks in the rain......

We are so near to others.....

But everything is so far......