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 second 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......