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......

Where civilisation ends

 My Girl from the Fens

You may, possibly, not have heard of The Ouse Valley Singles Club, so forgive me if I inform you that their style is often likened to 'George Formby meets the Clash,' and that they have shared stages with Chas and Dave, Pete Doherty, and The Boomtown Rats, and have headlined at the Peterborough Beer Festival, among other festive gatherings such as Bestival, Truckfest and Glastonbudget.....

OK, they are neither Mozart nor Sondheim. Nor are they quite CMAT. Their performances blend 1950s skiffle with the energy of punk and the swing of rock and roll, occasionally infused with a touch of reggae. They layer this with comic folk-like story-telling, often crossing the parameters of what is deemed to be politically correct but keeping it very tongue in cheek.

Anyway the reason I am drawing your attention to them is that I have just survived a visit to the Fens, a part of Britain normally avoided by both invaders and holiday makers, for reasons that we won't go into here.  It is a part of the world where civilisation ends (though where it begins these days is another question).  And one of the OVSC (Ouse Valley Singles Club)'s greatest hits is a song by the name of My Girl from the Fens, a song that has recently ear-wormed itself into my heart.

It's a catchy ditty, summing up the attractions of the folk that live worryingly near my home. It opens thus:

I love a girl

And that is that

She comes from the East

Where the land is flat

And on the surface

She may seem dumb

'Cause her cousin is her uncle

And he's married to her mum

But she's alright she's my Fenland Rose

And it gets worse.....

The second verse, which is not going to panic the Poet Laureate, nor frighten fans of Longfellow, goes like this:

If you meet a girl who comes from Wisbech

You might have trouble understanding her speech

Oh she sounds just like the Tasmanian Devil

And she gets a nosebleed above sea level

On our first date, we got a bit tipsy

She took me to a place

Where a farmer shot a gypsy

And then we went to King's Lynn

To do some shopping

She's the Cambridgeshire champion of carrot-topping

She's my girl from the Fens....

You see, for us that live beyond the reaches of Greater Anglia, these local references strike home and we chuckle (to avoid the shivers).....

But, don't be put off!  There's more to Wisbech than the muddy waters of the river Nene, or the now-closed Bingo Parlour, for example, and there are some (and I use the word carefully) places worth visiting, which include Peckover House and Garden, 

the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, the Octavia Hill (founder of the National Trust and a prominent social reformer) Birthplace House, and Blackfield Creatives' Wisbech Gallery..... 

Though I did come across this in Wisbech:

I find the third verse to be quite endearing, in a curious sort of way:

Well my Fenland girl has got the X-factor

At 6 years old she learned to drive a tractor

And at 8 she plucked turkeys, 9 she kept quails

She was born with the black soil under her nails

From Peterborough where they're a bit posh

To Spalding and Chatteris and the shores of the Wash

I will follow that girl

And my heart I do pledge

We will grow old together

Picking seasonal veg

She's my girl from the Fens

People here are definitely special, in a no-nonsense sense, though it is not all sugar beet and Chinese veg, shady characters dragging wheely-cases along narrow lanes, boarded up pubs and locked warehouses.  King's Lynn, for example, was once the third greatest port in England, with the Great Ouse still accepting shipping from all over the world,

And, scattered throughout the Fens, from Lincolnshire, across Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, there are many buildings of great interest, usually atop solid rises in the marshy surroundings.  Crowland Abbey, originally a Benedictine Abbey founded in memory of St Guthlac in the eighth century, has been much battered by history but is now the Parish Church of Crowland.  

The Church of St Peter, at Walpole St Peter, is, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, one of the most impressive churches of its date (c1350 - c1400) in Norfolk, and is a favourite of a number of royals, including the current King:

And across this watery world rises one of the greatest churches anywhere - Ely Cathedral - which reaches for the sky 66 metres (217 feet) above the town, which is already almost 30 metres above sea level, so the West Tower is one of the best viewpoints across the fens.

Anyway, back to the song.....  the last verse is quite down to earth, I will admit, but having pitched my camp in the area and feeling my feet taking root in the fertile slime of these reed beds, I can certainly relate to it.....

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

On her heart I depend

She's my girl from the Fens

She's my girl from the Fens

Where civilisation ends, that's the Fens

She's my girl from the Fens

Now should this drive you to want to spend an evening with the Ouse Valley Singles Club, you could catch them at Doddington Village Hall on November 28th.....

https://theousevalleysinglesclub.com/

And, by coincidence, the late Kit Hesketh-Harvey (of Kit and the Widow), who lived in Stoke Ferry, not far from Doddington, where he owned All Saints' Church, was a big fan of the OVSC, and this was one of his favourite songs....

And if that isn't a recommendation, I'm afraid I cannot say much more.....

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For CeeJay