Highwalking in London 1

I don't know really what I'm doing here but I enjoyed it; it's a look at typography and architecture in a highwalk. I'm following a project set by London College of Communication, which has asked for some research by walking and collecting stuff as you go and so on. Though I found I was not so interested in the leterforms in this location (which do reveal a quite a bit about the area's changing history) but I was interested in the actual experience. For the uninitiated, Highwalks or Pedways are an elevation of pedestrians above the level of traffic - popular with Corbusian modernists - they creates a feeling of being in a computer game - say Flashback or Doom. I began at Moorgate and went west to the Barbican and then end up in circular route, including (briefly) the Museum of London and London Wall (aka Route XI).

N.B. The crude and less erudite comments are entirely my own.


Finsbury Pavement House on the east corner [of Moorgate], by R, Seifert & Partners, 1971-2, has aggregate faced floors and the trademark Y-shaped pier. (Pevsner, p. 566)


"Most large buildings designed in the 1960s and early 1970s therefore make provision for the walkway" Pevsner, p. 131.

"A large complex by Leo Hannen Associates, completed 1973. Seven storey slab to the street, its grey floor panels with jagged relief pattern. On the ground floor shops and the new Moorgate station entrance. Balcony-like abutment for an unbuilt extension of the ped-way." Pevsner, p. 561.





"Lots of pubs and shops were provided at podium level, in anticipation of the rebrith of pedestrian life on the upper level. The ensemble can still be appreciated, though its windswept upper level will appeal to few and the balance of buildings was upset by replacements from the mid 1980s." Pevsner, p. 131.


"Escalators lead to a paved upper court made over the station platforms connecting with the walkway along London Wall." (Pevsner , 561).



That jagged relief pattern.






"Slightly lower west slab with gloomy passage to a narrower court" (Pevsner , 561).


I think this is the Leo Hannen Associates build which has been recently (?) disconnected from Tenter House by some redevelopment.






London Wall high walk on the side of Fore Street.


I think this is a new build which replaced the 1961-2 Austral House by Gunton & Gunton, which was an attractive modernist built with green curtain walling, serpetine marbling and yellow-tinted glazing above the street entrance.






!!
Those ridiculous London prices - another world - run back to the Midlands! But hold on, is that a dehumidifier is the bottom left hand corner?








I think this is the 1993-5 Pentagram signage?


"There is nothing quite like the Barbican Estate in all of British Architecture. It combines two favourite concepts of radical postwar planning: the traffic free housing precinct linked by elevated walkways, and the giant multi-functional 'megastructure', to use the jargon of the time...
(Pevsner, p. 281).

"The name Barbican records a seperate outlying fortification, demolished in 1267 after the Barons' Wars..."
(Pevsner, p. 286).


"The Barbican Hall is a pleasant space.... The Theatre is more innovative... complex access foyers to either side take the place of aisles"
(Pevsner, p. 285).


"Here, the combination of immensely high apartment blocks (at forty-three storeys they were the tallest in Europe) and enjoyable and usable open space really seemed to work." Inwood, p. 831.


The idea of precincts - as old as Cathedral precincts - was first worked out, in modern planning terms, in 1942, by Alker Trip.... In a small book, 'Town Planning and Road Traffic', Trip extended into the city the principle... of 'limited segragation' of the various classes of traffic.
(Edward Carter, 'The Future of London', p.158.)


Such boldness was made possible by wasteland left north of Gresham street by the Blitz, which allowed one to walk for half a mile without passing a single struture, and by the City's readiness to finance the costly new housing and building for the arts, which did not falter in the quater century from conception to completion (1956 - 81). "
(Pevsner, p. 281).


"the present, more monumental system, depended on the raw mass of in situ reinforced concrete.."
(Pevsner, p. 281).






Fairly recent signage designed by Cartlidge Levene and Studio Myerscough.


"More rounded forms in the cascade spout..."
(Pevsner, p. 283).


"The local entertainment was provided by the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra and the well healed residents were there because they wanted to be, not because there was no where else to put them."
(S. Inwood, A History of London, p.832.)




"It was an estate, in short, on which even architects and town planners would have been prepared to live". (S. Inwood, A History of London, p.832)




"In the 28 acres of the [post war] plan, generous provision was made for the gardens and open spaces, in which remains of the city wall were displayed."
(Pevsner, p. 542).

"...the Museum of London completes the [1960s] sequence of tower on the north side (of London Wall)"
(Pevsner, p. 544).





"The roundabout by London Wall is closed off on the west side by Fitzroy Robinson Partnership's tall, boldly patterned and stagey development (No. 200 Clifford Chance) , proposed in 1983 and built in modified form in 1991-2. Two stepped blocks at right angles, the north one rising taller behind. An atrium floor joins the blocks with glazing stepped down ziggurat-wise from on high... The scheme erased a warren of small courts and side streets."
(Pevsner, p. 415).

This does perhaps resemble an old corner of the historic London wall, but I find the effect physically and mentally choking - especially when I have been at street level on the busy roundabout.


"Part of the [Alban Gate] development is the low residential west block, with playful, rather over articulated fronts of pleasent orange-red brick patterned with stone dressing. The struts decending diagonally where the walkway continues west teasingly suggest a giant drawbridge, as if the flats were a barbican to the main ' keep' behind."
(Pevsner, p. 544).






No real ale. Tut.




"The commercial part of the Barbican development, along London Wall, was less well received."
(S. Inwood A History of London, p. 832)

The second tower on London Wall is St Alphaege House, by Maurice Sanders Associates, 1960-2, very similar to Moor House, but with stilts around a recessed lower floor.
(Pevsner, p. 543).


"Now for the cuckoo in the nest: the enormous Alban Gate, two continguous towers by Terry Farrel Partnership (engineer Ove Arup & Partners) built for the MEP in 1988 - 92. The inspiration for its setbacks and broken profiles, no less than for the striped pink and grey stone cladding, is the Postmodern interpretation of the American interway skyscraper by Michael Graves (the architect also insists that it also derives from the idea for a giant gatehouse). The concept was to replace one tower block (Lee House, by Bernard Gold & Parters, 1961 -2) and to extend its envelope south west, bridging the cross roads of Wood Street and London Wall. The awkward juncture between the two alignments is the weakest feature. The best is the selectively dramatic structure: huge segmental arches bridge London Wall, their tympana filled in by glazed-in pedestrian suspended on raking steel rods."
(Pevsner, p. 544).




"So much for the unquestioning confidence of the 50s and 60s. Since then London Wall's planning and architecture have fallen mightily from favour. The anticipated rebirth of pedestrian life high up never happened, and the kiosks and upper entrances are mostly disused."
(Pevsner, p. 542).

The Margins of Medieval Art: Wiggenhall, Norfolk

Garogoyle, St Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall

Medieval marginalia is an academic term for all the lude gargoyles, masturbating sheila-na-gigs and the everyday scenes depicted on the margins of medieval buildings, manuscripts and furniture. It is not a popular subject for serious minded medievalists, but there are many pioneers in the subject who every so often change the way we look at the past. One of those was Michael Camille. [1]

Camille revealed that marginalia wasn't simply 'unconscious scribbling', which had hitherto been thought, but rather a critical commentary on religious orthodoxy, social conventions, national politics and regional problems. Sometimes marginalia wasn't critical at all, but an 'aide memoire', by using rude puns to learn the lengthy psalms. Or marginalia could help the religious tone, reminding people what sin actually looked like. One of the most famous subjects of Camille's analysis was the Luttrell Psalter, which has some of the finest works of mid-late medieval marginalia.


Hybrid beasts from ancient Greece used for memorising text: The Menticorn and Cockatrice depicting the fear of lying tongues mentioned in the above Psalm 109, in The Howard Psalter - a medieval Wiggenhall book.

Historically, this was a new development and which presented the Middle Ages as something which could be culturally complex, humorous and really quite odd - almost totally foreign. So I wanted to find out what medieval life was like on the margins and how this was depicted culturally; in a book, building and on the furniture. I looked through various medieval manuscript directories to find a medieval book which had some marginalia and where the provenance was known.[2] I then flicked through numerous Pevsner guides to see if the original location of these manuscripts had something physically which matched the book roughly in date and aesthetics. This was a tall order as there is so much which is unknown and lost about the past - take the relative lack of medieval church relics in London compared to Norwich as an example. But I eventually found that the best location for this was the village of Wiggenhall, north west Norfolk - five miles south of Lynn on the Great Ouse. Here was a group of mid-late medieval churches (c13 - c16), with late c15 early c16 wood carvings, an early c14 manuscript and a set of early c14 documents.


Looking south along the Great Ouse from the tower of Wiggenhall St Germans - notice how the river is higher than the fields.


The small township of Wiggenhall St Germans

This is still today a very unique and marginal village, partly due to its location in the flat marshlands of the wash; an endless horizontal horizon where an overbearing sky meets a grid of black peat, green growth, drains, roads and more drains and more roads. In his novel Waterland, Graham Swift wrote a number of observations about the region:

"Every fenman suffers now and then that the land he walks over is not there"[3]


Maintenance work on a drainage sluice, Wiggenhall


Wiggenhall St Germans and the River Great Ouse from the North

For a complete history of the area there is none better than H. C. Darby's work, [4] as Darby carefully charted (and with good prose) how the region grew in the late Middle Ages after the land had been reclaimed from the sea. This process was accentuated in the seventeenth acentury when the region was drained and enclosed by the Dutchman Cornelius Vermuyden. This created an agricultural powerhouse for the monarchy and aristocracy but with a major environmental drawback: the flat fens were in constant danger. Firstly from freshwater flooding, which meant fresh water coming from the Midlands had to be pumped out to sea, which sinks the landscape to below sea level. This is dangerously exacerbated by the second problem: the constant threat of salt water flooding. On television, Jonathan Meades presented a contemporary vision of the location's clear relationship with the Netherlands: a modern depopulated and highly industrial agriculture sinking ever deeper and perhaps one day into the sea. But despite also being a byword for all that is backward and incestuous, this region is almost unique in the sheer number, scale and detail of its mid-late medieval architecture:

"The hundreds of churches are trying hard or not so hard to keep going. Churchyards grow crops of nettles unmatched in their profusion. Struggling vicars rush in their second hard cars from one of their churches to the other to arrive in time for the next service. Their congregations are small and scattered and often live away from when the church was built, long before the black death or an improving c18 squire had removed the original village. There is plenty of change and disturbing change under the grandiose, ever-changing and yet eternal East Anglian sky." [Pevsner]


Wiggenhall St Germans


Wiggenhall St Peter


Wiggenhall St Mary the Virgin


Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen

Wiggenhall is unique in that it is a village with four large medieval churches; St Germans, St Mary the Virgin, St Mary Magdalen, and the ruin of St Peter. Medieval churches are a good barometer of town's wealth at that time; Norwich had about 30, London had nearly 100, while Nottingham had only 3 and Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester had even less. So for a village to have four medieval churches is quite something. Another barometer of wealth are tax records, which reveal that the Hundred of Freebridge Marshland was the most wealthy region in Norfolk, partly because this is a landscape which contains some of the most fertile soil in England.


A map of late medieval wealth in Norfolk , from H. C. Darby 'The Medieval Fenland'

According to Pevsner, the medieval benches of Wiggenhall St Mary and St Germans are the best in Norfolk.[5] Benches from this period are very rare, as most people in the Middle Ages would have experienced going to church while standing or sitting on a stoney cold (though straw strewn) floor. The weakest went to the wall. These benches are sometimes complete with central depictions of saints, though this is contrasted with the crude marginal carvings of beasts and medieval sinners.


Bench ends from the front showing various creatures from the Greek Bestiary


Bench ends from the back - you can just see a sinner in the mouth of hell


Ibis and Dragon

Many of these mythical beasts were taken from the bestiary - a series of ancient animal tales which originated in ancient Greece, but were often appropriated by the medieval church to interpret Christian stories which may have had a relevance to certain parishes. Take the above image of the Ibis, a creature which appears three times in the Wiggenhall churches. This was a creature that was given a mythical story about how it lived close to the water's edge and fed on dead creatures and eels because it was afraid to enter the water.[6] In the late Middle Ages Wiggenhall was frequently flooded by changes in the course of the Great Ouse.


Old course flowed past Wisbeach - new 14th Century course flowed past Wiggenhall and Lynn. From H. C. Darby 'The Medieval Fenland'


That diversion from Wisbech to Lynn in more detail

In the Norfolk archives are a series of fourteenth century records for the draining and embanking of the Great Ouse at Wiggenhall.[7] This was a place which like the Ibis lived dangerously close to the water's edge, with frequent floods and a constant need to embank and create new drains to control the flow of water. Beasts in the Middle Ages were often used to personify weather and landscape.[8]


St Germans butresses: supporting a church built on reclaimed land

In the Howard Psalter - a manuscript which was made for use in the church of St Germans in Wiggenhall - there is a more 'everyday' graphic interpretation of life in the late medieval marshlands.[9] This was religious book commissioned by Lord Howard (a descendant of the infamously powerful Dukes of Norfolk) - for the religious well-being of his church, which as Lord of the Manor, he was expected to maintain.


The Howard Psalter f.14


The Howard Psalter f.14 (detail)

The above image shows a fowling scene, which was a major industry in medieval Norfolk and an important part of the local diet. Thomas of Ely wrote in the twelfth century:

"At mid winter, or when the brids moult their quills, I have seen them caught by the hundred, and even by the three hundreds, more or less. Sometimes they are taken in nets and snares as well as by the bird-lime."[10]

The fowling scene in the Howard Psalter shows the use of birdlime which lured the birds in to sticky pole using an owl as a decoy. This is mentioned in the thirteenth century English poem, 'The Owl and the Nightingale':

"In woodlands where the boughs grow thick
To help hunters lure, then snatch,
The little birds they like to catch" Lines 1625-1628 [11]

Why a local bird hunting scene? Birds have a long association with thoughts and memories because it was believed that birds like memories, needed to be hunted down and stored in a cage or a coup.[11] The Middle Ages was a highly mnemonic culture. The Bullfinch and the Jay illustrated on the right of the page are 'notable and ear deceiving mimics',[12] who like the medieval reader learned their psalms through imitating songs and the chattering of others. It is interesting that the very locality of the reader was also seen as an important aide memoire.


The Howard Psalter f.40 v (detail)

Another important local connection is the dipiction of an ape with an eel spear on folio 40 v. There are a number of different eel speers in the Wisbech museum with a similar design. Eels were another important part of the local diet and the area is synonymous with the creature, Ely taking its name from the Old Anglian language meaning 'Eel district'.[13] In the English vernacular 'apes and owls' was a common analagy for the absurd and is featured in medieval literature such as Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale:[14]

"For visions are but fantasies and japes.
Men dream, why, every day, of owls and apes"

--

[1] M. Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London, 1992).
[2] L. F. Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts. A Survey of Manuscripts illuminated in the British Isles 1285 - 1385 vol. II (Oxford, 1986).
[3] G. Swift, Waterland (1983).
[4] H. C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland (Cambridge, 1940). See also, H. C. Darby Draining of the Fens (Cambridge 1969).
[5] N. Pevsner, North West Norfolk (London, 1962).
[6] M. W. Tisdall, Gods Beasts: Identify and understand animals in church carving (Plymouth, 1988), p. 148.
[7] Owen, A. E. B., The Records of a Commission of Sewers for Wiggenhall 1319 - 1324 (Norwich, 1981).
[8] W. Cahn, 'Medieval Landscape and the Encyclopaedic Tradition', in Contexts: Styles and Values in Medieval Art and Literature (Yale, 1991), p. 13.
[8] The Howard Psalter British Library MS Arundel 83 I (c.1310)
[9] Thomas of Ely, 'Liber Eliensis, p. 232, cited in Darby The Medieval Fenland, p. 36.
[10] B. Radice, (ed.), The Owl and the Nightingale / Cleannes / St Erkenwald (London, 1988), p. 238.
[11] M. J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1992), p. 246,
[12] R. Jellis, Bird Sounds and their Meaning (London, 1977), p. 179.
[13] The English Place-Name Society A Key to English Place-Names (Nottingham, 2009).
[14] C. L . Shaver, 'Chaucer's "owls and apes"', in Modern Language Notes (Oxford, 1943, p. 105 - 107.