Churches
St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Bury St Edmunds
First appeared in Suffolk magazine, December 2000
PRINCE CHARLES has called it "a spiritual beacon for the future". Others have called it obscene. How can the building of a cathedral tower in Bury St Edmunds have stirred up such mixed emotions?
SUFFOLK has more lovely old churches than any other English county except Norfolk. Until 1914, however, it had no cathedral: it may come as news to some, even in the county, that it has one now.
Awareness is growing, though - and will continue to grow over the next three years as St Edmundsbury Cathedral itself grows into a Millennium landmark.
When the new diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich (to all intents and purposes the diocese of Suffolk) was carved out of the huge sees of Norwich and Ely on the eve of the Great War, the choice of St James's church in Bury St Edmunds as the cathedral was at first sight an odd one.
There are dozens of finer churches in the county. St James's was not even the best, or the grandest, in Bury. St Mary's, barely 200 yards away, was much more impressive and remains a more striking landmark - for now.
When H Munro Cautley, himself the diocese surveyor, wrote his definitive Suffolk Churches and Their Treasures in the 1930s, he gave the cathedral less than four lines: St Mary's got 22 lines, and Mildenhall 82. But that, in a way, was the point.
Churches like Long Melford, Southwold and Blythburgh were already perfect - you could not enlarge them to accommodate all a cathedral's functions without spoiling their medieval shape and integrity. Apart from its large and elegant nave, there was not much to spoil in Bury St James's (though the eminent Victorian Sir George Gilbert Scott, architect of London's Albert Memorial and St Pancras Station, had had a go in the 1860s).
In any case, the choice of Bury as the cathedral town was almost automatic. Before its Dissolution by Henry VIII in 1540, the abbey there had been one of the largest and most powerful in Europe.
The shrine of St Edmund, the martyred ninth century king of East Anglia, was one of the major pilgrim attractions in the great medieval age of pilgrimage. Other great abbeys, like Peterborough, Gloucester and Westminster, were converted by Henry into cathedrals. Bury St Edmunds might have become one of England's greatest medieval cathedrals, if not the greatest. Henry chose instead to have it demolished, even though it was the resting-place of his sister Mary Tudor, the former Queen of France. (At the abbey's dissolution, just seven years after her death, her remains were moved to St Mary's church, where they are to this day.)
The abbey's destruction left just two churches in the old precinct - the 15th century St Mary's and the then newly rebuilt St James's, the pilgrims' church.
The fine nave, begun in 1503, was the work of master mason John Wastell, a Bury man whose other commissions included part of King's College Chapel in Cambridge and the bell tower of Canterbury Cathedral - two of the great achievements of English architecture in any age. Nearly 500 years later, the work of turning his church into a real cathedral is being carried out partly in tribute to Wastell. For the great central tower that will rise over St James's in the coming three years will follow a design based on his Canterbury masterpiece.
The project is being pursued with enormous and infectious enthusiasm - from the Provost, the Very Reverend James Atwell, to the architects, the stonemasons to the scaffold-erecters. But it is not a project without controversy. The two big questions are:
- How can the diocese justify spending £10.3million on one church when so many are in such desperate need of funds, not only for repairs but just to stay open?
- And why, in the 21st century, build a tower in mock-medieval style?
The first question may sound like the tough one, but it is the one that Euan Allen, co-ordinator of the Suffolk Cathedral Millennium Project, finds easier to answer.
"It's a case of taking an opportunity," he says. "When building funds ran out in 1970 the north side of the cathedral was left in a very ugly state. There was a blank brick wall in the choir and a stairway going nowhere, and where the tower will be there were just some rusty rods sticking up.
"There's a question of the signal sent out, particularly to uncommitted people, about how much you care, if your mother church is demonstrably unfinished.
"Most importantly, it's a signal of faith at the end of one millennium and at the start of another that we are here and will remain here.
"The masons are building for 1000 years - and that's not a soundbite, it's the literal truth. We expect this building still to be standing at the next millennium."
This may not entirely satisfy those in parish churches worried about the continued survival of wonderful buildings that have already stood for several centuries. But the fact is, it is not a simple either-or equation. If the £10.3m were not being spent extending the cathedral outwards and upwards, it would not be available for the church in Suffolk to spend on anything else.
The catalyst for the present building project was the death of Stephen Dykes Bower in 1994 - or rather his will.
Bower, appointed the cathedral architect in 1943, was the mastermind of its various enlargements and alterations between 1959 and 1970. At his death, aged 86, he left £2m for the completion of his work - a sum that has now risen, with interest, to £2.7m.
To this has been added, after three bids, a grant of over £5m of lottery cash from the Millennium Commission to build a tower adapted from Dykes Bower's original drawings by his former partner Hugh Matthew. The total has been topped up by a public appeal for £2.5m, now achieved. An elaborate fan-vaulted ceiling and stone wall-lining was removed from the tower plan to save money, then reinstated when the trustees found they were getting enough after all.
By the terms of Dykes Bower's will, his money would have gone to Westminster Abbey if his Bury plan had not been followed. The Millennium Commission, rightly or wrongly, was always intended to fund what Euan Allen calls "pipedream projects", not the maintenance or preservation of existing buildings, however worthy of rescuing. And as for the public appeal - who knows?
Mr Allen knows that the 500-plus parish churches in the diocese all want an average £20,000 for essential repairs. So it was with some embarrassment that he asked them all for one single contribution each - one fundraising event, perhaps - to help the cathedral project.
It was presented as "an invitation to help", along with an invitation to come and look round the work-in-progress. Perhaps tellingly, it was an invitation all but about 40 parishes have found able to resist, though some have given generously.
To the question: Why a gothic tower 500 years after the style's heyday? there is only one answer - it's what Dykes Bower wanted.
Prince Charles, as patron of the appeal, approves - but the Prince's architectural approval could be seen as a double-edged sword. He is well known as a traditionalist who believes tradition means continually aping the past.
Throughout the great period of English church-building, from the 12th century to the early 16th, there was an eager spirit of innovation and development that made Suffolk's glorious churches what they are. John Wastell would not for one second have considered building in imitation-Saxon style. So why imitate him now?
(In truth, it's not a flattering imitation, either. Hugh Matthew may be a wonderful draughtsman, with a fine eye for detail, but the proportions and lines of his tower plan do not compare with the slender grace for which Wastell's tower at Canterbury is rightly famous.)
Although he lived all his life in the 20th century, Dykes Bower was in spirit one of the last Victorians, an obsessive follower of their taste for the neo-gothic. A stickler for "stylistic harmony", he overlooked the fact that the joy of most ancient churches is the richly organic way they combine the styles and materials of different periods.
So why was he allowed to dictate his austerely retro style at Bury - as indeed he continues to do from beyond the grave?
Perhaps the date of his appointment is the key to that. He was a war-time choice, when perhaps preserving - or recreating - the past seemed important. Just eight years later Basil Spence won the competition to design the replacement for Coventry's bombed-out cathedral, and the excitingly modern work he produced is the best 20th century building in England.
The spirit then was not one of pastiching the past but of reaching with optimism into the future. Perhaps it is a pity that Spence was not engaged at Bury - especially as his chosen resting-place is just 16 miles away at Thornham Parva, a little church that has strong historical connections with Bury.
For the architects and builders, however, there are great compensations. After all, the chance to build a medieval tower does not come along every day.
For the flint-knapper and the stonemasons it is a rare chance to use old skills on a new building - or at least the new extension of an old one.
Every stone has its own drawing and is cut exactly to shape at the yard at Ketton, in Rutland. When they arrive at Bury, "each stone goes in like Lego," as Euan Allen says. Just two masons are on site to put every one in place. It is Barnack stone, freshly in use for the first time in 500 years, and exactly matching the stone of the 12th century abbey gatehouse that has served as St James's bell-tower until now.
Other old skills are having to be rediscovered. Where medieval stone walls traditionally had a core of rubble, the new ones will have a brick core. But the stones are being laid in the old way, spaced by lime mortar, not cement (the weight of the stone itself holds it all together).
A medieval master mason would have known exactly what mixture to use for each part of the job - but now the recipes must be reinvented. Lime with a dash of linseed oil, for example, provides the damp-course. The hope is that, like still-standing ancient towers, the slightly moist, slightly flexible mortar will long outlast rigid cement.
If it does, how will posterity view this curious piece of mock-medieval bravado? It will surely not be ranked among England's finest cathedrals - or even among Suffolk's finest churches.
And it is hard to agree with Dr Alan Powers, librarian of the Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture, when he suggests: "The style for the 21st century might be gothic, for all we know".
But one thing is for sure: as Millennium projects go, our cathedral tower is better value-for-money than London's Dome. It will be around for a lot longer, too.
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