HIGH LEVEL WORK

More on the Tower Blocks

There was a pause in the removal of cladding from the tower blocks, and we wondered what was going on. Then it became clear; they had gone as high as they could with a cherry-picker from the ground. I imagined scaffolding would not be the next step (think of how long it would take to build, and the hire charge) and I was right. Instead, in the last few days cradles have appeared, dangling down from the tops of the blocks, and men with harnesses. Abseiling is now an established way of dealing with high buildings, but it is certainly not something I choose to watch. I now notice that they are removing the fixings that held the cladding panels onto the walls, as well as the panels themselves, and the rockwool insulation, so the whole installation is going. It is of course good to reassure the residents, but this looks a bit wasteful. Perhaps they are going to replace it with a whole new system. Anyway, this winter the tower block residents will feel safe, if cold.


Different Hands

Now that the conservators are up close to the painted ceiling, one of them is beginning to think that she can see different hands in the work. The patterns on the panels were presumably stencilled, so there is little scope for variation there, but the busts of saints (and Old Testament figures as we must now say) show distinct variety. Now some of those may be copied from conventional images of the saints, but there seem to be varieties in style, which might suggest that they are not all from the hand of Daniel Bell himself. We have no idea what sort of a studio he operated, but he must have had plenty of assistants on hand to do the stencilling, if nothing else, and since there are seventy-two figures they would have been a lot of work for one person as well. Clearly the figures were completed back at the studio and then brought to St Mary Mags to be stuck on to the flat panels, which I would imagine were stencilled first (though our inspections will show whether that is true).

Meanwhile, at a lower level, there is a bit of a mystery with the Stations of the Cross. These are in roundels, high up on the north and west walls of the nave, carved by Thomas Earp, who was responsible for most of Street's sculptural requirements (and known as "Street's hands").. I have always maintained they were only decorative, and not actually for use, because they are only half a set (of the conventional number, which was well-established by 1865 since Fr Bennett had already used them at Frome) and they are so high up the wall that you really couldn't use them for devotional purposes, because you couldn't read the scenes from the ground. We have photographs from long ago that show a set of enormous painted stations hanging much lower on the walls, which demonstrate that the need was felt for a legible, full set quite early on. I have now had a brief look at the carved Stations, and I have to say that some of them are pretty hard to decipher even close to, being crowded with figures. The one that you could always make out from the ground, however, was the scene of Christ before Pilate, where the seated figure of Pilate is very distinctive. Now, though, having got up close, I have real doubts as to whether this particular sculpture is actually by Thomas Earp. I've been telling everyone how good Earp is (and his carvings at St Peter's, Bournemouth, demonstrate that) but this particular sculpture stands out from the others by differences in style: the figures are much more static, the faces more conventional, the drapery much plainer, and the whole composition is flat and empty (which is why it was easier to read from the floor). I find it hard to believe that this is really Earp's work. Perhaps our volunteer researchers will be able to pursue that question, and indeed how these great Victorian artist-craftsmen organised their studios.