George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
The original fabric--of which the choir with its aisle and two apsidal
chapels thrown out from the aisle, and the south transept and one and
a half bays of the north, are all now remaining--is of the earliest
pointed, with occasional round arches to windows, etc. The character
is very simple and mainly remarkable for the great beauty of the
profusion of sculptured capitals to all the shafts. The section of
the piers is singular and gives great lightness of effect; they are
in fact thin slices of wall, and not piers formed in the usual way,
and as the weight of them is not a crushing weight, I look upon them
as excessively scientific in their arrangement. The triforium is very
lofty as compared with the rest of the design, and consists of a very
simple arcade of pointed arches, supported only by long and slender
shafts set near together.
The groining is good, and in the chapels a small shaft rises from the
capitals for some feet and carries the wall rib: this gets over a
difficulty in mitring the mouldings. The Lady-chapel appears to have
been remodelled at a later day but upon the foundation of one coeval
with the choir. A very grand effect is produced by the great size of
the transepts--which have aisles on both sides--and by the placing of
a chapel in the re-entering angles between them and the choir-aisle.
In this way an internal effect of lightness and space, of very fine
character, is obtained.
One of the most remarkable features about this cathedral is, however,
the extent to which, in later days, the old design was persisted in:
_e.g._ the remarkable triforium is carried round the entire church,
varied a little in its details and quite different in its sculpture,
but still evidently a copy and from its great size giving an air of
great unity to the whole design. In the clerestory windows generally
there is a good deal of poor flamboyant tracery with a little glass
of the same date, but in the choir the original windows all happily
remain. These are, in the apse, rather wide lancets, and in the rest
of the clerestory simple triplets. In the aisle there were windows of
two lights with a simple quatrefoil above. Many of the windows have the
dog-tooth ornament round the external labels. The choir still retains
on the outside a very fine and original corbel table.
In a chapel south of the choir are extensive remains of some most
singular work for pavements--they are squares of stone slightly sunk
in regular patterns and then filled in with some very hard black or
red substance. The same work is carried up against the walls of this
chapel, and in other parts of the cathedral are several small fragments
of similar pavements. The stone is of a yellow colour and the system
seems to admit of being turned to most useful account.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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