In setting out their plan, they remembered what had been done at Newark some fifty years before. There a western tower had been begun, standing free of the aisles on three sides; but, as the work advanced, the builders had determined to bring their aisles westward flush with the west wall of the tower, and had pierced arches, as an afterthought, in its north and south walls. The work at Newark was temporarily stopped, and, when it went on again, Grantham led the way with one splendid effort. The Grantham builders apparently began work with their north aisle. It was on a vast scale, and spaced with so little regard to the spacing of the columns of the nave that the north doorway, instead of opening against an interval between columns, has a column and part of an interval opposite it.[69] The earlier north aisle was totally enclosed by this new work, which not merely stretched three bays to the westward—the third of these bays, which roughly corresponds to the internal space occupied by the tower and its piers, being nearly as wide as the other two together—but also was extended a bay eastward, so that it encroached on the chancel wall, or, it may be, on the space hitherto occupied by the tower. From the walls of the aisle the builders probably passed to the lower courses of the tower piers, the arches from the tower into the new aisles, and the western doorway,[70] and then joined the tower piers to the west angles of the older nave by two arches on each side, with intermediate columns whose form was evidently suggested by that of the earlier columns east of them. If this hint was taken from the older work, the imitation did not extend to the rounded arches. The new arches were sharply pointed, and, to give uniformity to the connected work, new pointed arches were built up in place of the old rounded ones. This obviously was done by removing just as much of the upper wall of the nave as was necessary, and blocking the clerestory. No clerestory seems to have formed part of the new design. As part of this task, the chancel was connected by an arch with the eastern part of the new aisle, and the old west front and north aisle walls were removed. [Illustration: PLAN OF GRANTHAM CHURCH.]