Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Churnet Valley Railway

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Churnet Valley Railway, Kingsley & Froghall Station, Staffordshire
Churnet Valley Railway: Kingsley & Froghall Station, Staffordshire

On Friday March 7th 2025 the enterprising, ambitious Churnet Valley Railway operated the first passenger-carrying train to the site of its new Leek (Churnet Valley) station:  Our First Heritage Open Day – What A Huge Success! – Churnet Valley Railway.

(I wish the CHR had not hijacked the brand ‘Heritage Open Day’ which has been the brand of England’s annual celebration of the nation’s history and culture since 1994.)

Leek is a market town with a current population of twenty thousand, which until 1965 was an important rail crossroads created by the North Staffordshire Railway, the much-loved “Knotty”, linking the Staffordshire Moorlands with Stoke-on-Trent, Macclesfield and Uttoxeter, where main lines extended to London, Birmingham, Manchester and Derby.

The north-to-south route stretched from near Macclesfield to Uttoxeter on the line from Crewe to Derby, while the westerly route reached Leek from Stoke-on-Trent.  A branch line eastwards from Leek Brook to Waterhouses formed an end-on junction with the 2ft 6in-gauge Leek & Manifold Valley Light Railway, built to serve a dairy at Ecton though the terminus was further on at Hulme End.  It opened in 1904 and closed thirty years later, shortly after the creamery at Ecton closed.

Services declined in stages between 1956 and 1970, except for a freight connection between the Oakamoor Sand Sidings and Stoke.  Track was lifted but the trackbed remains on the ten-mile line westwards between Leek and Stoke and south from Oakamoor to Alton Towers and Denstone.  The routes north from Leek to Macclesfield and south of Denstone to Uttoxeter have been blocked by redevelopment, including road improvements and the vast JCB factory at Rocester.

The site of the original Leek station is now a Morrisons supermarket.

The Churnet Valley Railway punches well above its weight.  It grew out of earlier efforts to safeguard the railways around Leek from 1971 onwards, and from small beginnings focused on taking over the seven-mile route through the valley between Oakamoor and Leek Brook, which was accomplished when heritage train services began in 1996.  The further mile to the site of the new Leek station was added in 2024.

The stations are interesting in their own right and a testament to the energy behind their restoration.

Leek Brook is only accessible by rail at present.  It was the junction for the St Edward’s Hospital tramway, which ran three-quarters of a mile through the grounds of the Staffordshire County Mental Hospital, using 220-volt DC electric overhead.  Passengers were conveyed in a second-hand London horse tram, but the main purpose of the tramway was supplying the hospital with coal.  Passenger service didn’t last beyond the 1920s, but the coal traffic continued to the end of 1954.

Cheddleton station is the only original building remaining, and was famously saved in 1974 by a local businessman, Norman Hancock, parking his Jaguar on the level crossing to prevent its demolition.  The station was subsequently listed Grade II and became the original base of the grandly-titled Cheshire and Staffordshire Railway Society which ultimately became the Churnet Valley Railway.

Consall station was opened in 1902 to serve the nearby village and the workers of the adjacent forge and lime kilns.  The main building on the down platform is a reproduction, completed in 2002, after which the original 1902 shelter was reinstated on the restored up platform which abuts the Caldon Canal.

Kingsley & Froghall station is a convincing reproduction of the demolished original station.  After passenger services were restored in 2001, the main building on the down platform was completed two years later, followed by the shelter on the opposite side which, like Consall, overhangs the canal.

Timetabled services run on Wednesdays and at weekends from March to October, with additional operations for special events on bank holidays and other occasions:  Events Calendar – Churnet Valley Railway.

The on-train catering offers an impressive range of alternatives, from breakfast to curry night, and there is a tea-room at Kingsley & Froghall.  Prices range from £15 for pie-and-mash to £80 for a murder-mystery experience:  Steam Train Dining Experiences – Churnet Valley Railway.

This is a heritage railway that’s going places.

Caldon Canal

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Caldon Canal: Consall Forge, Staffordshire
Caldon Canal: Consall Forge, Staffordshire

Whether you walk, cycle or cruise, the eighteen-mile Caldon Canal is an ideal connector between interesting places between Etruria, on the northern edge of Stoke-on-Trent, where Josiah Wedgwood established his famous pottery, and the depths of the little-known Churnet Valley, hidden from the noisy pleasures of the Alton Towers theme park.

The canal is practically a branch of the Trent & Mersey Canal, which financed its construction, climbing from Etruria to a summit level at Stockton Brook and then following the River Churnet to its terminus at Froghall within reach of the quarries at Cauldon.

It opened in 1778 and was quickly connected to numerous quarry tramroads, adding to the traffic on the main line of the Trent & Mersey, which became so heavily-used that water-supply problems caused intolerable hold-ups.

The canal company needed the support of landowners and townspeople around the market town of Leek in order to build an additional reservoir at Rudyard, so the three-mile-long Leek branch (1800-01) acted as a feeder for traffic as well as water.

A further waterway, the Uttoxeter Canal (opened in 1811), continued from Froghall through Oakamoor and past Alton Towers to Rocester and Uttoxeter.  The canal had a dedicated wharf to bring building materials for the Earl of Shrewsbury’s vast house and landscape garden.  A proposed further extension from Uttoxeter to Ashbourne remained unbuilt.

The Trent & Mersey Canal was sold, along with the Caldon Branch, to the North Staffordshire Railway in 1845, and the railway company saw potential in using waterways as feeders to their operations. 

The NSR closed the Uttoxeter Canal in 1849 in order to use the route for the track of the Churnet Valley Railway, and though canal traffic declined towards the end of the nineteenth century between Froghall, Leek and the railway, the waterway never actually closed.

However, it became practically unnavigable by the 1950s, and it was rescued by the Inland Waterways Association’s collaboration with Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire County Council.  The main line to Froghall was reopened in 1974, followed by all but the last half-mile of the Leek Branch.

A particularly interesting walkable section of the Caldon Canal starting from Cheddleton Station southwards includes a length where the canal runs into the River Churnet, simply because there is insufficient room in the narrow valley to accommodate both waterways.

The canal and river separate at Consall, where the remains of the eighteenth-century limekilns are a reminder that this was an industrial area dependent on water for transportation. 

The canalside Black Lion pub [Black Lion, Consall Forge – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale] is a welcome opportunity to rest and, if the timing’s right, it’s possible to return to Cheddleton from the picturesque station on the Churnet Valley Railway.

Detailed information about the places of interest along the canal is at The Ultimate Guide to the Caldon Canal – Leek branch – Black Prince.

Bradford Live

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Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live (2025)
Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live: restaurant decorative detail (2025)

I was privileged recently to join a Cinema Theatre Association visit to Bradford Live, the newly-restored New Victoria Cinema (1930), which survived brutal alterations, persistent neglect and threats of demolition until it was rescued and impressively restored as a “world-class” concert venue.

It was, and is, a magnificent building.  It opened on September 22nd 1930 with a spectacular ceremony that included the film Rookery Nook and much else.  Its size ensured its physical and commercial survival through vicissitudes that have blown away many of its contemporaries.

It was designed by a Bradford architect, William Illingworth (1875-1955), and at its opening it was claimed to be the third largest cinema in England and the largest outside London. 

Two of its London rivals of greater size, the Davis Theatre, Croydon (opened December 18th 1928;  3,925 seats) and the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle (opened December 22nd 1930; 3,500 seats) have both gone. 

Comparisons, as the schoolboy said, are odorous.  There were other 1930s cinemas with capacity for around four thousand patrons, some of which survive such as the Granada Cinema, Tooting (opened September 7th 1931;  slightly less than 4,000 seats; currently a bingo club) and the Gaumont State Theatre, Kilburn (opened December 20th 1937;  4,004 seats;  now a church).

William Illingworth provided Bradford with a vast 3,318-seat auditorium with a Wurlitzer organ, facing a stage 70ft wide × 45ft deep, alongside a ballroom, a 200-cover restaurant and a tea-room café.  The auditorium decoration was dignified Italian Renaissance, while the comfortable, stylish front-of-house spaces included Art Deco features and warm, adventurous colour schemes.

Built for Provincial & Cinematograph Theatres, it was operated successively by the Gaumont and Odeon chains and prospered until the 1960s.  In particular, its stage and audience capacity meant that every significant rock and pop performer, excepting only Elvis Presley, appeared in Bradford, from Bill Haley and the Comets and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Film and live performances in the auditorium ceased in 1968 – Rio Conchos and Tom Jones were the last shows.

The conversion to twin screens and bingo in 1968 was ferocious.  The structure was sufficiently robust and there was so much space that the two cinemas were built on the circle and gallery, and the stalls became a huge bingo club.  Most of Illingworth’s plaster decoration was ripped out, though a segment of the balcony plasterwork remained hidden in a void for decades.  The ballroom – redundant for twenty years – became a third screen in 1988.  Schemes to subdivide the building further in 1991 and 1994 came to nothing.

In July 2000 Odeon opened a multiplex at Thornbury, where 3,300 people (almost the original capacity of the New Victoria) could choose from sixteen different movies at any particular time of day.  The game was up for the Odeon cinemas in Bradford and Leeds.

As the Odeon Bradford gradually deteriorated, local people got together to oppose its destruction.  An exceptional campaigner, Norman Littlewood, with his wife Julie, founded the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group (BORG) in 2003.  Its most spectacular demonstration was the occasion in 2007 when a thousand people joined hands and hugged the Odeon.

Schemes to demolish and redevelop came and went until, partly through the efforts of urban explorers, it became apparent that significant amounts of original decorative features survived behind the 1968 alterations.

There’s an extensive exploration of the building showing its condition in 2014 at BRADFORD ODEON STRIPPING OUT ~ AUTUMN 2014, which is narrated by Mark Nicholson, author of the compendious history of the place, The People’s Palace:  the story of Bradford’s New Vic (Bradford Live 2022).

The building passed through the hands of a succession of entities until Bradford Live bought it from the city council for £1, and spent rather more than that – £50.5 million – on its transformation.

It’s a palimpsest – a document that’s been repeatedly erased and rewritten.  Under the aegis of the Aedas Arts Team, William Illingworth’s surviving work has been restored and replicated, particularly in the ballroom and restaurant.  Elsewhere the bare structure of two million bricks and one hundred tons of steel indicates the magnificence of the architect’s engineering:  https://cdn.rt.emap.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/12/28135511/20181203_aat_designandaccessstatementpart1.pdf.

It will be performance, particularly music, that makes this place pay.  The days when three thousand people will queue up to see the same movie at the same time are gone.

The crowded streets that hemmed in the New Victoria in 1930 have been opened out to create Centenary Square, so that Bradford Live sits alongside the Alhambra Theatre and the National Science & Media Museum, within a few minutes’ walk of St George’s Hall and on the doorstep of the University of Bradford campus.

Bradford is the City of Culture in 2025, and now that Trafalgar Entertainment has taken on the role of operator it’s clear that it will contribute much to the culture of the city for years to come:  Show will go on as operator revealed for Bradford Live venue | TheBusinessDesk.com.

Bradford Live does not appear on Bradford’s list of listed buildings.

Exploring Turin:  Superga

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Sassi-Superga Tramway. Turin, Italy
Basilica of Superga, Turin, Italy

The Sassi-Superga Tramway is a rack railway that climbs two thousand feet to a magnificent view of Turin and the Po valley.  Though it operates as a railway it looks like and is called a tramway, to the extent that it has a Turin route-number, 79.

It was built in 1884, powered by cables, and after an accident where the emergency stop fortunately worked perfectly it was rebuilt as a conventional rack railway powered by third-rail electricity in 1935. 

It uses the unusual Italian gauge of 4ft 8⅞in (1,445mm).  This weirdness arises from 1879 legislation which defined railway-track gauges by measuring them from the centre rather than the inside of the rail.  Italian main-line railways have quietly adapted to the worldwide standard gauge of 4ft 8½in (1,435mm), and apart from a solitary funicular, the only other examples of Italian gauge in the world are the tramways of Milan, Naples, Rome and Turin – and the Madrid metro.  There is also an Italian narrow gauge of 3ft 1¹⁄₁₆in (950mm).

The depot yard has no rack track, and a steeple-cab electric locomotive shunts the rack-equipped rolling stock using overhead caternary to the beginning of the rack at the entrance.  Passenger trains are operated, for obvious safety reasons, with the power car propelling one or two trailers, so that in an emergency the brake-power is where it should be.  The loco conveys the cable trams to the Turin street tracks when they need workshop attention.

At the Sassi station there’s a beautifully preserved horse streetcar (no: 197, dating from 1890) in a tiny museum, and outside on a spare platform an early streetcar (no: 209 of 1911).

The trip takes eighteen minutes, mainly through a verdant nature reserve with occasional views of opulent houses with splendid but hilly gardens.  By the time the tram is beyond the midway passing loop you can look straight out of the opposite window at the sky with no sign of the horizon below.

The upper terminus is modern and comfortable:  its café makes the most of the view and it’s pleasant to sit there until the next tram leaves in an hour.

There is a further treat, though, a short, stiff climb above the station.  The Basilica of Superga is a Baroque church, built 1717-31 by Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (1666-1732), later King of Savoy and latterly Sardinia, in fulfilment of a vow he made in the turmoil of the Siege of Turin in 1706.  The Chapel of the Vow, to the left of the sanctuary, is kept as a place of silent contemplation and, filled with respectful Catholics, has a distinctive atmosphere of veneration, like the side chapel of the Holy Shroud in the Duomo.

The Basilica is the site of Italy’s great football tragedy, where the entire Grande Torino football team were killed when their plane, returning from a friendly match in Lisbon, crashed into the retaining wall at the back of the church, on May 4th 1949.

Eighteen players died, together with three members of the coaching team, three club officials, three journalists and the flight crew of four – thirty-one in all.  There were no survivors.

The effect on the world of Italian football and the city of Turin was beyond intense.  Wikipedia describes the aftermath of the tragedy:

At the request of rival teams, Torino were proclaimed winners of the 1948–49 Serie A season on 6 May 1949, and the opponents, as well as Torino, fielded their youth teams in the four remaining games.  On the day of the funeral, half a million people took to the streets of Turin to give a final farewell to the players.  The following season, the other top Italian teams were asked to donate a player to Torino.  The shock of the crash was such that the following year, the Italy national team chose to travel to the 1950 FIFA World Cup in Brazil by ship: Superga air disaster – Wikipedia.

As in subsequent football tragedies, such as Munich (1958), Ibrox (1971), Bradford (1985) and Hillsborough (1989), the emotional toll is remembered by millions every year.

The Mouse Man

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Robert Thompson workshop, Kilburn, North Yorkshire

Robert Thompson (1876-1955) was the son of a North Yorkshire joiner, also called Robert Thompson, whose forward-thinking mind inclined him to send his son to serve an engineering apprenticeship in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire.  At the end of five years young Robert nevertheless joined his father’s business as a carpenter, yet his heart was in studying and practising the craft skills he’d discovered in the medieval woodwork of Ripon Cathedral during his travels between his home village of Kilburn and the West Riding.

Robert aspired to the ideals of craft production and disliked the mechanical rigour of industrial design.  Alongside the business of serving his clients’ practical requirements in an agricultural community he quietly built up the means to pursue his craft, laying down oak timber to be seasoned in the old way in the fresh air for up to five years.

One of the most distinctive features of his work is the use of the adze, rather than a modern plane, to create a distinctive dappled effect on timber surfaces.

A commission from Father Paul Nevill of Ampleforth College for an oak crucifix for the college cemetery (1919) established his reputation for ambitious woodwork of fine quality.  From the initial commissions that followed he quickly adopted his trademark of carving a tiny mouse in some unobtrusive part of each piece, representing his motto of “industry in quiet places”.

There are Robert Thompson mice all over North Yorkshire and much farther afield, on furniture and fittings in churches, pubs, commercial buildings, houses, schools and colleges.

Roy Hattersley, writing an obituary for another outstanding craftsman, David Mellor (1930-2009), quoted William Morris’s precept “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Robert Thompson lived his life on the basis of that principle, and left a business that continues to thrive in the hands of four of his great-grandsons.

If you’re in the region of the Hambleton Hills, find your way to Kilburn and take a look at Robert Thompson’s workshop, still in production:  Home (robertthompsons.co.uk).

And if you think to look at the price-list, sit down first:  Ecommerce Price List (robertthompsons.co.uk).

You get what you pay for.

Memorial to a much-loved bassist

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Andy Rourke mural, The Wheatsheaf, Oak Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester

Andy Rouke (1964-2023), the highly-regarded bass-player of the 1980s Manchester band The Smiths, died of pancreatic cancer, and the loss has had a huge impact on his fans and admirers.

Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, picked up his wife Bee’s suggestion of a wall mural as a way of commemorating Andy and his exceptional musical legacy.  He knew the exact image to capture his friend when they were both playing in the band, an image taken at the Caird Hall, Dundee by the photographer Nalinee Darmrong who had travelled with them on tour in 1985-86.  Other images from that time are at You’ve Got to See This Local Photographer’s Book About Her Teenage Years Touring With the Smiths – Washingtonian.

Mike Joyce recruited the Manchester muralist Akse P19 to render Nalinee Darmrong’s image in his precisely detailed manner.  His work has been enriching the local streetscape since 1992:  Akse P19 | Greater Mancunians. 

Andy Rourke frequented the Wheatsheaf pub on Oak Street in the Northern Quarter, and the current landlords, Robert Ashton and Lisa Booth, immediately offered the gable wall overlooking their car park with the approval of the building’s owner, Admiral Taverns.  Andy’s family gave their blessing to the project.

Against a black background, the 30 feet × 20 feet monochrome image is startling.  Nalinee Darmrong, who travelled from Washington DC to see the finished mural, characterised it as “hard to see, but…also beautiful to see”, “bittersweet but amazing”:  ‘Incredible’ mural of The Smiths legend Andy Rourke unveiled on side of Manchester pub – Manchester Evening News.

Mike Rourke’s crowdfunding campaign in conjunction with Pancreatic Cancer Action Network raised nearly £29,000:  Andy Rourke of The Smiths mural – a Creative & Arts crowdfunding project in Manchester by Mike Joyce. 

More information about this form of cancer can be found at Pancreatic Cancer UK – We bring more than hope and donations can be made to Donate to Pancreatic Cancer UK – Pancreatic Cancer UK.

Utopian community

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Dartington, Devon: Henry Moore ‘Memorial Figure’, Dartington Church and Hall

Dartington Hall, north of Totnes in Devon, celebrates its centenary as a community in 2025.  It’s a magical place, where people of talent have created, educated and influenced life and culture in Britain and beyond in all manner of fascinating ways.

It grew from the vision of Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) and his wife Dorothy (1887-1968), who purchased the decrepit estate, with its grand house dating back to 1338, to found a charity dedicated to encouraging all forms of art, sustainable agriculture, social science and peace.

Dorothy Elmhirst belonged to the Whitney family, which had settled in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and became fabulously wealthy after Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, transforming the economy of the slave-based cotton industry in the Southern states.  She inherited $15 million dollars at the age of seventeen.  She and her husband wanted for nothing, and sincerely wanted to make the world a better place.

Leonard was descended from a long line of Yorkshire gentry.  After service in the First World War and subsequent study in the USA, he met the Bengali poet, artist, social reformer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and followed him to India as his secretary.  Together they founded an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal.

When Leonard and Dorothy married in 1925, Tagore, who had travelled extensively in England, encouraged them to invest in the ideas of the Chinese-based Rural Reconstruction Movement and may have suggested Dartington Manor as a suitable site.

The Elmhirsts lost no time in improving the estate, employing the architect William Weir (1865-1950) to restore and adapt the existing buildings, including the Great Hall which had stood roofless for over a century.  Dorothy Elmhirst worked with the garden designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane to transform the gardens.

The weaver Elizabeth Peacock created the wall-hangings for the Great Hall between 1930 and 1938.  The architect Walter Gropius adapted the interior of the Barn Theatre in 1935, in preparation for Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton, to start the Dartington Theatre School the following year.  The Henry Moore sculpture ‘Memorial Figure’ was installed in the grounds in 1947.

A cluster of practical and educational projects grew up and were placed under an umbrella organisation, the Dartington Hall Trust, in 1935.  All of them have adapted over the years, and some have closed down or moved away – the progressive Dartington Hall School (1926), the Dartington Hall Film Unit (1945), the Dartington International Summer School and music festival (1953), the Dartington College of Arts (1961), Dartington Glass (1967;  divested and renamed Dartington Crystal 1986) and the ecology-focused Schumacher College (1990).

The roll-call of prominent artists and innovators associated with Dartington is remarkable, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s initial visit in 1926.  Paul Robeson rehearsed his 1930 production of Othello at Dartington.  The potter Bernard Leach was involved in Dartington from its earliest days and taught there from 1932.  The influential dancer and teacher Rudolf von Laban arrived from Nazi Germany in 1938 and contributed to Dartington programmes until 1951.

The composer Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, taught at summer schools between 1942 and 1951.  Benjamin Britten conducted his cantata St Nicolas in the Great Hall in 1949, the year after it was completed, and Igor Stravinsky visited the 1957 Summer School.

One of the most influential figures associated with Dartington was the sociologist and writer Michael Young, latterly Baron Young of Dartington, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old pupil at the School in 1929, was a Trustee for fifty years, 1942-1992, and wrote the history of the Trust, entitled The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an utopian community (1982).

The Dartington estate is a delightful place to visit, whether for a few hours or a few days, either to attend an event or simply to be there:  Visit Dartington Trust: events, courses, walks, food and drink & more.

Leeds’ secret garden

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Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds
Monk Bridge Viaduct, Leeds

After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.

It’s remarkably difficult to find:  there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.

If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction.  But we’re from Sheffield.  How are we supposed to know?

The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.

From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds Central Station, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).

In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).

The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.

Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.

On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting. 

If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.

Exploring Turin:  Duomo

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Turin Cathedral, Italy: Chapel of the Holy Shroud

The Cathedral of St John the Baptist (Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista, Duomo di Torino) is worth visiting for the sake of an object that’s hardly ever seen – the Holy Shroud (Sacra Sindone).

The church interior is not particularly ornate.  The nave is plain, with Doric piers supporting round arches, the bulk of it built very quickly between 1491 and 1498 alongside a slightly older brick bell tower.  There is, however, a sequence of spectacularly Baroque side chapels, a huge organ case aloft in a transept, and a shrine to the twentieth-century Catholic local hero Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925), due to be canonised in the centenary of his death from polio.

The domed Chapel of the Holy Shroud (1668-94) fills the space between the east end of the Cathedral and the adjacent Royal Palace. 

The story of the revered relic it was built to contain is unrecorded before 1354, when it was exhibited in the French town of Lirey about a hundred miles east of Paris.

It came into the possession of the Royal House of Savoy in 1453,  and was kept in the royal chapel at the Savoyard capital, Chambéry.  There it sustained fire-damage in 1532, and it was transferred to the new capital of Savoy, Turin, in 1578.

Charles Emmanuel II, Duke of Savoy (1634-1675) commissioned priest, engineer and mathematician Camillo Guarino Guarini (1624-1683), to complete the elaborate chapel that had been planned by his predecessor, Charles Emmanuel I “the Great”, Duke of Savoy (1562-1630). 

The floor of the Shroud Chapel is raised so that the interior Is visible from the nave, and both public pilgrims and royal visitors could gain access to the chapel on separate occasions.  Crowned by Guarini’s dome, a masterpiece of engineering, the Chapel was consecrated by the architect in 1680, but was only completed after his death.  It was finally ready to receive the Shroud in 1694.

At the time of the 1898 exposition of the Shroud it was photographed for the first time by an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia (1855-1941), who was astonished that the negative image provided detail invisible to the naked eye.

Following a fire in 1997, the Shroud is currently stored in a temperature- and humidity-controlled case in a side-chapel. 

Since 1998, the 500th anniversary of the Cathedral’s consecration, the Shroud has been shown much more frequently than before, in 2000, 2010, 2015 and (by live stream because of Covid) at Easter 2020.

At all other times visitors are invited to sit in front of a digital image of Christ’s face, an opportunity that is treated with the greatest respect.  Even the bambini fall quiet.

I respect the views of scientists who say the Shroud’s herringbone weave postdates the time of Christ, that the images are painted with identifiable colour agents such as iron oxide, and so on, but I also sense that we can’t possibly know the significance of this piece of fabric. 

There’s an ethereal quality about the image that defies logic, and hosts of visitors to Turin gaze with awe at what may be the face of their Redeemer.

Newburgh Priory

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Newburgh Priory, North Yorkshire: north front

Newburgh Priory, as the name suggests, was founded as a monastery of Augustinian canons who came to the site from elsewhere around 1150.

At the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was purchased by Henry VIII’s chaplain, Anthony Bellasis, in 1539.  It has remained the property of Bellasis’ descendants to the present day – taking a baronetcy in 1611, and the successive titles Baron, Viscount and Earl Fauconberg.

Thomas, 1st Earl Fauconberg (c1627-1700) married Oliver Cromwell’s daughter, Mary (1636 or 1637-1713) whereby hangs a tale.

Lord Fauconberg had an unerring instinct which side to back in the convoluted politics of the day.  He was a Roundhead in the English Civil War, but welcomed King Charles II at his Restoration in 1660 and when Charles’ brother James II was obliged to relinquish the Crown in 1688, the then Viscount Fauconberg supported the invitation to William of Orange to assume the Throne, for which he was made Earl Fauconberg.

In the aftermath of Charles II’s Restoration the corpses of three regicides, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Henry Ireton (1611-1651) and John Bradshaw (1602-1659) were exhumed and taken to Tyburn for post-mortem execution.  The details of this unpleasant event are at Cromwell’s Body | olivercromwell.org.  The three corpses were beheaded and the heads stuck on spikes above the parapet of Westminster Hall.

Cromwell’s head was said to have blown down from the roof in a gale sometime towards the end of the seventeenth century and was picked up and hidden by a sentry.  It passed through several “owners”, until it eventually reached the Protector’s alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where it was buried in an unmarked spot in the grounds in 1960 so that it would remain undisturbed.

There are bizarre stories of the identities and subsequent fates of the regicides’ headless corpses, contradicting the official version that they were buried in a pit below the gallows at Tyburn.

Alternative accounts of the location of Cromwell’s corpse began circulating in the 1720s, just as the events of 1660 passed out of the memory of the living:  it was said either to have been sunk in a lead coffin in the River Thames or buried at the battlefield of Naseby.

Alternative versions place its location in St Nicholas’ Church, Chiswick, where Mary, Lady Fauconberg and her sister Frances are buried, or in St Andrew’s Church, Northborough, where Oliver Cromwell’s widow, Elizabeth Claypole, is said to lie.

However, visitors to Newburgh Priory are shown a stone vault in the attic, where family tradition says the Protector’s headless corpse rests. 

Lady Fauconberg was said to have used her husband’s political influence to ensure that her father’s corpse was protected from further abuse.  It was quietly spirited away to Yorkshire and has remained undisturbed in the attic of Newburgh Priory to this day.

The Newburgh Priory family, now called Wombwell, have to their credit declined every request to open the vault and examine its contents.  It attracted the curiosity of King Edward VII as Prince of Wales when he stayed at Newburgh. He bribed the estate carpenter to break into the vault one night but was caught and like everyone else had to take “no” for an answer.