Heritage fantasy land.
Mar 23, 2011
We have just finished a stint in the parish church of North Wiltshire's most up and coming tourist destination/film set at Lacock.
Cornerstone Magazine
Aug 14, 2011
Exposed flesh from the time of King Billy
It is nice to have had a recent high profile feature in the SPAB's magazine, "Cornerstone". Its about the repair of a precious remnant of mercantile Bristol that survives on the ground floor of the C17th church house of Bristol's oldest religious building, the Church of St James Priory. It sits, a blitz survivor, squeezed between the Romanesque finery of the west front with its oculus and blind arcading and the anodyne, brick clad modern bus terminal with its giant art clock that succeeds only in achieving a twice daily telling of time.
Church houses survive all over the country as they played an important economic role as breweries for church ales and other celebrations. Many evolved into pubs, and as they funded the construction of many medieval churches they often have older origins than their crenellated neighbour.
Inside, there is a particularly fine panelled room where we have been repairing the Jacobean-style, pomegranate laden strap-work ceiling . Tucked away in the corner of the room is a fireplace and overmantel consisting of Doric entablature beneath a central cartouche with helm and rocaille (a shell with foliate forms, origin of the word Rococo, literally shell-rock).
I had hardly noticed that the overmantle is balanced on either side by a Bath-stone caryatid. Conservation work to remove the nasty modern brown paint by the conservator Peter Martindale has revealed them to be a lush pair of rouged, cornucopia clutching and bare chested C17th over-painted ladies. Peters work has also exposed the lengths that past incumbents went to to protect their modesty
Prayer meetings were and still are held in the room, and she must have proved quite a distraction, as her exposed bosom was later decorated with a rather low-cut piece of underwear.
This was John Wesley's Parish church and I am sure he would have known this room well as it also served as the parish church of Wesley's Horsefair community to which in the early days of his time in Bristol he brought his members for Holy Communion. St James is where Charles Wesley's children were baptised and where five of his children are buried in the churchyard. I wonder, could he have had a hand in covering her up?
Later still, someone fitted her out with a rather robust defensive cuirass, wrangled from a piece of lead, which fits a treat. It certainly offers her a degree of protection from both the occasional lustful glance and radon gas, although it can also slipped off easily if someone fancied a quick peep while no one was around, but reassuringly, I don't think it had been removed for many decades.
