Lincolnshire Towers: St. Wulfram’s, Grantham

The steeple of St. Wulfram’s church first caught my eye, as it must many people’s, at about 105 miles per hour, the speed at which non-stop express trains hammer through the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, shooting out onto the high embankment across the town, leaning into the curve — and there, soaring above the chimneys and rooftops flashing jaggedly by in the foreground, there is Wulfram’s tower, with the same serenity with which it has weathered the seven centuries of its age; and the spirit soars with it.  The vision hangs and swivels, lingering for perhaps fifteen seconds, and is gone, and the train is pressing on towards Lincolnshire’s borders and London, or Yorkshire, or Scotland.

There are those who call the East Coast Main Line dull and boring, mainly because, south of County Durham at least, it runs relatively straightforwardly through England’s flatter counties.  But there are more than mountains to be seen from the window of a train.  For this line, as much as any other, I am sure, is proof of the poetry conjured up by that conspiracy if churches and railways.  Four medieval cathedrals — Durham, York, Peterborough and Lincoln — can be spotted to varying degrees at various points along its length, and plenty of other fine churches greet the eye as well, from the fifteenth-century spire of St. Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent to Doncaster Minster’s Victorian Gothic, or handsome St. Peter’s at Offord D’Arcy.  But of all these, save perhaps only Durham, the sight of St. Wulfram’s at Grantham is surely the most thrilling.  Here the line speed (105mph beats ninety at Durham!), the eye-level view from the embankment, the church’s proximity to the railway, and, above all, the sheer beauty of the steeple, all conspire to lend those few seconds of the journey a meaningful, harmonious, unforgettable form, that of a theatrical scene, revolving like a snow-globe.  In other words, they turn Grantham into a poem.

St. Wulfram’s spire from a passing London train, 6th June 2017

Other travellers have noticed this before me.  For the writer Peter Hitchens, who ‘normally make[s] a point’ of looking out of the window whenever he comes this way, this is ‘one of the loveliest steeples in all England’.  And, according to the BBC programme Songs of Praise, which came to Grantham in 1980, ‘a certain Fr. Stanton’ would apparently stand up in the middle of the compartment to raise his hat in honour of the spire and its builders, and request his fellow passengers to do the same.  For myself, I resolved one day to visit Grantham properly, and to savour the poem more slowly, more closely, and from within.

That resolution was to be fulfilled one brisk autumn day in 2018. The train had pelted headlong from London, so it was barely mid-morning when my sister and I alighted half-way up England, under shredded bands of cloud scudding intermittently across the face of a kindly sun.  Off we set, through a pleasing warren of terraced houses immediately east of the station, down to where the Great North Road swoops in.  Even now it is not difficult to imagine the stage-coach days, with the inswooping mail trailing its column of dust, all wheels and thumping hooves and harnesses ajangle.  Not far along the road we found the majestic Victorian Guildhall, a building worthy of a major town on the Great North Road, with a statue of Isaac Newton outside, and a bustling local writers’ fair inside.  I was warming to Grantham already, sensing a certain self-respect that did not need to give itself airs (or maybe a down-to-earth-ness, appropriately enough for Newton’s home patch).  But there was no time to linger, for there was business to attend to.  Our plan was not to head straight for the church, but to hare up Hall’s Hill, the rise bounding the town to the east, in order to admire the great steeple from afar.  Hindered only by a bush full of angry wasps, which we doubled back to avoid, we climbed up high enough to be able to look back down on the town, and watch the sunlight and shadow cascading over it, and the fast trains hurtling through in the middle distance.

The view westwards from Hall’s Hill, 3rd November, 2018.

There in the autumn noon stood the tower that has been the glory of this broad, shallow valley of the young Witham since about the year 1320.  We were looking at a sight instantly recognisable, by this one essential feature, to twenty generations before us.  Briefly this was England’s highest steeple, until within ten years Salisbury Cathedral’s spire overtook it.  The two projects were not in fact unconnected, as Julian Flannery explains in his peerless Fifty English Steeples (Thames & Hudson, 2016), because Grantham actually belonged to Salisbury diocese: clearly one spire was not enough!  In any case, according to Flannery’s comprehensive theodolite surveys, St. Wulfram’s remains England’s fifth highest surviving medieval steeple after Salisbury and Norwich Cathedrals, the fellow Lincolnshire steeple of St. James’ in Louth, and St. Michael’s in Coventry (that is, the ‘old’ Coventry Cathedral).  It is worth mentioning in passing that three of the four highest medieval steeples of English parish churches are to be found in Lincolnshire: Louth amid the dreaming Wolds (287 feet), Grantham in south-western Kesteven (274 feet), and fen-defying Boston (266 feet).  This is to say nothing of Lincoln cathedral, once the tallest building in the world by virtue of its 520-foot central spire.  (Even after this spire collapsed in 1549, and the two others at the west end were taken down in the eighteenth century, Flannery believes that what remains of the central tower ‘may just exceed’ St. Botolph’s at Boston.)

The spire seen from Park Road.

But I am day-dreaming.  St. Wulfram can be put off no longer; it is time to go down the hill, threading through the suburban houses and the park — all almost conspicuously unpretentious, as if the town thinks the tower is showing off enough! —  to see the great church at closer quarters.

The west front.

So this is the steeple before which Ruskin swooned.  Here, as well as anywhere, it is possible to see the glory of the Gothic: the sheer verticality of everything, every little detail doing its bit to add to the upthrust of the whole.  The whole structure is straining towards Heaven, and the wide traceried windows let in Heaven’s light.  Flannery pointed out the one major mistake made by the builders in the staircase at the south-west corner, which was built too far out at the bottom, and which unfortunately, by becoming more pronounced as the tower tapers with height, throws the whole slightly off its symmetry.  Yet this lesson was learned here once and for all; the error was not repeated in any of the later great English towers.

Looking west from the chancel.  The tower stands right over the west door.

Considering the steeple’s emphasis on verticality, there is an interesting contrast waiting inside the church: the enormous and spacious width of its interior.  The two side-aisles are each almost as broad as the nave: John Betjeman even declares that the ‘power of the grand interior is horizontal rather than vertical’ (Best British Churches, Collins, 2011 edition, p. 400).  The church impresses us first by its height, then by its breadth.  In the north wall an alcove is visible where St. Wulfram’s relics are likely to have been displayed.  I wonder what grand processions there have been through this church over the years.  One spectacle that has been recorded for posterity is the visit of the BBC programme ‘Songs of Praise’ in 1980, which, for all sorts of reasons, in texture, language and content, seems caught at a curious, fascinating position, between the old Britain and the new.

We were, I think, about the only visitors at that point on the Saturday afternoon, but there were quite a few townsfolk pottering around.  Chairs and parts of a dismantled stage were being cleared away and loaded into a van after a secular awards ceremony the previous night, and a youngster no more than ten years old was being given a lesson on the mightly organ.  (I hope he will one day support a mighty surge of singing, as in Songs of Praise above!)  I bought a tea-towel showing the great spire (it has to be a particularly large tea-towel to fit the tower in) and we took our leave.

From the south-west.

This being a non-party-political blog, no party-political allegiance should be read into the detour we then made to see the building where, on October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was born.  This red-brick corner shop is, I think, revealing about her character, even though it is no longer Roberts the greengrocer but a chiropractic clinic.  This must have been, as has often been pointed out, and which seems in common with Grantham in general, an unpretentious but decent place to grow up; plain and unvarnished but dignified and unbowed (and is even raised slightly above the level of the road).  The Methodist church where the Roberts family worshipped is only a few doors down.

Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace, North Parade, Grantham.

It seems arguable that this building goes some way to explain both Margaret Thatcher’s sympathy as a politician for those who worked hard to earn their living, which aided her electoral success, and her apparent lack of sympathy with those who were not capable of doing so, which is generally acknowledged to have precipitated the end of her premiership.  I was also struck by the shop’s position actually right on the old Great North Road, and not far at all from the railway either; she must, as she was growing up, have felt London and the wide world beckoning to her the moment she stepped outside the front door.

Almost directly opposite Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace is one of the most curious Catholic churches I have ever seen.  From outside, St. Mary the Immaculate is a solemn, sober early nineteenth-century neo-classical edifice.  Inside, however, it is completely different: the church seems to have been altogether transformed in the 1960s, so that the altar now faces north, not east, along what must once have been the length of the church, rather than its breadth.  I don’t think I have ever seen a church with an interior differing so dramatically from the exterior.  This surprise certainly competes with the contrast between horizontal and vertical in St. Wulfram’s!

Inside the church of St. Mary the Immaculate, looking north

Daylight began to fade as we drank hot chocolate in Cafe Leo along Westgate, and so the time came to take our leave of this reserved, unshowy town with its ardent steeple, and of the unsung, wide-skied county in which it is set.  But not for long, for another tower further east, that of St. Botolph in Boston, was soon to beckon me back to Lincolnshire.

Postscript: Writing this at Whitsuntide, I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.  Poetically at least, this week is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the journey it records.  It was down this line that Larkin’s train came that ‘sunlit Saturday’.  He would have passed through Grantham, and one of those weddings may well have been solemnised in St. Wulfram’s church.  Truly England is a poem.

Lincolnshire Towers

St. Wulfram’s church, Grantham, 3rd November, 2018.

Of all our counties I suspect few more strongly than Lincolnshire of keeping hidden, somewhere, the last remaining corner of Deep England.  For a start, there is so much of it in which to hide: after North Yorkshire it is the second-largest of the ceremonial counties, while the density of its population is the seventh lowest overall (ranking forty-second of forty-eight).  All that undisturbed, unmotorwayed acreage, almost as wide as mid-Wales, largely spared by industry and development, and unblemished by any major conurbation, in which Deep England might yet linger.  The river Trent, the Humber estuary, the Fens and the Wash, once its arteries of commerce, have come to serve as buffers against the cutting edges of modernity; and even its western, inlandmost parts are only incidentally served by the Great North Road and the East Coast Main Line (which latter never comes within thirty miles of that coast while Lincolnshire has anything to do with it).  It is true that the county has a grittier side — Scunthorpe steelworks, the port of Grimsby with its face set like flint against the North Sea, or the austerely dead-flat southern Fens — but its heart, the landscape of the Wolds or south Kesteven, has an otherworldly softness, even a tameness, about it.  That homeliness is matched by the place-names, among which even those of Danish derivation retain only a slight angularity: Willoughby… Hagworthingham… Scamblesby… Then there are all the old railway stations whose names appear in Flanders and Swann’s song ‘The Slow Train’, hinting at the heavy blow struck here by the Beeching Axe: Mumby Road, Dogdyke, Tumby Woodhouse.  Even the name of the county, with its buttery consonants, has a welcoming warmth to it.  And consider Bag Enderby in the light of Bag End, the name of Bilbo Baggins’ home in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  If in these parts the mythical Shire can shimmer just beneath the surface, then why not very Deep England itself?

It is worth noting, too, that many Yellow-Bellies themselves — as Lincolnshire people are called — can fairly be said to be in sympathy with the ideals of Deep England. One of the most famous, indeed the son of a rector of Bag Enderby, and born nearby at Somersby, was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose verses tell of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and vanished Lyonesse, and of many things loved and lost.  Or there is the late Roger Scruton, arguably the most articulate defender of Deep England in the past forty years, who began life in the tiny hamlet of Buslingthorpe near Market Rasen.  I concede, however, that Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe) and Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) are harder to square with this list…

In any case, Lincolnshire has form where the preservation of Deep England is concerned.  The March of Progress always seems to be missing Lincs: is it too much to hope to find something that it has left alone altogether?  Not necessarily, is Lincolnshire’s murmured answer.  I think of Ruddock’s, the old-fashioned stationers and bookshop in Lincoln’s High Street, to which I paid tribute here at the time of its sad demise in 2017.  Or the quirky Bubble Car Museum near Boston.  And Lincolnshire sausages of course, the glorious centrepiece of any Full Deep English Breakfast.  Then there is another, less tangible but momentous example: whereas, in more urbanised parts of the country, who knows how many traditional folk-songs had been forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, in Lincolnshire some were still remembered.  Here the last folk-singers lived just late enough to coincide with the earliest recording equipment and the Edwardian folk-song revival which saved so many tunes from extinction.  It was in the north of the county that the composer Percy Grainger discovered, and duly recorded and transcribed, such beautiful melodies as ‘Brigg Fair’ or ‘Rufford Park Poachers’.  That we can hear the voice of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, a man born in 1832, singing the songs of his youth, is cause to be thankful not only for Grainger and the singers who sang for him, but for the county which had preserved that folk-memory for so long.  Those songs are not only artefacts of the past, but to many ears some of its profoundest and most vivid evocations: this is borne out by the misty and chromatic arrangements that many composers made of them, Grainger’s own ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ being an example.*  Things linger in Lincolnshire: the old is slow to fade, and the new takes time to set in.  As I was once told by the guide on a rooftop tour of Lincoln Cathedral: "When the cranes go up in Lincoln, you know there’s a recession on the way."

This is not simply happenstance, either.  The county has a definite streak of rebelliousness, and its people stick by their principles.  I count very much in their favour the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in turn sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious popular opposition to confront Henry VIII; also the Lincolnshire Martyrs, who include two canonised saints.  The knowledge that Henry VIII hated Lincolnshire, declaring it ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, only makes me fonder of it still.  Less clear-cut morally is the tradition (if that’s the word) of poaching, which does, it must be said, have in its defence the injustice of the eighteenth-century enclosures of common land by wealthy land-owners.  The song ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, as sung by Joseph Taylor, with its pleasingly defiant declaration —

A buck or doe, believe it so,
A pheasant or an hare,
Were put on earth for everyone
Quite equal for to share […]

— captures the spirit, as does the more famous ditty ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (apparently a favourite of George IV; presumably it was not his hares that were being filched!).  Those landowners had come to see the land merely as an asset or a useful resource, whereas for the poachers and ordinary folk it was simply home, and home for their minds and spirits as much as for their empty stomachs.  To this day, it is not Lincolnshire’s way to follow the herd or pay heed to fashion overmuch, and this tendency to dig in heels, combined with the fondness for old things, creates conditions highly favourable, I would say, to the secret abiding of Deep England.

For it is not altogether unthinkingly that Deep England drowses green and gold in the haze of the afternoon.  I like to believe that those who dwell in that lost land are awake and alive to truth and beauty, pondering great thoughts and bold deeds over another hearty round of ale.  The proof that such folk did once live in Lincolnshire —  if they do not live there still — is plain to see in the heirlooms they left us, which stand amid the low rises and shallow hollows of this gentle county, startling us with their beauty: I mean the towers, the great audacious medieval church towers, with their youthful exuberance, their sheer verticality, which everywhere point heavenwards.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral, 20 March 2014.  With its original spire, it once stood at 520 feet; without, it is now 271 feet high.

There is of course Lincoln Cathedral — in John Ruskin’s estimation ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’ — which, when it still had its spires, was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548.  The highest spire, 520 feet tall, crowned a county that never naturally rises higher than 551 feet above sea level.  But these are not Lincolnshire’s only towers.  The relative prosperity of this region in the Middle Ages, as well as its ready access to the raw material of the Great Limestone Belt (which stretches south-west from Lincolnshire’s Kesteven through Rutland, Northamptonshire and the Cotswolds, all the way to Somerset), provided conditions favourable to the building of great towers by any self-respecting town.  So it is that Lincolnshire came to possess some of England’s greatest treasures.  At Louth it boasts the tallest medieval parish church tower in England, St James’s, whose spire stands at 287 feet.  St. Botolph’s at Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) has the tallest church tower to its roof: instead of tapering to a spire, the masonry shoots straight upwards to a height of 266 feet.  The spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram, 274 feet high, sweeps into sight at 105mph when beheld, sudden, serene, from express trains on the East Coast Main line.  And hundreds of other towers, less lofty but all distinctive, all dignified, lay claim to their segment of the wide Lincolnshire sky, each raised up in intercession for its parish and all souls there dwelling.**  That is because the folk of these parts in the Middle Ages committed their wool-wealth to the dressing of their homeland for Heaven, ornamenting this lowest-lying of counties with ardent upliftings of passionate stone.

As Julian Flannery says so movingly in ‘Fifty English Steeples’, an epic volume of detailed architectural surveys of medieval church towers, and one of the most treasured books on my shelves, 

England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth [church tower in September 1515] and the arrival of the English Reformation.  The pre-industrial landscape was dominated by the steeples of 17 cathedrals, 900 monasteries and 9,000 churches.  The spire of Lincoln Cathedral was the highest man-made structure the world had ever seen, and the construction of the great chapels at Westminster, Windsor and Cambridge had reached its magnificent conclusion.  Within a generation the monasteries had been dissolved, church-building had ceased, Lincoln spire had fallen, and medieval England had passed into history.  [p. 9]

Yet, for all the reasons above described, I have my suspicions that it is in Lincolnshire that the lost beauty he describes has lingered longest, and in particular in Lincolnshire’s towers that it survives most fiercely.  In a series of articles to come, I hope to describe what I found when I went to see some of them for myself.

St. Botolph’s church, Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’), under scaffolding on the 2nd February, 2019.  The tower is 266 feet high.

* Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy was used as the incidental music for John Betjeman’s 1964 BBC film Branch Line.
** One other Lincolnshire tower, that of the parish church of Deeping St Nicholas, photographed from the Peterborough-Spalding line on the 20th March 2014, illustrates the title banner of this blog.