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Canterbury tales
The awesome beauty of Canterbury Cathedral has inspired visitors for centuries, but now the building is decaying. As the appeal to raise the millions of pounds needed to save the crumbling cathedral gathers pace, John Dodd meets the craftsmen and women rooting out the rot and using traditional skills to preserve the building.
Photographs by Andrew Hayes–Watkins
Leonie Seliger can see where a man breathed 829 years ago. Holding her own breath in intense concentration, she is copying the same line a stained–glass painter made on a window in Canterbury Cathedral. When Leonie’s heart kicks in and she breathes again, there is the faintest of wobbles, detectable only by microscope. She compares it to the original. And there, exactly where her breathing recommenced, is the same wobble in the line of the 12th–century painter. Her connection between today and the past is that personal, the task of conservation that delicate.
Ninety feet up the cathedral, Heather Newton, head of stonemasonry and conservation, surveys the Portland cement mortar being extricated from the crumbling face of the Corona — built to house a piece of the skull of Thomas Becket — and heaves a sympathetic sigh for the labours of the artisans who put it there in Victorian and Edwardian times. “I would say 65 per cent of what we have to do is the result of well–meaning but misguided intervention from those days,” she says. “Portland cement–based mortars simply don’t mix with the Caen stone put there in medieval times. There is some bomb damage from the war but that’s a comparatively minor problem.”
Almost the whole of the south–east transept is having to be replaced. There are 10 lifts at work removing the old and hoisting up the new blocks, which come, authentically, from the same Lower Normandy source as the 12th–century ones they are replacing.
The brutal truth is that Canterbury Cathedral, despite its outrageous beauty, Gothic columns and dazzling windows is on a slide to collapse. The entire lead roof is so thin it all has to be replaced — sheets of it have been slipping off. Duct tape binds marble pillars to hold them together; stained glass is blackening with erosion. It will cost £30 million for the masonry and the roofs, another £20 million for the rest.
As the cathedral’s literature puts it: “Augustine founded it, Becket died for it, Chaucer wrote about it, Cromwell shot at it, Hitler bombed it. Time is destroying it.” But who will save the building that encapsulates such history and still houses the signature cross of William the Conqueror, endorsing Canterbury’s claim to be the seat of the Archbishop Primate of all England? It looks like Joe Public.
The National Lottery and English Heritage have yet to be approached for donations but appeals for solely religious buildings do not go down well. The national, American and global fundraising campaigns are due to begin next year, but are currently overshadowed by the economic climate.
For the past two years appeal organisers have targeted the people of Kent, who are clearly proud of the mother church of worldwide Anglicanism — a World Heritage Site visited by a million people a year. They have raised £8 million, enough to make a start.
All the work is being done traditionally. Stonemasons chip away at limestone blocks, brought in 20–ton lorry loads, with the same tools as their 12th–century forebears. Each stone requires a different cut, so power tools are of little use. “Everything is bespoke,” says Heather Newton. “And a good stonemason can work just as quickly with traditional tools.”
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