City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEN1AN
BEING a citizen of London, I naturally rather look down on Westminster, just as people from Oxford are as nice as they can be about Cam- bridge. But' 1 was walking in Little Cloisters, my favourite part of the rival city, this week when I. met Mr. Stephen Dykes Bower, the Surveyor to the Abbey. With the Surveyor as guide, I went round the Abbey and, not having been there for sonic time, was amazed and delighted with the change that is happening. 1 had heard criticisms of the polishing of the Purbeck columns in the choir. Now that the -scaffolding is away, showing these dove-grey columns, some paler than others, against the white newly-washed chalk and limestone of the walls and vaulting, I can see that the columns ought to be polished as they arc and as W. R. Lethaby maintained they should be. Through lack of polish in the past, the Pur- beck has in places decayed. There are plenty of people, too, who criticise the recolouring and polishing of medieval and later monuments. But I think thiase in the Abbey arc greatly enhanced by what has been done to -them and I am quite sure that when all the monuments arc cleaned and polished and . the subtle greys and creams, whites and contrasting- veinings in which eighteenth-century sculptors delighted are brought back. 'to': their original freshness, those who deplore the Abbey monuments Will come to admire them, not only in themselves; but for the essential part they play in'making the-Abbey a national memorial and not just a fine Gothic church. Stand in the Chapel of St. John the Baptist on the north side of the apse and you will see the seventeenth-century Hunsdon Monu- ment glowing with colour aboVe you, with the black marble and white alabaster of the Exeter monument as a foreground. Look southwards and you will see the Abbey as all of it will one day be, the intersecting vaulting clean in white, and dove grey and with Wren's restoration of mediteval painting along the ribs of the roof. Notice, too, the restored monument to Queen Elizabeth in the north aisle of Henry VII Chapel, its gilded canopy seen against the lace-like tracery of this wonderful Tudor building. Even more rich and amazing will be the tomb -of Mary Queen of Scots when it is restored, in the oppo- site chapel. Most beautiful of all the monuments in-the. Abbey is that in the same chapel to Margaret Beaufort by Torrigiano, an effigy in gilt bronze, whose praying hands are surely the most beautiful sculptured hands in the world. This too is to be restored.
Previous page
