And not care about religion? And actively loathe it when the Pope opens his mouth? What are your favourites?

Kilpeck, Herefordshire. Well-known but I only got there this year. Wonderful doorway:

Seriously pimped up hingeage. Love it

Shit brickwork through.
The sort of think Prince Phillip might attribute to Subcontinental chaps.

Kilpeck is rightly famous - maybe I'll get there myself some day.

I too am a non-Christian lover of churches and cathedrals (although, to be fair, this goes for all old buildings). A few years ago I wrote 26 essays for a history website, about various churches in the City and Westminster (with a couple of outliers!). The essays have been archived by the British Library, which I suppose means they'll outlive me

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The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.

My random blog!http://www.princevulpine.blogspot.co.uk
My non-random blog!http://princevulpinelondonchurches.blogspot.co.uk/

Wow, I'd love to read those.

I am a City of London guide (not the Blue Badge, something more modest). Get me on St Stephen Walbrook or St Dunstan in the East, and I take some stopping. I used to be in the Friends of The City Churches too. Should rejoin.

Me too. Many are beautiful buildings that are valuable parts of British heritage and history.

Religion however can still fuck off.

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"As a horror writer I don't ask for much. I just hope I've changed the way you think about life."

Yeah, churches are fascinating. Love churches. And many religious buildings, in fact.

Got to visit the Registan in Samarkand last year. That was mind-blowing:



But yeah, love churches. I'm particularly partial to Catholic churches, despite being no fan of Catholicism. I find the iconography, especially the Stations of the Cross mesmerising.

That's the problem. The design, vision and craftsmanship are often superb - take Grinling Gibbons, for example, or Durham Cathedral. But it's impossible to forget that the guiding impulse for all that expression was a superstition that I reject.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

St David's Cathedral. Hidden in a valley (memories of Viking raiders?) and with a massive bishop's palace next door.

went past this a couple of weeks ago when on the train:

Ulm cathedral


Tallest spire in the world, until this:

finally gets finished
(2026 is the scedule completion date)

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'Because we've reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us'

ooh, I like Ulm.

Less exotically, the best tower I know, Gloucester:

Köln is rather nice

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

I find the Cologne a bit much. Protestantism looks kind of inevitable when you see that. Just as punk looks inevitable when you see a clip of some hippy doing a 25 minute prog solo.

Durham's got 3 massive towers, I didn't know that. The Normans were into their statements of might. Ely is another of theirs. Bizarrely, the city of Ely markets itself as a bit of a Saxon town because of the Hereward the Wake connection. Stirring story, no doubt, but he couldn't have built the cathedral.

I'm thinking that an appreciation of devotional architecture in parallel with an honest recognition of the absurdity of the core beliefs that provided the base motivation for the realisation of that architecture isn't all that uncommon.

The same might be said of works of art such as Allegri's miserere, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, or certain of Gerard Manley Hopkins' works.

That they were inspired essentially by an absurd concept doesn't detract from their intrinsic quality, nor from the capacity of those who recognise that absurdity for what it is, to appreciate the sheer, incontestable beauty of the works concerned.

That aside, the first thought that struck me on viewing, for example, Lincoln Cathedral was that whoever made that structure happen must have been fucking bonkers. Which is of course, absolutely true.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

I live in Grantham Lincs where we have this 86 metre beast...



Home to the worlds first public library.