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At the end of May, my husband and I took a weekend trip to “Shakespeare country” It’s only about an hour and half’s drive, but we meandered a bit, took our time and enjoyed country roads with gorgeous vistas in every direction. The weather was hot, so we decided not to try to cram the weekend with activity.
We stopped at Coventry Cathedral on the way to Stratford-on-Avon. My husband had seen it when he was twelve years old and never forgot it, and he wanted to show it to me. I knew why the moment I saw it. This is the first modern cathedral I’ve ever seen that is what I think a cathedral should be. It is exquisite. The exterior is gorgeous red-tan sandstone. The way it’s designed the new cathedral is connected visually and literally to the old one that was bombed out during WWII, with a connecting bridge over a courtyard between the two building. The shell of the old cathedral is visible and you can go inside. It’s an eerie feeling; all that’s left is 3 walls. See: www.coventrycathedral.org
In the new cathedral, everything is bathed in light. Instead of the few usual big, darkly stained glass windows, there are hundreds of small windows in floor-to-ceiling fenestration all along both sides of the building. Light floods into it from all directions. The large, main stained glass work is glorious. It’s hundreds of small windows arranged in a patchwork of colours. You can’t see what it is until you get across the church from it, and then you see a sun in skies of all shades of blue from dark purple to the palest baby blue. Breathtaking!
The baptismal font is a sculpture carved into a giant boulder from Jerusalem. The sculptures in the cathedral are, of course, all modern. There’s a head of Christ by an artist in Oklahoma that is made entirely from the metal in crashed cars from a junkyard. I didn’t like the Christ face, far too white-Midwesterner-looking, but the concept of resurrection, of new from old, runs throughout all the sculptures. A lot of them are made from recycled or reused materials. The most amazing one is the main cross in the sanctuary. It’s a sculpture showing what the altar cross in the old cathedral looked like after the bombing, all twisted from the heat, but not broken. In the center of it, very small, is a cross made from 3 medieval nails, original to the old cathedral. it gave me chills. What a symbol of resurrection!
Coventry Cathedral is also a world center for reconciliation. After the war the then bishop went to Germany and offered forgiveness. Can you imagine? He went to Dresden, which was literally levelled by Allied bombs and the subsequent fires, a striking parallel to Coventry’s situation. He started a movement of reconciliation, and an organization called The Community of the Cross of Nails. They have an international center at the cathedral where conferences and courses are given for both clergy and lay people about fostering forgiveness and reconciliation. Now there are connected centers all over the world that practice reconciliation and charity. The cross made of the old nails is the logo for the organization. See: www.coventry-cathedral.org/international
There’s also a side chapel that is an interfaith meeting place. It’s round. The exterior is rich teal green slate and there are vertical windows, floor to ceiling, every few feet. The stained glass is in very light pastels to let in lots of light. The seats are in a circle, and there’s no altar. The brochure says it’s a place where all Christian denominations are welcome to worship together. They have a service once a week. I loved the chapel, but I wished it was for ALL religions, not just all Christian religions.
We went on to Stratford-upon-Avon and got to our bed and breakfast (B&B) at about 4:00. Driving in, I wouldn’t have recognized the place. I hadn’t been there since 1985. So much development is going on, there are hundreds of new buildings. We had a little rest and watched some news. Then we went out for a while.
We walked from the B&B first to dinner in a pub that was so old, the walls were leaning in. It’s structurally reinforced, so perfectly safe, and eating there, sitting in a room where Shakespeare could have sat, was fun. The food was heavy English food: cottage pie for my husband, and I had traditional Lancashire hot pot– a stew with beef, carrots, onions (in chunks, not sliced), parsnips and potatoes. They served it with greens and bread. It was much over salted for my taste, but I never salt anything at home, so it was probably fine for most people. Then I had a Southern Comfort for dessert. 
)
We walked off dinner by walking down (about a mile down and back) to the River Avon, window shopping and looking at restaurant menus on the way there; investigating the Royal Shakespeare Company site when we got to the river. We walked along the riverbank briefly, but it was just getting dark and those annoying midges were out and drove us crazy in about 30 seconds. Millions of those little things anywhere near water at dusk.
We took a slightly different route home. The center of Stratford is completely protected as a historical district, so the houses are tiny, with doors along the street that even I, at five-foot-four, would have to duck to get into. Many of the buildings have side entrances that are modern, but the facades are perfect Tudor half timbers. A lot of them lean in or out, or even side to side, but the effect is magical. It’s like stepping into a fairy story.
Of course the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (the RSC’s main house) is closed because they’re building the new theatre on top of, or rather inside, the old one, and it’s a huge construction site. But they’ve done a really smart thing. On the construction barrier walls around the site, they have put up the plans for the new theatre, pictures of how it will look, and regular updates on the process. There’s a whole history of the project posted on these walls. It’s fabulous. (See: www.rsc.org.uk)
Only the small, temporary theatre is open, called the Courtyard Theatre. It’s on the site where the Other Place used to be. They were doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the night we could go, and we weren’t in the mood.
On Saturday we slept in, then walked to Trinity Church, where the graves are. Will and Ann are under gravestones in the sanctuary, just in front of the original altar. (Their son, Hamnet, died in childhood. Their daughter lived to adulthood and married a very well-to-do doctor, so she’s buried next to him out in the churchyard. Their house is restored so you can tour it. )
The church was busier than I’ve ever seen it. When I’ve been before, there have been maybe half a dozen people there, but it was crawling on Saturday. So we didn’t linger very long. We did find a nice quiet side chapel where we sat and mediated for a few minutes. The graves are now cordoned off so you can’t get close enough to read the inscriptions. When I was last there, I stood right over them and read the famous “Curst be he who moves my bones..”
We stopped for tea on the way back to our B&B and had delicious pastries (my one extravagance for the day) with really good tea. Then Ewan went straight back to the B&B and I went to the shops to buy little things for dinner. We didn’t want to go out again that night. So I got steak and mushroom pies (actually rectangles of pastry with meat and mushrooms inside in a thick gravy) and Cornish pasties (shaped like giant pot stickers with meat and potatoes inside), apples and plums, and drinks. So we had a picnic on our bed, watched Dr. Who and some other TV and went to sleep early. It was good just to loll around.
Sunday, we got up early, packed up and left by ten , to go to Compton Verney, a fantastic gallery in a gorgeous family estate. It was bought a few years ago by Sir Peter Moores, a very rich businessmen, heir to a fortune and rich in his own right. The permanent collection is quite eccentric because he has eccentric taste in art, but the museum itself is absolutely best practice. They took a page out of the Met’s book and are really the most modern-thinking art museum I’ve seen here in England. See: www.comptonverney.org.uk
They have LOTS of beautifully, professionally produced educational materials, catalogues, a history of the estate and other supporting material. And they have activities every day to engage both children and adults in doing art as well as looking at it.
The galleries are well laid out with good light and temperature control, and the collections are arranged and displayed completely professionally. It was a pleasure to be there. The cafe has fantastic food and the service is amazingly good. The shop had many items based on the collection, and the general stuff is directly related to the activities and/or the collection– not a lot of junky, unrelated items as in most of the museum shops here. I was very impressed indeed.
The collections are, as I said, a bit odd. There’s a lot of medieval art from Europe, especially Italy, and very little English art, in the permanent collection. I’m not fond of medieval stuff, all the angels and saints and endless variations on the theme. But they have some wonderful, very suggestive still lifes, and a couple of saints that really glow.
The temporary exhibition was Giocometti, whom I detest, so we didn’t even go into that gallery.
There was also a performance art piece in progress the whole time we were there, but it was completely booked up so we didn’t get a chance to see the whole piece. It looked really wonderful, young dancer types in dark leggings, skirts or pants, with bright turquoise tops, standing and moving in various places throughout the museum and grounds; and mobiles of photos and miniature objects were part of it, and a video camera set up. As I say, it looked like fun, but it was booked up all day.
The stuff I enjoyed most was the folk art, which is on the top floor. It comprised everything from wonderfully bad paintings to pub signs to everyday tools and gadgets to quilts. There was one quilt that just knocked my socks off. It had patchwork, embroidery, crewel work and applique, all done by hand. It was a patriotic piece, commemorating some battle in 1898. It was a bit worn around the edges but otherwise in very good condition. The colours were much brighter than you’d expect in fabrics over a hundred years old.
The other patchwork was a set of pillows and a full length cushion on an old settee. The patchwork was definitely 19th century, but the settee was at least 17th if not even earlier. The cushions were an obvious effort to make the old bench more comfortable. The colours were natural undyed cotton with a pale orange that could have been from onion skins or possibly calendula petals to make the dye. The stitching was all by hand of course, as the stitches were UNIFORM. What skill the quilter had!
There were also some wonderful toys in the collection, whirly-gigs, a doll bed and a child-sized wheelbarrow, all hand carved. The paints were old and faded and badly chipped, but you could see that they were skillfully and fancifully done in very bright colours. Some of the kitchen gadgets defied even the curators as to what they were used for. A lot of the labels said, “believed to. . .” or “possibly for. . .” Great fun!
There were very few English paintings, but they are having a visiting exhibition of English art later this year, which we may go back and see. In June-September they’re having a special exhibition called The Fabric of Myth, all textiles, which I’m dying to see, so we’re planning to do that. It’s a little more than an hour’s drive, so it’s a doable day out.
