Tag Archives: church

Jul 30 2025
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Daily Post, Interior

St Magnus’s Cathedral

Wednesday 30th July 2025, 11.05am (day 5,088)

St Magnus's Cathedral, 30/7/25

St Magnus — originally Magnus Erlendssen — was one of the Norse Earls of Orkney. Apparently someone thought it was a good idea at the time to set up a kind of power-sharing agreement with his cousin Håkon, which lasted only as long as it took Håkon to capture Magnus and stick an axe into his parietal lobe. However, as Magnus was considered something of a pious dude and all-round good sort, after his nephew Rognvald subsequently deposed the usurper, he built this cathedral in tribute. This is pretty good going, as most of us these days will get a post mortem on Facebook and a few ‘likes’. I dunno, progress, eh?

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May 03 2025
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Rotherham Minster, from the café

Saturday 3rd May 2025, 1.30pm (day 5,000)

Rotherham Minster, 3/5/25

Rotherham, South Yorkshire, is one of those places where a high proportion of its casual visitors surely come because it has a League football team and for no other reason. This is not to knock the place. I did have a decent day out here today (at the football) and it certainly has a big and impressive church, as depicted.

This shot breaks plenty of rules, including being taken from inside the café over the road, and my leaving in the lights that surrounded its window. But the woman in the red coat helps. And anyway, I don’t care about the formalities because today I have stretched this blog out far enough to reach day 5,000. 13 years, 8 months and 7 days of daily photography has brought me to this point. I suppose I occasionally think about winding it all up but it hasn’t happened yet, there always seems to be something coming up which encourages me to continue, whether it’s an interesting trip away, or a numerical target like today’s. The next one should be that I ensure I make it to my birthday this year: because on the day I turn 56, I will have documented exactly one-quarter of my life on here. Seems a reasonable (next) goal to me…

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Apr 03 2025
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Brize Norton: the non-military bit

Wednesday 2nd April 2025, 5.20pm (day 4,969)

Brize Norton village, 2/4/25

As I type this on Thursday morning, my latest journey has ended, and so for the next nine days you will be seeing pictures of a lump of volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This will be a quite different environment from the genteel acres of Oxfordshire, the part of England that I had to transit through to reach my destination, seeing as I was flying out of RAF Brize Norton overnight. That being a military base, they were understandably touchy about deadbeat civilians like me coming in and happily snapping away at their installations for blogging purposes.

Here, instead, is the village of Brize Norton itself: a patch of quintessential Oxfordshire. With that thatched roof, I guess this scene might have looked much the same for two or three hundred years. Except for the one anachronism — it’s there, if you can spot it.

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Mar 05 2025
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Ring o’ Bells and Halifax Minster

Tuesday 4th March 2025, 6.10pm (confirmed…) (day 4,940)

Ring o'Bells, 4/3/25

The association between this pub and Halifax Minster is obvious, even before noticing the painting hanging inside, which depicts the choir ‘practising’ while swilling ale in the tavern; and it was painted in the 1790s, apparently. The beer inside is still decent but there wasn’t much singing going on tonight. This is one of the shots where you can check my timekeeping.

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Mar 03 2025
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Daily Post, Portrait, Sport, Stranger

Sunday morning, places of worship

Sunday 2nd March 2025, 10.55am (day 4,938)

Goalie and church, 2/3/25

I don’t know whether St Bernadette’s — the church in the background — was busy on this Sunday morning, possibly it was. Hough End Playing Fields across the road certainly was, although this picture doesn’t capture the fact that at least half-a-dozen sports matches of various kinds were taking place around me at this point. I like the combination of the bright orange shirt and the slight dullness and tattiness of the background.

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Feb 03 2025
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Waltham Abbey ruins

Saturday 1st February 2025, 1.45pm (day 4,909)

Waltham Abbey, 1/2/25

Struggled to find a particularly interesting photo once I got to the end of the day, but this one will do, with its frisky dogs and imposing architecture. This is the church of Waltham Abbey, in Essex, where I happened to find myself for the afternoon. The last of all the great monasteries of England to succumb to the corporate raiding of Henry VIII in 1540. The church still stands, but all the rest of it is just ruined old walls and gravestones.

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Jan 05 2025
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

St Luke’s, the bombed out church

Saturday 4th January 2025, 10.10am (day 4,881)

Bombed out church, 4/1/25

St Luke’s, Liverpool, was your basic, big urban church until the night of May 6th 1941, when the Luftwaffe decided to do some remodelling. It has been left like this ever since, as a memorial to all those who died in WW2.

How’s my symmetry on this shot? Hmmmm…. it’ll do. Apart from the barrier on the right-hand side, anyway. These kinds of thing always seem to be there to vex us. The other visitor, I’ll let him off.

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Mar 29 2024
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Richard Cobden and St. Ann’s Church

Thursday 28th March 2024, 9.40am (day 4,599)

St Ann's Church, 28/3/24

In Manchester, but not my usual parts of the city, so a chance to bring some different views to the blog. The statue of the Dead White Male is of Richard Cobden, and until just now I had no idea who this person was so I have read up about him. It sounds as if he was something of a radical dude, campaigning for years for the repeal of the Corn Laws (which kept the price of bread artificially high and impoverished the masses for the benefit of a few rich landowners), free trade and pacifism. So, go Richard. St Ann’s Church, behind, is a rather noble building as well.

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Sep 17 2023
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Daily Post, Interior

In Ripon Cathedral

Saturday 16th September 2023, 12.20pm (day 4,405)

Ripon Cathedral, 16/9/23

Properly, the Cathedral Church of St Peter and St Wilfrid, Ripon: a big church for a small place. There’s been a place of Christian worship on this site since 672, so 1,350 years. Quite a weight of history, and like most such buildings, you can feel it. This shot of the rood screen and organ pipes above is one where it helps to get the symmetry right, and I think I’ve managed that.

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Apr 02 2023
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

The Sagrada Familia: World’s maddest building?

Saturday 1st April 2023, 5.45pm (day 4,237)

Sagrada Familia, 1/4/23

I suppose I am reasonably well-travelled but this is still only my third-ever trip to Spain, the most recent being in about 2007 for a conference (hence before the start of this blog), and the first being in 1991 when I went inter-railing round Europe and went to Madrid and a couple of the cities in the south. But I never visited Barcelona, and Clare hadn’t done so either, and so when we were thinking about a destination for an Easter break, this was suggested and so here we are.

When in this place, everyone comes to see this building, don’t they? But I’m not sure I actually like it. It’s fantastic, unique, for sure, but it’s also somewhat mad, excessive, lacking in grace and beauty (something not true of St Basil’s, which could also be accused of excess). The other Gaudi buildings in the city are more attractive. It’s just a personal opinion based on a quick first impression, so don’t listen to me though. I suppose that one indication of the impression is that the cranes poking out of the top look at first like they may be a deliberate part of the design. It has been under construction for 140 years now, and still isn’t finished. Heaven knows what might still be to come.

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