I checked with National Rail first thing on Saturday morning, and it was clear that the signalling problem had been fixed overnight, and that the train companies had managed to sort out the ensuing knock-on effects of having their trains in the wrong place. At any rate, trains were now advertised as running to time once more. That was a big relief.
I decided that, since I had already been so massively inconvenienced and was going to lose much of my Saturday to travelling anyway, I may as well spend the morning having a quick look around the centre of Durham. I’d never been there before, and it is a World Heritage Site. It’s also suffered massively from Planning Blight – some of the modern buildings on the edge of the city centre were absolute monstrosities, and I wondered how on earth they had been approved. Government buildings were the worst offenders – the Passport and Identity Office, and the National Savings building were particularly horrendous!
The city centre itself was very steep and hilly. I thought Malvern was bad, but the town is only built on one hill. Durham has several, with a river running in quite a deep gorge right through the middle. The upshot was that there were steep hills and flights of steps everywhere. Even the “wheelchair accessible” spiral ramp from the station down to the town centre had steps! There were steps from my hotel at river level up to the centre, and really steep steps back up to the station. It did make me think that this was really was no place to be a wheelchair user.
It was however worth the steep walk up the hill to the centre of the city, where the Cathedral and the Castle face each other across the cathedral green. I didn’t manage to get around the castle – it’s an integral part of the university, and was only open to visitors on guided tours at set times, which I didn’t have enough time to squeeze in. But I did get to have a good look around the cathedral. It is uncompromisingly Norman in appearance, with semi-circular arches over the doors and windows, and some rather solid and squat-looking towers. Inside, it was much lighter and airier than it looked from the outside. It was originally a monastic church, and somehow managed to survive the Dissolution of the Monasteries remarkably intact, and still has a full range of monastic buildings around the cloisters.
The cathedral is in the middle of a big redevelopment of the cloister range, which will be used as a big exhibition space from next year, opening up currently closed buildings to visitors and telling the story of the cathedral and its treasures. As part of the fund-raising towards this, they are building a scale model of the Cathedral in Lego. For just £1 you can buy a Lego brick and personally place it on the model, which was several metres long and extremely impressive and detailed. So far they’ve been building it for about two years, and it looked to me that they were nearly 2/3 of the way through. I thought it was very clever how the designer had worked within the limitations of Lego bricks (including admittedly lots of the more technical bricks that weren’t around when I was a Lego-mad child) to build details such as the Norman arches and the high altar. That was an unexpected bonus which I found very interesting.
I think I’ll have to see if I can come up with project extension to enable me to continue working with Durham University into next year, as I wouldn’t mind returning to Durham and seeing how the redevelopment of the cathedral cloisters turns out…..
