A Visit to Holkham Hall

Holkham hall is a mid 18th century building situated in North Norfolk. As with all Palladian constructions lines of symmetry abound, inside and out. The general plan of the building follows the usual layout of a central block flanked with identical wings linked by corridors. Consequently the face on view of the hall boasts its maximum dimension, thus impressing the visitor with its size. However, unlike other Palladian buildings Holkham does not use long spindly extended corridors to its wings to artificially accentuate its breadth. In fact not only does the Hall have very short corridors but also it is effectively two Palladian mansions back to back, thus having a much greater depth than some other neo classical homes.

The sumptuous interior of Holkham is well known, especially the breath taking colonnaded entrance hall. The décor is as ornamented as it could be without looking baroque and the interior just succeeds in retaining the clean, elegant and elemental feel that is a feature of pristine classicism. From the outside, however, I would not personally rate the building as particularly attractive; the wings, for example, look like workhouses. But perhaps this is appropriate: Holkham hall is not owned by a heritage trust who are doing their best to the halt forces of decay and fossilize it, but it is still a working concern – the Lord and Lady remain in residence and as of old the Hall is the hub of a farming estate, although income has been supplemented with tourism and the sale of rustic products.

Holkham Hall was built at the beginning of the industrial revolution when wealth was still primarily bound up with land ownership. As a great farming estate Holkham would have been amongst societies key wealth producers. The Lords of Holkham held one of the country’s chief means of production. Like the owners of the other great estates they used the then modern neo-classical architecture and statuary to signal their leadership status; they were where it was at, a new pinnacle of culture and civilization rivaling Rome. They thought of themselves as the “new Romans” but, in fact, one better: Technically they were more advanced than the Romans and these Christianized patricians, in their impressive celebrations of classical statuary and myth, were not afraid to contrast the barbarism of Rome unfavorably with their own Christian values and morality

After the medieval years of looking up to and feeling inferior to the classical world, western civilization, by the 18th century, had not only overhauled classical civilization but were poised to far exceed it. But it is ironic that the estate owners, who were at the center of the agricultural revolution with its new revolutionary farming techniques, were helping to bring about the demise of their landed class. The labor hungry industrial revolution would not have been possible without the efficient farming methods used by the great halls, freeing labor from direct contact with the land. When the industrial revolution got well underway and created a superstructure of industry and work far removed from the tilling of the land, wealth and power shifted away from the gentry: the factory owners, and not the hereditary land owners with their lineages and blood connections, were now vying to be the front runners. The factory owners were technically savvy, and the patrician class of the 18th century with their classical pretensions was in decline. Command of technology and not classics was the badge of the new modernism. The exuberant celebrations of classicism we find in the homes of the gentry became quaint and out of touch. The dynamic and frenetic pace of an accelerating industry with its ever-changing face of technical innovation was leaving behind the ponderous patrician wisdom of a bygone era.

Phallic Paradigm

So after 8 years of reliable service I have at last got rid of my beloved old automatic Carlton. Here it is posing beautifully at the old castle:

and here is my 'new' automatic Vectra 'Elegance' posing at the classico-modernist Holkham hall:

With 0.2 litre less of engine and 10 inches shorter you can see that this is tauntamount to the opposite of an enhancement pill. Getting a bit greener is a pretty sacrificial business. But is it an improvement? Stylistically I think 'No'. The Calton with its deeper (albiet less fashionable) window area not only afforded better visibility, but accentuated its sheer missile like length. And of course for a male sheer length is the meaning of life. The engine also sounded better, albeit a bit noisier and rougher; that perhaps may have something to do with the transverse arrangement of the Vectra engine and emission controls. However, although the Calton with its engine management and ABS was a high spec. in its day (long gone), the Vectra is festooned with even more gismos and this gives it an advanced feel: a product of a creeping information technology and marketing one-up-man-ship that attempts to fuel demand with a constant round of functionality upgradings. Can the human brain wrap itself round yet another thick manual of functionality? I'm still trying to get through the damn fat square manual that came with my wrist watch.

But the underlying technology of the latest vehicles, although highly refined, still comes out of the Victorian era of pistoned heat engines. Like a mine that has been thoroughly worked out and has now hit a period of decreasing returns, Internal Combustion can only be enhanced with increasing effort, research and investment. ICE vehicles are definitely on the refinement part of the development curve as computerisation attempts to squeeze out more and more from less and less. What a contrast the modern car is: an amalgom of the steam and the computer ages.

As for me I am still waiting for those revolutionary paradigm shifting atomic powered cars that they promised us on the sixties. Now that really would be a masculine statement: a car with a hull like a nuclear submarine. The Green party can go and hang.

Power Houses

I recently visited Sizewell ‘A’ power station (seen above). Whenever I visit this power station the same memory is invoked. I remember seeing it as child in the mid-sixties when it had not long been built. Its corrugated aluminum façade was still an un-oxidized metallic silver sheen, sparkling in the sun. Metallic silver, in those days, was the colour of the future and above all, of progress; one saw it everywhere in connection with high tech or science fiction: spacesuits, aircraft, rockets, concept cars and concept fashions. As a child I was excited by that 'the future is here' feeling as I viewed the glistening power station. I readily tuned into to the hopes of modernism and aspirations of technological and scientific progress.

It was very appropriate that the moon was hanging over the station when I took this photograph – another half a decade after my first visit to Sizewell ‘A’ and that other science based project, man on the moon, would be fulfilled. Atomic power and space travel, those great projects of heroic science, went hand in hand into a hopeful future. Atomic power was going to provide electricity that was going to be too cheap to meter. Moreover, fusion power, a cleaner enhancement of atomic power, was just round the corner. Space flight would look like 2001 Space Odyssey by the end of the millennium and AI machines of great intelligence would soon be a reality, perhaps in a lifetime. None of these hopes, of course have been matched by the story on the ground, or in space.

The gray oxidized hull of the now decommissioning power station was forbidding in the half-light when I photographed it. The inflated expectations of the sixties about the possibilities of space flight and atomic power, like the somber discolored bulk of Sizewell ‘A’, have lost their sheen of optimism.

Sizewell ‘A’ is a gentle 25-minute walk down the beach from the Christian conference center where I was staying and here is a picture of that conference center:

The contrast with Sizewell ‘A’ is breathtaking: Built in 1922 Sizewell Hall is reminiscent of Lutyens, the garden city builders, and the periodic return to the arts and crafts of the romantics as they react against the cold functional complexity of modernism. The romantics seek a return to rusticity, an age when things were simpler, warmer, and more human - days when heartfelt yearnings and intuitions were chief oracle, and not the dispassionate and incomprehensible scientific expert. It is appropriate then that Sizewell Hall is a conference center for a movement that so often displays a sharp reaction against scholarship and learning in favour of simple ‘heart knowledge’. The view of creationism that some Christians promulgate typifies it: They draw a line round the first passages of Genesis confidently stating that this boundary clearly and unambiguously delimits all one need know about creation, completely ignoring the textual hints of dark tunnels leading way out beyond their limiting artifice, tunnels suggestive of a much bigger, perplexing and less comfortable world out there. The Southern Baptist fundamentalist is apt to trace all ills back to man’s fall, and thereby is less troubled by the mystery of suffering and evil. His 6000-year-old creation is easy to accommodate mentally and in a sentimental Kincaidian way it is as cozy as his living room.

Temperamentally I gravitate toward science, its pristine logic and its hopes of progress. But the somber discolored bulk of the now redundant power station as it decommissions, conjures up a sad nostalgia as I recall naive childish hopes. I have also had to cope with the dashed hopes of the evangelical movement as it recovers from a period of inflated religious expectations. When I first visited Sizewell Hall with my current church in 1994 it was the year of the emerging Toronto Blessing. There followed a short period of optimism whilst the picture, for a while, remained unclear. But now in 2008 we look back on a trail of false prophecies, half-baked and bizarre blessings, disgraced evangelists, failed promises of revival, polarization, and crowd control by spiritual spin and spiritual bullying. How could a group of people who make so much of 'Holy Spirit discernment' be so easily fooled? The frank, candid and challenging question has to be posed: Is Christianity real or is it just a product of crowd dynamics?

Evangelical Christianity, like scientific triumphalism, has had to adjust to a more sober assessment of its expectations. The spiritual lessons here for both atheist and evangelical are priceless: On the one hand, the epistemic arrogance of those who believe they have found self–sufficiency in a scientific tree of knowledge, has been challenged. On the other hand with the discomfiture of evangelicalism, there is a mellowing and an embracing amongst evangelicals of a more open concept of the Gospel. At least I hope so.

Cathedral Capital

Norwich Cathedral is around 900 years old. Although some parts of the Cathedral were built in the light and airy styles of late mediaeval gothic the earlier architectural legacy of the Normans with its much heavier construction techniques predominates. Gothic architecture wears its God striving mystique on its sleeve, but the older lumpen Romanesque of the Normans conveys a sense of Divine mystery via its archaic and primitive feel rather by recourse to platonic ideals of beauty. As I sat I in one of the aisles of the Cathedral as midnight approached on Christmas Eve my aspect was thoroughly dominated by the pillars of huge girth that march up and down the aisles. My eye sought relief from the oppressive heaviness of the Norman architecture by turning its gaze up toward the lofty nave with its breathtaking vista of three successive tiers of colonnades. The primeval feel of the building gives it an otherworldly atmosphere; perhaps the sort of thing Tolkein had in mind when he described the ancient halls of Moria.

Compared to Norman architecture gothic, particularly perpendicular gothic, with its delicate traceries and minimalist pillars and buttressing, is closer to the modernist ideal of material efficient constructions. A fine example of perpendicular architecture is found in the church of St Peter Mancroft that borders the south side of Norwich market place. Built in the fifteenth century, the slenderness of its stone pillars and large windows, which together maximize light, floor space, and uninterrupted lines of sight, anticipate the modern era of reinforced concrete and steel constructions.

But although perpendicular gothic parallels the modern practice of creating a thin elegant weather covering rather than a cavern of stone, the church builders of renascence England did not know that they were closing in fast on the disruptive social non-linearities of modern times. For romanesque and gothic churches had one thing in common; they were both effectively sink holes for the surplus labour of their respective social settings; something alien to our culture with its constant tension between investment and spending.

Whenever I am in a large romanesque or gothic church, I find it difficult to empathise with the social ethos that lead to their construction. Like the pyramid builders of ancient Egypt it is clear that mediaeval and renascence society had an agricultural surplus large enough to sink a vast amount of labour into massive stone celebrations of their religion. Although these constructions may have served intangible social mores revolving around a sense of community and religious purpose, they had no productive purpose that the modern industrial mindset can comprehend. Once constructed, that was it; the labour embodied in these fantastic buildings went no further and served no direct productive end; unlike the industrial period when investment in the construction of say, a large factory is intended to facilitate or enhance further production. In the modern world investment is the name of the game and capital is invested to further increase capital, thus leading to the unstable exponentials and non-linearities of modern society.

From a modern perspective with its values of investment, betterment, and change, often all motivated by the search for profit, the mediaeval ethos of social stasis and massive construction projects that fossilized surplus labour is difficult to understand. What exactly motivated these people? Was it just about the maintaining the power of the priesthood via an oppressive stone symbolism whose sheer magnitude cowered the lower ranks of society into submission, or did that society genuinely have the glory of God in their minds? - Perhaps a bit of both. If that is so then the modern mind does have a significant point of contact with the minds of medieval and renascence times – namely that of having inseparably mixed motives. The medieval priest supported the status quo because his desire to maintain his station within it was in inseparable union with his motive to glorify God. Likewise, today’s entrepreneur may wish to better society through his innovating efforts but he is unlikely to be able to resolve this altruistic motive from a desire for personal profit. Mixed motives are very difficult, if not impossible, to resolve into their components. Sin, the word with the 'I' in the middle, is inextricably mixed with human motives (Romans 7:15-25) and that's why the saviour came.

Aping 2001

OK then, I'll face it, we've had a building cock up at my address. HAL: "Look Tim, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. ..."

Tim Reeves' Big Day Out: MPH07

I had a very enjoyable day at MPH07. Some of the vehicles on show were spectacular and, needless to say, so were the prices. Here’s the vehicle I bought with my initials on the front as an extra:

The sticker on the back of this car will read "My other car is a wreck".

The spectacular theme continued in the arena performances presented by Clarkson, Hammond and May with breath taking internal combustion engine based stunts: car football, a flying car, and formation hand break turning. Four motorcyclists not only managed to squeeze themselves into a spherical iron cage but also managed to ride at speed as well. It was not just the wall of death, but floor and ceiling of death as well. So precisely coordinated was their riding that a dangerous collision was only small fractions of a second away:

With its 80% male attendance this was a show for the lads. It fulfilled all those stereotypical notions of testosterone charged males fascinated with danger, risk taking and fast sleek phallic looking machines. And if Richard Hammond’s recent antics are anything to go by, Top Gear’s blustering presenters are not pseuds but really do engage in risk taking. But as well as dangerous antics the show was also about being naughty boys and breaking the rules. Jeremy Clarkson drove his range rover up a 38 degree slope, but gleefully told us beforehand that Rover only recommends a maximum slope of 35 degree. Clarkson was pushing the envelope and certainly not doing as he was told:

It was all a refreshing change from today’s church experience, an experience so crushingly and slushily feminine in style, intuitions and behavioral expectations, that it habitually expresses the faith in quasi-sensual and romantic terms. Its notion of risk is that of listening to the prophetic intuitions of the limbic mind when you know that the prophetic hit rate in recent years has been all but zero.

Most Haunted Mansion

In a Halloween publicity stunt, the National Trust has published a list of its top ten most haunted properties. Blickling hall, the Jacobean mansion near Alysham in Norfolk has hit the number one spot. But how was this list arrived at? Was it done by carefully counting and collating reports and giving them a verification weighting, or did the National Trust dowse Sian Evans abdomen with a pendulum in order to get a gut reaction? The house manager at Blickling provides a few clues:

We are absolutely delighted to be at the top of the most haunted chart. This will give Blickling a very scary five skull rating in the national guide to haunted halls. The house staff always look forward to coming in and being scared witless by our team of ghosts who have worked hard for this position and put in a very spirited performance. They are good workers who enjoy their work and always moan about their tasks, although they are sometimes difficult to distinguish from the cleaning staff who also do a lot of moaning (especially on pay day). With a celebrity ghost like Anne Boleyn we definitely have a head start here at Blickling, but we will be giving all our hard working ghosts a Halloween bonus and pay rise.

So, if you are an employee at Blickling your best bet is to take a white sheet with you to work and scare the living daylights out of a visitor of two - you might get a pay rise and bonus. Not a ghost of chance of that I suppose. I wonder if anyone has spotted my pay slip lurking in a dark corner at Blickling? I wouldn’t believe it if they said they had .....there I go again, moaning; must have caught the habit from the spooks.