This kloosterkaart (monastery map, it alliterates in both Dutch and English!) for the Netherlands is fascinating (even if there aren't a lot of visible remains) and certainly very well done. Works on a time slider (e.g. watch all the Templars disappear in 1312) geoplaza.vu.nl/projects/klo...

Fascinating photographic record of the rescuing the leaning Martinitoren of Groningen, 1933-46. Seems they cast a steel reinforced concrete collar around the cracking foundations and underneath the sandstone facing of the 78-metre masonry tower, which had been built 1468-81.

thinking about 2nd quarter 14thc flowing tracery today and recalling how incredibly out of whack Hawton, Nottinghamshire is. the rather ambitious and little bit wayward east window tracery seems to have slipped within the arch to the north

has this thing been milkshake-ducked yet? well here I am in the outer rim under the squashed-dog people

dudes rock

took me ages but finally got a plan of the archaeology of the Burg in Bruges to find the exact spot of the Sint-Donaaskerk, raised to a cathedral in 1559 and demolished for materials 1799-1800. Now I've got a bit ambitious and have tried to rebuild it

Huge drop of new G-Earth 3D in the UK today... basically the Peak District, and Shrewsbury (the latter not surprising since there's been a sliver over the hospital area for a while, but very welcome) However, the "Lichfield gap" looks more ridiculous than ever now. c'mon! really??

Been having problems trying to get blender models onto Sketchfab, but now I find out the site has been bought out by Epic Games and is going to be trashed in favour of the new FAB which is basically a for-profit content shop Terrible for the educators, architects, museums etc who actively use it!

really enjoyed Harry Hill's new independent YouTube show with Stewart Lee, who seemed determined to deconstruct the whole affair from the outset, with a surprise segment about medieval castles with Matt Lewis who I did a podchat with years ago! www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhJx...

People go on about how awful Twitter/X is, and it is absolutely beyond even maintaining a presence on, but Facebook shoves loads of hateful content at me on my burner account. Just looking now I got endless hatred at this 23-year-old woman from Wales who works in health, and pure Holocaust denial.

Didn't quite make it out in 2025 but Spacefleet Holy Roman Empire is finally done (The last full-blown "cathedrals in space" I put out was way back in May 2021!) Still got England to do some day, but still waiting on getting a model of Lichfield... www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIQa...

BoM165: The bridge at Semer Water is classic Yorkshire: simple, solid, and a fundamental part of the landscape. Sound in general, but for cement mortar pointing, cumulative damage from negligent driving is compounded by trees growing in the cracks. www.billharveyassociates.com/bom/165-seme...

Beautiful coffin for bassist Gary "Mani" Mounfield carried out of Manchester Cathedral by pallbearers Ian Brown, Andrew Innes, Alan "Reni" Wren (right-hand) and Bobby Gillespie, John Squire (painter of the album cover that is on the coffin) and Liam Gallagher (left-hand). From the MEN live feed.

Other day I dreamt someone was cutting my copy of the Age of Chivalry catalogue (Alexander/Binski 1987) with scissors. I was all not having this and punched them. However for some reason I actually threw a punch and hit my bedside table so hard I couldn't use my right hand properly for 24 hours.

Radio 4 is just unlistenable now. I never have it on anymore. Even in the car. OK The Moral Maze is extremely bad and has been for a very long time, but there's barely anything on it now that isn't noise trying to keep tabloid Britain exactly how it is, forever.

Gorgeous Don-Bluth inspired commercial for Norwegian recycling company Infinitum. Ending text: Flasker og bokser kan få nytt liv. Det kan ikke dyra. / Bottles and cans can be given a new life. Animals can't. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2twI...

Henry Eatock-Taylor's sermon here to Reform UK "Christian Fellowship for Reform" launch at St Michael Cornhill in the City. Starts off getting some titters with "what if the Nativity were woke" bit and ends up saying Christ "got cancelled in our place". very normal www.youtube.com/live/fyZnnm0...

Made a return visit to the Santiago Yahuarcani (b.1960) exhibition at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester for works harnessing the ancestral memory of the Peruvian Amazon. Hugely fascinating in so many dimensions, but one thing that is impressive the visceral materiality of the works.

might have listened to this French self-dubbed "Roman extreme metal" band if they didn't have a dogshit AI generated cover. If you got a child you're babysitting to make you an album cover in an evening, it'd be more ethical and artful than shit like this.

If Brits wants to keep heritage buildings standing, we'll need to seriously consider measures like this too. Church assets look pretty small once you divide them amongst the thousands of buildings that need urgent work. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

made a rare venture on the Everything App where you are nay but a click away from the most racist thing you've ever seen, but saw this intriguing (yet obvious RETVRN bait) trending video of nuns singing in... some sort of weird-looking church? is it early 19thc French neo-gothic?

I saw this column flipping through a Country Life on the shelf and was hoping to find it online. Here it is! Am fully behind the thrust that parish churches need some government support, beyond all the silly stuff about them paying their own way as Post Offices and yoga venues (with stone floors??).

Commentary tedious for decades ("it's a bad neo-Gothic building anyway!" "turn it into a museum!" "it's too full of corridors with little rooms to turn it into a museum!") Core problem is the utilities. there's loads of defunct cables/pipes that are fire risks. Needs completely stripping out.

BBC article takes "cash in the attic" angle on this, but it's hardly a surprise a painting of this age and quality will fetch a few million "Insurance and security costs" are quoted as the reason to sell it, but it seems sad its monetary value causes it leave the place it was (probably) painted for

It would be Westminster Abbey, wouldn't it (Currently £31/£28 concessions)

Back in the spectacular art deco Manchester Apollo (G2 listed) for first time in nearly 20 years for Saxon doing all of 1980 album Wheels of Steel, with NWOBHM legend Brian Tatler of Diamond Head on guitar. Wish they had being doing the album behind them here though, as that's my favourite

For Guy Fawkes' Night, a cartoon of an enormous cartoon of The Guy Himself, pumped up to Buttlord GT proportions, which is too big to fit through Westminster Hall N porch A parody of grand classical history painting (such as B.R. Haydon) by George Cruikshank, printed in The Comic Almanack July 1844

yeah I was right with that, a huge chunk of S England between London and the S coast, and filling in some gaps along the latter. past noon EST on a Monday so they've updated.

I pack a pedestal (pedestal) To antique travellers (travellers) And by my half-sunk shattered visage I might Be stamped on these lifeless things tonight

Checking Chichester ironically to scale a 3D capture I have of the cathedral, realised a huge amount of new 3D views in G-Earth seem to have gone up recently (possibly last 24 hrs). not on the coverage overlay, but as I suspect they will be on Monday, they are something like this.

Today La Sagrada Família is having the first part of the crowning cross of the Jesus Tower installed. This will finally take it past Ulm Minster's 161.5 metres (begun 1392, completed with octagon and spire 1885-90) as the tallest church in the world!

The Duomo of Sant'Andrea, Venzone. The ambitious church of a walled town nestled in the edge of the Alps—voted most beautiful in Italy in 2017. Consecrated 2 Aug 1338 by the Patriarch of Aquileia, its calm Umbrian-Tuscan Gothic belies how it was partly shook to rubble in the 1976 Friuli earthquake.

Looks like the Saints in Colour project on the Wallingford Screen at St Albans Cathedral I advised and partly designed is finally (sadly) getting derigged before the end of the year. So see it while you can! I still think it looks pretty cool.

shouldnt be surprised really but still funny to see the East Wing of the White House, built 1941 is actually a reinforced concrete frame? When I first saw it last night I thought it was just the 1970s porte cochère but it seems the whole thing is concrete and rebar

anyone want to bat for Salisbury Cathedral on the matter of the ornament of the lean-to E aisle roof of the main transepts? I always think it looks extremely daft. like someone squeezed toothpaste out on it. No one ever copied it anyway. Like pretty much all of Salisbury's weird ideas

Anyone else in the UK having trouble accessing archive.org? I can only see it via a VPN for a couple days now. If this is more Online Safety Act nonsense, well, I'll be really cross i suppose

Was at Chester Cathedral last week for the Centring the Past project, which sought to understand the lost, poorly-documented timber centres for medieval masonry vaults. This hand-carved frame recreating that of the Chester Chapter House vestibule vaults struck quite a profile on the Dean's Field.

before I've even used up my backlog of photos from my Big Trip, I've been cathedral-bothering again today. at a very underrated building!

A welcome surprise in my last-minute cathedral guiding was the new visitor centre at Lincoln Cathedral, with exhibition pentice on the back of the Wren library and cloister linking to the 1840s Deanery building by Simpson and Brown, completed in the Pandemic and opened in Spring 2021. Tremendous!

after much wrestling with procedures to get it down to a manageable size from a million+ verts I now have a Chichester Cathedral photogram in my 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 Only Lichfield left to grab for England (and also Southwell and Ripon, and then also the Welsh cathedrals other than Llandaff)

My first visit to Old Sarum last week and all I took pictures of was the toilet block. Quite interesting tho, built into Iron Age rampart during early 1940s as a "wireless control room" for Old Sarum airfield to the NE. Converted into facilities in the 1960s and central accessible toilet added 2006.

The Society is deeply concerned by a growing pattern of the Secretary of State refusing to add important historic buildings to the National Heritage List for England, even when formally recommended to do so by Historic England. Read more: bit.ly/4pQKFSI 📷 Hotspur Press by Alan Davies #heritage

Lanterns at Ely, eyes at Lincoln. Has been quite the trip last week or so. More cathedral content coming!

Although still the most evocative view of Old St Peter's is this chromolithograph by H.W. Brewer, included in The Girl's Own Paper, 31 August 1907. (accompanying text: repository.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/ob...)

Two hours trying fix my Romanesque cathedrals file which kept crashing on animation render for the last stretch of the 1090s. Rolled back to an earlier save and it's finally working again. Exhausted. Need to rebuild some bits but perplexed what broke it

I've been listening to In Our Time since the mid-00s, when I was going through its archive (in .rm format!) and taking notes like a big nerd to get to grips with all sorts of subjects. Overall Melvyn has been a brilliant chair and struggle to think who can replace him. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Cor, took longer than I thought to rebuild Tewkesbury Abbey's late 1080s E arm. Polygonal Romanesque apses harder than semi-circular! Kept radiating chapel heights to that of S transept, E arm I gave a gallery for the giant order system but wonder if the clerestory have a lower sill level?

Watching this nice drone video put up yesterday of the sad post-fire state of 18thc Woolton Hall near Liverpool and yes, no surprise to see every floor burnt out down to the cellars: but this gable end doesn't look far off collapsing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgbk...

Quickly made a massing (leaving off stair turrets etc and Canute's rotunda for now) of Bury St Edmunds Abbey, long overdue for my English Romanesque Cathedrals project. Mostly following the elevations of the English Heritage project of 2022.

Quick animation using the interior rip to compare Salisbury Cathedral to its predecessor up at Old Sarum, as completed under Bishop Osmund (1075-92), and its extension built under Bishop Roger (c.1110-c.25). Osmund's Old Sarum is exactly the length of Salisbury's transepts.