And today, on the centenary of Gaudí's death (10 June 1926), the central tower is to be inaugurated (it was actually topped out on 20 Feb)

found this in old papers: pretty sure it was from 2009 (£15 was a lot of money in those days!) such a ridiculous policy to enforce till 2019. especially walking round the cathedral in a sash so you don't get yelled at thing

Lovely surprise to see St Walburge Preston has just got rid of its Vatican II altar platform that current custodians Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest have been ignoring since 2014.

Lytham Hall's main staircase plaster ceiling, attributed to Swiss-Italian stuccoist Giuseppe Cortese (house designed by Yorkshire architect John Carr and built 1757-64) has been repainted over the last few months and unveiled in the past week. Can't say I'm disappointed: I think it looks spectacular

A different angle to the usual view of Cologne Cathedral before the 19thc completion. Made 1670-5, looking from the NW. The S tower, completed up to clerestory height with its famous medieval crane is to the right, but to the L you can see the interior of the E wall of the N tower.

Final thought - if this is how they treat the best-performing REF unit of assessment at the university, nobody is safe.

never fails to amaze me how 1987 cover art for thrash band Toxik (by the stalwart Ed Repka, who painted a multitude of classic thrash covers and endures to this day) while being a bit on the nose for "ooh big business bastards waging war and murdering mother Earth", still somehow remains relevant

Wanted a model of the parish church of St Mary, Long Sutton (Lincs) so was able to find two drone passes of it that I could render. Problem is one was taken in snow so I had to change the roof colouring as well as the overall colour temp. But I think it turned alright, as an illustrative massing.

“Looking forward to what the "ai sucks ackshoeally" crowd has to say about this one.” (Replies and quotes disabled)

Enjoying collecting a multitude of bluesky errors as the website spends a day shitting itself inside out

this is just a story based around a YouTube account trying to grow its numbers. is this really what Reuters should be reporting

realising i put a rather prescient Starfox reference in my latest cathedrals in space thing www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgSD...

anyone else perturbed by how often "grokipedia" comes up on google searches for stuff? seems the big-G's absolutely cooked (that's bad)

important question. how would a cathedral wear trousers.

My name's Knave - and I'm Corbel! - welcome to: **~The Amazing Digital Cathedral!~** any legs in this, you reckon. i'd need to learn how to animate armatures.

Since the unfortunately totally demolished Early Gothic cathedral of Arras is related to the Super Universas project by being reassigned as suffragan of Reims to Cambrai, wanted to work out where this sketch of its stunning east end I've used before is from, and I did, eventually, sorta, work it out

I always used to say that in the whole course of my PhD and after, I never came across a single set of medieval "classic" sedilia in what is now France. Then last week I found out about the church of Tour-en-Bessin near Bayeux. The sedilia are LEAST astonishing thing about it tbh. It's CRAZY!

So following the proportions of Aachen Dom, here's the massing of the long-lost Carolingian rotunda of the Burges Burg, destroyed 1184 and replaced with a standard Romanesque basilica. It is basically marked out on the pavement today (the successor church isn't) (trees off)

Relaunching my Holy Roman Empire cathedrals video with a few edits (pls like and subscribe) with a look at the 14 churches made cathedrals in the Spanish Netherlands with the 1559 Super Universas bull. Ones that got demolished were the most fun to research! stainedglassattitudes.com/2026/03/16/s...

has anyone else been having trouble with institutional sign-in to JStor via shibboleth the last week? JStor just doesn't seem to accept the login. (I can get the items via external catalogue searches but it's annoying direct links don't work)

so I was planning on launching my 1559 Super Universas cathedrals overview today and the re-up of the Sacrum Imperium Romanum video... but I got an itch about Saint-Omer for the 1559 crew. Can you really not get a model of it? So I found some drone footage and crunched it then found more... and:

Getting-on-for-nine-years old doge mask fully succumbing to latex rot. Makes you think. I'd put it in the bin but seems a shame not to give it a proper send-off like stick it on top of a firework

no sir. i dont like it.

Looking at my Crusader States Cathedrals I wrote in 2022 to link to a Holy Land diocese, and saw my Gaza entry still linked to a Twitter thread(!) to update on its near-destruction in Dec 2023. So I redid it with a few images. stainedglassattitudes.wordpress.com/2022/01/25/s...

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.

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