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I realised, quite early on in writing this website, that I was putting off writing about Great St Mary's. It seemed a little odd at first: this was after all the first church in Cambridgeshire that I ever visited, indeed I lived within spitting distance of it for many years while I was a student (in my first year, I lived on the top floor of the hostel which stands just to its south - I got to know the sound of its bells extremely well!).
You might think that, with such familiarity, it would make sense for me to write about early. However, I didn't. To begin with I suppose that was because it's an interesting and complicated church, likely requiring a bit more description and a bit more writing than many of the places Mark and I visited. But as time went on I decided that there would be something narratively satisfying about the very final church I wrote about being the church which sits at the centre of Cambridgeshire, and at the start of our journey. That has now been a very long journey indeed. I started writing about the churches of Cambridgeshire in 2003, as a kind of distraction from my impending undergraduate finals. Mark and I visited almost all of the county over the following four years, when he visited me at weekends during my subsequent postgraduate career; and we finished off some outlying odds and sods in less frequent visits in the three years after that, while I got to grips with my first jobs in academia. By the time I left Cambridge, in August 2010, we had visited every church, and I had written about all of them except for three.
Then, the project stalled a bit. I had moved to take up a permanent position at the University of Glasgow, and I was very distracted by the excitement and stress of moving to a new city, in a new country, with new colleagues and friends. My church-crawling habits also lapsed. Somehow I could never find the same joy in exploring Glasgow's virtuosic Victorian churches, jostling for space and attention in a competitive doctrinal marketplace, as I had in Cambridgeshire's medieval parishes. So, I turned to other things - mostly walking up the Munros - and left this website as a frustratingly near-complete task, logging the occasional e-mails people sent us with comments and corrections, and intending one day to get around to finishing. (Mark adds: it never ceased to surprise me how many people sent "can we get married in your church" emails...). The prompt for me doing so was a return to Cambridge for work. I deliberately gave myself a couple of extra days to spend in the city, in part to visit old friends, but also to finish off my notes and finally complete our tour of the churches of Cambridgeshire.
So! Here we are, returning to the start, in Great St Mary's. I'm sorry that it's taken twenty years to finish this tour, but I'm glad to be finishing it on a high note.
The church sits solidly in the heart of the town, occupying a gap between King's Parade to the west and the market square on the other. It's a grand civic position for a grand civic church; not so dramatic as St Peter Mancroft in Norwich, which is perhaps its most obvious comparator, but still impressive. I call it a 'civic church', but in fact it has a kind of dual identity, serving both town (as the mother-church of the city) and gown (as the official University church).
It is, unusually for an East Anglian church, mostly dressed stone on the outside. The side walls are filled in with rubble, but everything else is neatly put together in beautiful ashlar and limestone, battlemented and solid. The masonry probably includes some Barnack stone from an earlier incarnation, incorporated into the new structure when it was rebuilt (entirely, save for the chancel walls) in the late 15 th century. It took a while for it to be finished (the tower took until the end of the 16 th century, and contains masonry magpied from the ruins of Thorney and Ramsey abbeys), but it is stylistically all of a piece: high late Perpendicular, in the same vein as Lavenham in Suffolk. It is not so large as Lavenham, and in fact I think its neatness and the awkwardness of seeing the building all at once (it is a bit hemmed in on the north and south sides, and one really has to get into Senate House Yard to see the west face properly) can make it look smaller than it is, but it is nevertheless a very substantial structure. The west end is a particularly fine composition. The aisles extend to clasp the bottom of the tower, which is the tallest in the county (excluding spires). I think it's also one of the nicest and most distinctive: on the corners are octagonal turrets, offset so that the edges rather than the faces are aligned with the cardinal directions, and with substantial buttresses supporting it from the third of four stages downwards. The large west window (which lights nothing accessible inside - a shame!) sits above an elaborate west door which is the main mode of entrance (although there is also a little south porch too).
The first impression of the interior is a little dark. This is partly a function of the gloomy clerestory glass and the large amount of woodwork: not just pews in the nave and aisles, but also galleries in the latter, supposedly put in in 1735 by James Gibbs (architect of the Senate House and the eponymous fellows' building of King's College, as well as the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, and a number of lovely baroque churches in London). That first impression is not just down to the glass and woodwork, though. The stonework in the interior is very elaborately decorated, with almost every stone surface elaborated with blind arcading, quatrefoils and other elements of carving. It's very impressive, but perhaps a little overwhelming: Baroque avant la lettre. I have always found myself preferring the spareness of somewhere like Sutton. Something like that here would really allow the lovely proportions of the piers (so very tall and slender!) and the size of the clerestory (so much glass, so little stone!) to sing. Nevertheless, it is an impressive ensemble, seen from the west end, and the quality of the decorations is so very high that it feels a bit churlish to wish for something simpler.
Let's say a bit more about those decorations. The grandest tracery is in the nave, especially in the spandrels of the arcades, the walls between those and the clerestory windows, and the magnificent chancel arch. There's also some pretty decoration in the aisles. I especially liked a line of moulding which ran along the wall below the windows, regularly punctuated by medallions depicting faces, spirals, lions, shields, and so on, now all painted a jolly red and gold. The church also - in the aisles, and in the nave - has some wonderful early 16 th century wooden ceilings. These were made from a hundred oak trees donated by King Henry VII at the insistence of his mother Margaret Beaufort, great benefactress of the university and foundress of Christ's and St John's Colleges.
As I noted earlier, the 15 th century rebuilding left intact only the walls of the earlier chancel. On the outside these were refaced by the Victorians, and although the interior is still basically the original 13 th century structure, it has been very fiddled-about with, with Victorian choir stalls and piscinae. The east window is from the 14 th century, with substantial 19 th century stonework in the tracery. It's nice enough, but overshadowed for me by the grand niches on either side. Below the window is a striking modern gold sculpture of Christ in Majesty.
There are chapels on either side of the chancel, with dark Jacobean screens. The one on the south is now closed off (as a vestry, I assume), but the arched openings on the north side lead into a nice little chapel for private prayer, the east window of which is a war memorial. The walls here - and throughout the church elsewhere, in fact - contain a number of memorials and monuments to local worthies. There were too many of them for me to document individually, and really none of them were terribly exciting. There weren't as many as you might think, in any case: it is in this respect entirely unlike St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, which is a great civic and academic mausoleum, and feels to me almost as cluttered with the dead as Westminster Abbey.
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Turning back westwards, the large tower arch is mostly filled with the organ (which is why we can't see anything of the large window which is so dominant from the outside). It is possible to climb the tower, for a small fee. That's very well worthwhile, if you've the legs for it; as I said earlier, it's the tallest tower in the county, and the views are spectacular. One can see as far as the rolling hills of western Suffolk, and even to the cathedral at Ely on a clear day. I always find, though, that my gaze spirals inwards from the horizon to the fascinating urban labyrinth in the immediate surrounding. Cambridge is such a lovely, intricate city, the handsome market town adorned (or besieged, depending on how you look at it) with the colleges of the university. You can see so much of it from up here: the elegance of the Old Schools; the incoherent grandeur of King's; the majesty of Trinity and St Johns; the generous openness of Jesus; and the higgledy-piggledy charm of Gonville and Caius, Clare, Trinity Hall, Corpus Christi, and the rest.
On my last visit in June 2019 I spent a good hour up there, letting my eyes roam over the city, enjoying the mix of familiarity and estrangement I felt. The sun was bright, and the blustery wind was warm, bringing me fragments of music from a busker on the pavement far below. Looking down into Room 28 of Market Hostel, the student accommodation on St Mary's Passage where I lived from September 2000 to June 2001, that time was suddenly so close to me that I felt I should be able to reach out in the air and push, so that my earlier self would be able to perceive (in the atmosphere, lit by the younger light) a corresponding trace of movement. I wonder what he would think, if I could trace letters on that membrane? To tell him - at that point mired in the misery of a state school boy suddenly plunged into a terrifying and alienating new world, and counting off the days till he could escape - that twenty years later he would be here, this time not as a student, but as a professor of philosophy, returning to act as external examiner, scrutinizing the very tripos exams which he found so terrifying? In some respects I think he wouldn't be too surprised: he was ambitious and clever and naïve, and - the psychological shock of arrival in Cambridge notwithstanding - all his successes up till that point had come very easily. But what winding paths he has to take to get from there to here, through all the study, and the teaching, and the two hundred-odd churches we've explored with you, to the sun, and the wind, and the music, and this highest tower!
St Mary is usually open.