Kings College Chapel
Location: Cambridge, England
Master Masons: Reginald Ely, John Wolrich, Simon Clerk, John Wastell
Completed: 1515
11 Photographs
For a bloke from a small town out the back of Australia, spending a decade living in Cambridge, where the buildings are almost a thousand years old, felt at times like a fairy tale. I will always remember cycling recklessly along the narrow Cambridge streets in the wintertime, the slippery cobbles glistening in the lamplight, passing wooden portals in stone walls to strange worlds beyond, sometimes open, usually not. Beyond each of these gateways, I soon learned that all sorts of wonders lay waiting to be discovered, and of these that I know, the ‘little chapel’ at Kings College is my most beloved. The most extraordinary building in Cambridge and one of my favourite buildings in the world.
I do not remember exactly the first time I entered, I think it was the first time I visited Cambridge, but I found myself returning time and time again over the years. Every chance I had to take someone new, I would. It used to be free to visit if you were a resident of Cambridge and I loved to wander in on occasion and sit quietly while the tourists milled about. The experience of being a resident in a tourist town can be frustrating, but equally one is able to visit something like this over and over again when its beauty is enough to draw people from all corners of the globe to just see it once.
I cannot effuse enough about the chapel itself, so I will not even try but instead recollect the first time I met my good friend and collaborator, Peter Salter. We discussed two things that stand out amongst many, fly fishing and fan vaults. Peter had recently written an article about fan vaults, the miraculous stone vaulting system ingeniously employed in at Kings College to extraordinary effect, and we discussed the similarities between the two, the nature of tension, compression, and suspension. I was already in love with the chapel and I recall pondering the two interlinked discussions. I did learn to fly fish rather badly but like with a lot of what I learned from Peter, it will take me another decade or so to figure out what it really meant.
I contemplated not including this building, not because it’s more than 400 years older than nearly every other building I love, nor because my perspective may be clouding my favour, but because of just how little justice photographs can possibly do to a place like this. The grandeur of the exquisite stone ceiling is impossible to convey, much less the light from the stained glass coming in from all sides. I cannot do it justice, no matter how my photographs might try.
HWLK