Easter surprise when abbey’s spire collapsed
TEWKESBURY parishioners attending morning service in the abbey church on Easter Day 1559 must have thought the end of the world was nigh when, in a violent storm of heavy rain and whistling wind, the spire came crashing down.
The octagonal spire, constructed from timber and cased in lead, had been added atop the tower in the 12th century. The tower is 148 feet tall, the spire was 130 feet tall, so the combined structure must have been visible across the flat Severn plain from a distance of some miles.
No doubt a lack of maintenance contributed to the spire’s demise.
Until the Dissolution, Tewkesbury monastery was a remarkably wealthy foundation.
But when Henry VIII confiscated land that had previously been owned by the church and sold the abbey to the people of Tewkesbury for £453, which was the value of the lead on the roof, the parishioners suddenly found themselves responsible for the upkeep of the building.
Needless to say, they couldn’t afford to look after the fabric of the abbey and so matters such as routine maintenance of the spire were overlooked.
Actually though, there was nothing extraordinary about a medieval church spire falling down. Lots did.
Lincoln Cathedral had a spire that was 525 feet high at the top – making it the tallest structure in the world – that fell down in 1549. This left Beauvais Cathedral in northern France as the world’s tallest building, until its spire also fell down in 1569.
Norwich Cathedral’s spire fell down in 1362, as did Chichester Cathedral’s in 1861. Closer to home, a spire was added to Painswick church in 1632 that crashed through the roof of the nave after being struck by lightning in 1883, then was rebuilt using the same stone.
Mitcheldean’s church spire fell down in 1733 and was replaced, while Dursley church’s wasn’t replaced when it succumbed to gravity in 1789.
Bucking the trend, St Christopher’s at Warden Hill in Cheltenham has gained a spire in recent years.
Two churches in Gloucester city centre have had the top of their spires nipped off.
St John’s in Northgate Street was built in 1732 on the same site as an earlier church. The building we see today originally incorporated the tower and spire from its predecessor, but the spire was removed in 1910 and now resides in St Lucy’s garden, just a stone’s throw away.
On my way back to the Citizen office in St John’s Lane one day, I listened with great amusement to a selfappointed city guide explaining to a group of American tourists that the snippet of spire they were looking at was the only visible part of a complete subterranean church.
“The Church of England buried it because they couldn’t afford the heating bills” he told the group.
In Westgate Street, the spire of St Nicolas’s Church is also truncated. The tip was knocked off by a Royalists’ cannon ball during the siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War.
Pinnacles at each corner of St Mary de Crypt’s tower in Southgate Street were lopped off in 1910 as they had become unsafe.
Not far away at The Cross, the tower is all that’s left of St Michael’s Church, as the rest of the building was demolished in 1849, then rebuilt, then demolished again in 1956.
The nave of Coleford’s church suffered a similar fate when it was demolished in Victorian times leaving only the tower we see today.
The broach spire of St Matthew’s in Cheltenham’s Clarence Street was not part of the plans drawn up by the church’s architect Ewan Christian. It was added, along with the middle section of the tower, a year or two after St Matthew’s opened its doors in 1879.
By 1952 the spire was giving cause for concern and was taken down. Then in 1971 the middle section of the tower was also removed on grounds of safety.
To see a steeple that’s close to being perfectly proportioned, go to St Paul’s Church in Shurdington. Slender and handsome, it rises to 109 feet and has been struck by lightning on a number of occasions, most seriously in 1894 when much of the structure had to be rebuilt at a cost of £400 (around £200,000 in today’s terms).
According to a local folk tale, St Paul’s steeple caused a man’s death. The story goes that when the builder of the steeple at nearby St Peter’s in Leckhampton was unable to match the perfection of Shurdington’s spire, he took his own life in shame.