Samantha Yates Samantha Yates

Church Crawling in York

It began with a lovely day in August in York with Church Crawling and Sharon of NU_B Design. Sharon is a fellow student from the Stained Glass Conservation and Heritage Management Course at The University of York and together we joined Rob Andrews ( Church Crawling) for one of his walking tours of Medieval Churches in York. He’s just so incredibly knowledgeable about the Art and Architecture of Historic Churches.

The sun was shining and we had a great day visiting four churches All Saints Pavement Church, Holy Trinity Church, All Saints North Street and St Marys BishopHill Junior. The last one was an added bonus and not too far away from the last stop, the pub! The Golden Ball pub Rob took us to is a community-run pub with fabulous Victorian features exterior tiles and a Victorian layout.

Like a true geek, I used an App, Google Keep to save photos and take notes on my phone. It syncs with my Uni Google account so now I have a lovely record of notes and photos with a separate folder for each church on my phone.

We saw the reuse of stonework and glasswork, the medieval waste hierarchy at work and I was struck by the wealth of information there is to decode in each church, I’ve since bought How To Read a Church, a pocket guide by Richard Taylor which I think is going to be helpful interpreting common features and symbols.

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