The impact damaged the road at the church cemetery. Large chunks of asphalt and mortar lay on the surrounding grass. Near the road, like a broken chess piece, lie the remains of a 150-year-old church spire. A few hours ago, he stood at the very top of the church, towering over the churchyard. Fortunately, the Victorian building fell to the ground and not through the roof of the church. For reasons now unknown, St. Thomas’ Church in Wells is one of the few English churches with a steeple in the northeast corner.
The list of people to call in this emergency is short. The call was answered by 37-year-old James Preston. Preston is a mason and tower builder whose work hangs on almost every historic building that is in the Ladybug Book of British History: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, Longleat, Ladd Cliff Camera and Whitby Abbey, to name but a few.
The spire collapse was caught on video by a neighbor at the height of Storm Eunice in February. When I met Preston six months later, he showed me the workshop where the new spire was being built and took me to St Thomas’ Church. After driving 20 miles, Preston, bristly and tan, told me about the variety of rocks in the West Country. From a geological point of view, we are at the bottom of an oolitic limestone belt that meandered through Oxford and Bath all the way to York and was formed during the Jurassic, when most of the Cotswolds were in tropical seas. Take a look at a beautiful Georgian townhouse in Bath or a small weaver’s cottage in Gloucestershire, and you’ll see ancient shells and starfish fossils. Bath stone is “soft oolitic limestone” – “oolites” means “pebbles”, referring to the spherical particles that make it up – “but we have Hamstone and Doulting stone and then you get crushed stone.” The historic buildings in these areas are usually soft limestone with Bass stone features and possibly Lias rubble walls,” Preston said.
Limestone is soft, brittle and warm in tone, a far cry from the more modest Portland stone we use in much of central London. Regular viewers may notice these types of stones, but Preston has a connoisseur’s eye. As we approached Wells, he pointed to the buildings of Dortin stone from which St. Thomas was built. “Dulting is an oolitic limestone,” Preston said, “but it’s more orange and rougher.”
He described the various mortars used in the UK. They used to vary according to the local geology, and then in the post-war period were rigidly standardized, which led to dampening of buildings with an impermeable mortar sealed in moisture. Preston and his colleagues kept a close eye on the original mortars, disassembling them so they could determine their composition during the simulation process. “If you walk around London, you will find buildings with tiny white [lime] seams. You will go elsewhere and they will be pink, pink sand, or red.
Preston saw architectural subtleties that no one else saw. “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he said. He has been working in this field since he was 16, when he left school to join the same company where he worked for 20 years.
What kind of 16 year old dropped out of school to become a bricklayer? ‘I have no idea! ‘ He says. “It’s a bit strange. He explained that school “isn’t really for me. I’m not an academic person, but I’m not one to sit and study in a classroom either. do something with your hands.
He found himself enjoying the geometry of the masonry and its requirement for precision. After graduating from college as an apprentice at Sally Strachey Historic Conservation (he still works for the company known today as SSHC), he learned how to carve people and animals, as well as how to cut stone with millimeter precision. This discipline is known as bank masonry. “Tolerance is one millimeter in one direction because if you are still too tall you can take it off. And if you stoop too low, you can’t do anything.
Preston’s skills as a mason are a perfect fit with his other skill: rock climbing. As a teenager, he was fond of mountaineering. In his 20s, working for the SSHC at Farley Hungerford Castle, he realized the crew had left a blanket on top of a high wall. Instead of climbing the scaffolding again, Preston used ropes to climb himself. His career as a modern tower has already begun – and since then he has been descending Buckingham Palace and climbing the pristine towers and spiers.
He says that with a careful approach, rope climbing is safer than scaffolding. But it’s still exciting. “I love climbing church spiers,” he said. “As you climb the steeple of a church, the mass of what you’re climbing gets smaller and smaller, so when you get up you become more and more exposed. It comes down to zero and never stops worrying people.” .
Then there’s the bonus at the top. “The views are like nothing else, few people get to see them. Climbing the spire is by far the best thing about working on a cable car or in a historic building. His favorite view is Wakefield Cathedral, which has the tallest spire in the world.” Yorkshire.
Preston turned onto a country road and we reached the workshop. This is a converted farm building, open to the weather. Outside stood two minarets: an old, gray one made of moss-coloured rubble, and a new one, smooth and creamy. (Preston says it’s a Doulting stone; I don’t see much orange with my clear eye, but he says different layers of the same stone can have different colors.)
Preston had to assemble the old one and return its components to the shipyard in order to determine the dimensions for the replacement. “We spent days gluing a few rocks together trying to figure out what it was supposed to look like,” he said as we viewed the two spiers in the sun.
A decorative detail will be placed between the spire and the weather vane: a capstone. Its three-dimensional flower form was created by Preston, faithful to the broken original, within four days. Today it sits on a workbench, ready for a one-way trip to St. Thomas.
Before we left, Preston showed me the yard-long steel bolts that had been inserted into the spire in the mid-1990s. The goal was to keep the spire intact, but the engineers didn’t take into account that the wind was as strong as Eunice’s. An exhaust-pipe-thick bolt bent into a C-shape as it fell. Preston and his crew would have had to leave behind a stronger capstan than they found, thanks in part to better stainless steel mooring rods. “We never intended to redo the work while we were alive,” he said.
On the way to St. Thomas we passed Wells Cathedral, another project of Preston and his team at SSHC. Above the famous astronomical clock in the north transept, Preston and his team installed several relatively clean slates.
Freemasons love to complain about their trade. They cite the contrast between low wages, long distance travel, hasty contractors, and leisurely full-time masons, who are still a minority. Despite the shortcomings of his job, Preston considers himself privileged. On the roof of the cathedral, he saw grotesque things set up for the amusement of God, and not for the amusement of other people. The sight of him climbing the spire like some kind of figurine delights and excites his five-year-old son Blake. “I think we were lucky,” he said. “I really want to.”
There will always be a lot of work. Erroneous post-war mortars occupy masons. Older buildings can handle the heat just fine, but if the Bureau of Meteorology correctly predicts that climate change will lead to more frequent storms, the damage caused by Storm Eunice will be repeated several times this century.
We were sitting at the low wall bordering the cemetery of St. Thomas. When my hand rests on the top edge of the wall, I feel the crumbling stone of which it is made. We craned our necks to see the headless spire. Sometime in the coming weeks – SSHC doesn’t release an exact date so the spectators don’t distract the climbers – Preston and his workers will install a new spire.
They will do it with massive cranes and hope that their modern methods will last for centuries. As Preston muses in the workshop, 200 years from now, masons will be cursing their ancestors (“21st century idiots”) wherever they insert stainless steel into our ancient buildings.