Welcome!
Coming soon: A visit to Sir John Soane's Museum, London
. and a touch of the Richard Rogers...
Kind words about the Genius Loci Digest
To receive your Digest is to take a long drink from a cool stream on a hot day. Your beautiful word paintings take me to places I'd forgotten. Thank you. Chris
⚡️ View the latest digest and the full archive here.
📐 My Goals ℹ️ Donations Page & Status 📸 MPP Status 🛍️Shop
A heavenly glimpse of the nave through the west door at Beverley Minster.
The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there
J.A.Baker: The Peregrine
I am a camera
Beverley Minster has always been a kind of threshold for me – a conduit which, through the countless ways I have interacted with the building over 20 years, has contributed to the way that I see the world. But on this day, I find myself on a different threshold.
As part of a day of training for emergency evacuation of people from the roof tower, I stand on the lip of the void to the roof boss that has been hoisted upwards and sideways to reveal the most gut-wrenching, yet mesmerising view of the world below. Next to me, the boss is the size of a dinner table – but from the tower crossing far below, it appears no more than a tiny dot.
As soon as I place my feet upon its circumference and look down, my nerves evaporate in anticipation of what I am about to see. As a photographer, with my camera, I am used to seeing such things from ground level; but now, for the first time, I am amongst the heights of this Gothic wonder without any blinkered device to aid interpretation. This is how the masons who built this place would have seen it – and now this realm of rarified air, this dwelling place of angels, is soon to be joined by a humbled human being.
And then I get the nod to swing out into the opening. It’s an awkward breached entry into the world beneath, but as soon as I’m released from the pedestrian realm of the loft I slip into a different order of being - a counter-visual - a wondrous, magical world revealed from a perspective that I’ve never experienced before.
During my descent, there is a moment that stretches thinly. I turn slowly, and the whole Minster gathers itself before me in one sweeping gesture: geometry drawn taut from east to west, vaults and arcades rippling like concentric waves on water. The interventions that usually stopper my view from my earthly perspective - all gone. The building, stiffened by centuries, seems alive and full of motion, yet time is held in perfect stillness.
Psychologists tell us that time does indeed alter under duress or intensity – the brain, flooded with sensation, lays down more memory traces, and the moment thickens.
Artists have spoken of the experience long before the empiricists. Virginia Woolf spoke of such instants as being beyond the ‘cotton-wool’ of everyday life. They are “moments of being,” when life is gathered into a single heightened perception. Eliot, too, found language for this suspension in the Four Quartets where the dance appeared “at the still point of the turning world.”
But perhaps the most resonant words are from Emily Brontë, who, in her poem The Prisoner, used the image of confinement to express how the spirit, even in captivity, can experience sudden states of release and vision:
But, first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
It comes as no surprise to me that this state exists – I touched upon it in last week’s Digest when I visited Billesley. I first felt it as a balm during breakdown, when my body seemed to shut my mind down – the side of me that held me prisoner. I am beginning to think that that particular state of stasis set me upon this curious journey of recovery.
And yet here whilst suspended in the heights of the Minster, something new happens. The dilation of time opens out into a different kind of revelation – not only the slowing of perception, but a sense of union. In an enthralled moment, I become my camera: lens and body one, an all-seeing eye within the body of the church itself. The nave, transepts, and choir are no longer separate vistas but part of a single breathing organism, and I, suspended at its heart, belong to it as much as it to me. It is not vision in the ordinary sense, but an enfolding: the self dissolved into the space, the space into the self.
From this vantage, the Minster feels less like a monument and more like a steadying hand, a reminder that our need for meaning is as old and elemental as our need for food, love, and shelter. It is, in its own way, my overview effect - not gazing down on Earth from orbit, but seeing the pattern and light embrace the tiny people below. Through shape and shadow, contour and form, I glimpse a deeper coherence – the peaks and troughs of humanity expressed through the material. And in some curious shift in perspective (like the zoom of my lens) it makes the deliberations of the present world seem shallow and absurd. Additionally, it isn’t lost on me that even this experience of wonder is only feasible because of another kind of inheritance: the people, ropes and pulleys, the patient procedures refined over decades, the careful checks and double checks that hold me safe. A choreography of trust rooted in time.
Moments like this are precious because they help us lift our eyes beyond the clamour of the present and glimpse the longer view. And the good news is, we don’t have to be lowered on ropes through the loft of a Minster to find them. They wait in other places – in a flash of bioluminescence, in an accidental camera obscura, an angel hidden in plain sight, or the colour of light over a full day. They remind us that wisdom is often found not by racing ahead, but by walking behind humanity and gathering up the treasures it leaves along the way.* Treasures that can’t be measured in pounds and pence.
Perhaps wisdom lies in this kind of equilibrium – a rare stasis where body and mind, space and spirit, align. It is a place where we can find direction, hope and meaning. For me, suspended in the Minster’s nave, the experience is less about the immediacy of the descent and more about suspension: a pause where the whole of Beverley’s fabric breathes as one, and I with it.
*Grateful to Alister McGrath and John Moriarty for this turn of phrase.
Membership really does help. Thank you.
I wonder if I might ask for your support?
🚐 📸🎨🖊️ Help keep me on the road and go deeper into the overlooked and unseen
Support The Digest
Watch the Video
Through the Ceiling Boss at Beverley Minster
Can't see the video? Click here to view it on full screen
For Members - A jaw dropping 360 view from my vantage point in the crossing
Viewable on any device
Click to ViewKind words from a subscriber:
Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be....
Recent Digest Sponsors:
Andy Marshall
All good things must come to an (abrupt) end..
..and I wish I hadn't worn those socks..
Thank You!
Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 16 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
Member discussion