In Pursuit of Spring
Visiting Leicester and the place where Richard III was found beneath a car park felt like a kind of pilgrimage to me - though not in the devotional sense. It was not about reverence, but about standing in one of those rare modern locations where conjecture gives way to evidence - where something long held in the mythical and the magical has, quite literally, conjured itself out of the earth beneath our feet.
Against all odds and against all expectations, the remains of Richard III were found in 2012 beneath a municipal car park on the site of the former Greyfriars friary. For centuries his place of burial had existed in the realm of conjecture - shaped by chroniclers, sharpened by Shakespeare, suspended somewhere between fact and fiction.
Then upon the instinctive inclination of a single woman, Philippa Langley - the Leicester City Council Social Services car park was excavated and almost at the first scrape of the tarmac - the bones of a single occupant - with a battered skull and curved spine - were discovered.
What is electrifying about visiting the burial location now is the building that has been constructed around it. Its geometry encapsulates the mysterious bounds of myth through a deliberate use of filtered light and sharpened line. Planes tilt and converge. The eye is drawn downwards - from abstraction to evidence - until it rests on the material facts beneath the floor: the muddy imperfection of a cut grave, edged by fragments of medieval tile. Nothing is embellished. All lines and filtered light lead to the material truth and the joyous relief of discovery.
The building, in this way, has become vocal. The observer becomes a participant in the story. Architecture here performs a powerful act by translating rumour into substance.
That certainty continues across the square inside Leicester Cathedral, where the Swaledale limestone tomb marking Richard’s re-interment carries its own gravity. The slab’s mass and restraint leave no doubt as to the transformation of fable into fact. Stone has a way of settling an argument.
Go and see them both. They are miraculous in that they teach us how to really see. The trench and the tomb are two places that hold between them the movement from story to substance. At a time when so much feels provisional and endlessly revised, there is something delightfully restorative about standing before earth and limestone and knowing that they do not spin.
Weather: I think this is, perhaps the start of the start of spring - or a false spring? 14.5 degrees celsius. Yesterday - I came to a halting screech in a little village called Hough-on-Hill in Lincolnshire at the sight of some daffodils next to a lychgate with a green man on the fascia. They led me to a remarkable Saxon survival - more in a later digest.
Observations: Saw the unmistakeable silhouette of a hare as I set off from Greetham at 0730 this morning. In Leicester, next to the Museum, I saw parakeets.
Total Miles Travelled: 1200 miles.
Leicester Cathedral - here.
"That aura, those echoes-the muted light is transporting. What a space to feel rooted in history. I'd love to make that journey myself; you've stirred the opera lover and architectural dreamer in me."
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