My friend Liam is a civil engineer (not that he’ll read this, some best friend…..) and I thought of him when reading the cathedral’s comments that their structure has four quite big construction problems. Now, a medieval version of Liam would have blamed the architects and it’s clear that they made a few little errors as well.
The first problem is that they built the cathedral in the wrong place. There is the story that God chose whether to site the building by making a miracle happen, but he chose a place that was very sandy which feels sub-optimal. The engineers got building their lovely new cathedral and discovered almost immediately that the tower was sinking and leaning, which caused quite a commotion. They built brick ribs and added walls to fix the little problem, but that didn’t much help.
The second problem is that they couldn’t make bricks. They couldn’t afford to ship stone in from France, which would have been the sandstone that most cathedrals at the time used, so they instead used brick as that worked for the Romans. So they got some people together to make bricks, but the things they made were riddled with cracks and crumbled. The cathedral’s new facade crumbled away within years and so had to be rapidly replaced with some new bricks as they had become more experienced by this point.
The third problem was a bit later when the repairs to fix the earlier problems started. They used Portland cement which was unsuitable and led to some bulging of the stonework and bits promptly fell off the towers. I can imagine the annoyance of the engineers who whilst trying to fix earlier problems ended up creating new ones.
The fourth problem is that they had to keep patching up the frontage because of the succession of building errors. They, on numerous occasions, patched up the outer layer of brickwork, but failed to actually attach it to the stonework behind it. This led to cracks of the outer layer and, once again, bits kept falling off. Recent investigations have shown that just 11% of the original masonry has survived, the other 89% is more modern and attempts to fix the construction errors that have occurred.
All of this has combined today to mean that the cathedral is currently faced with another major restoration, because the towers are still not stable. I think it’s clear that the bombing of the cathedral in 1942 didn’t much help matters, but the problems are much longer-term. I rather liked the whole engagement that the cathedral showed with this, it’s clear that many cathedral projects didn’t go to plan, although this one seems to have had more problems than most.