A GREEK IN CHESTER

In Gillian Darley’s marvellous biography John Soane: An Accidental Romantic, I discovered that the great London architect visited Chester many times to follow the progress of the neoclassical buildings there of Thomas Harrison, which he accorded rare praise. Harrison, a Yorkshire joiner’s son, had gone to Rome in 1769, aged 25, spending seven years there, against the months that bricklayer’s son Soane managed in 1778-9. Soane did go South, however, studying Greek temples at Paestum and in Sicily, which were influential on him, but it was Harrison, returned to the North, who built the purest English expression of Greek revival. His Northgate, above, was built in 1808, carrying a fashionable promenade atop the town’s mediaeval walls across the road; but it’s his work on Chester Castle, below, 1790-1815, with its austere Propylaeum and the elegant, deep portico of his Shire Hall, that is really extraordinary. The Shire Hall's interior is a wonderful, semi-circular, half-domed space, now a criminal court, which a kind policeman allowed me to see, but not photograph.

Above, details of the miraculously fine stonework and detailing of Harrison’s Castle buildings. Below, the other glory of Chester, its cathedral, whose choir, dating from 1380, is a feast of delicate and fascinating woodcarving, with a series of amazing, contorted dragons and beasts forming sculpted finials, bottom.