Bristol Cathedral

About this place

Walk in through the west door, get halfway down the church and look up: the side aisles here climb to exactly the same height as the central vessel, with no step in the roofline and no clerestory windows. Architects call this a 'hall church', and Bristol has the most important one in Britain; even the unforgiving Pevsner judged the early-fourteenth-century choir superior to anything else built at the time in England or Europe. For an ordinary visitor the effect is plain enough: one broad, evenly lit space rather than a dim nave flanked by corridors. The building is far older than its front suggests. It began as St Augustine's Abbey in 1140, founded by Robert Fitzharding, and only became a cathedral in 1542 after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. Its rarest treasures sit off the obvious route: the Norman chapter house through the cloister, from around 1160, its walls cut with zigzag carving and pointed arches that are among the earliest in England; and a Saxon stone panel of roughly 1050 showing Christ in the underworld, found in 1832 doing duty as a coffin lid beneath that same chapter-house floor. The long nave you enter through is, by contrast, almost new: left unfinished all through the Middle Ages, it was finally built by G. E. Street between 1868 and 1877, with the twin west towers completed in 1888. Crouch under the choir stalls and you will find misericords carved between about 1515 and 1526, most of them Aesop's fables. Entry is by voluntary donation, suggested at 5 pounds a head, with no booking and no queue even in August, which alone makes it a restful alternative to Bath Abbey fifteen minutes away by train. Most people are done inside an hour. The main entrance is level and fine for pushchairs, though the chapter house involves steps and an uneven floor. Pinkmans cafe occupies the cloister and there are free family trails. At the time of writing the Elder Lady Chapel (c. 1220) is closed to visitors, and the upcoming Access for All project (a new lift and step-free access through the cloister) will shut other areas in phases, including the cloister and cafe at times, so check the Visit page before you go. Getting here is the easy part: it stands on the grass of College Green opposite the curved City Hall, five minutes from the Harbourside and twenty to twenty-five minutes on foot from Temple Meads station, less by bus. If you have legs left, Cabot Tower on Brandon Hill is ten minutes uphill and gives a free view over the whole city. In winter the visitor doors close at 16:00 and it is dark before then, so make this an after-lunch stop rather than the end of the day.