Great St Mary’s Church, Cambridge

Long time readers will know that one of my favourite things to do is visit churches – not for any spiritual reason but architecturally and historically, and if it’s possible I take the opportunity to climb up into towers and onto roofs. Great St Mary’s is often recommended because its tower gives great views of the city, so I duly put it on my list of things I wanted to do.

Great St Mary’s is the parish church for the centre of Cambridge and since 1209 the university church. The current church dates from 1478 and the tower reached its present height of 114 feet (35 metres) and 123 steps in 1608. Price of admission to the tower is £6 (the church itself is free to visit). One thing I particularly appreciated is because the tower is so narrow with no passing places the person manning the shop has a video system so they can see who is going up and down and can tell you over loud speaker when its okay to head back down so you don’t get into an awkward tangle moving around people.

The views really are great and if you intend to visit then making it an early stop in your day really helps in getting your bearings. Below you can see views looking at Senate House

The Market

and Gonville & Caius College.

After enjoying the views I moved down to explore the church itself. One of the things I was struck by was how small it felt, perhaps all the talk of the tower made it feel bigger on the outside.

One interesting part of the church are the galleries, which you don’t see a lot of in churches these days. They were constructed back in 1735 so that the large number of university students who came to hear the sermons would have somewhere to sit instead of standing in the aisles.

There’s also of course some lovely stained glass windows that were added in the late 1860s.

One other thing to look out for is this war memorial on the outside of the church. It’s a bronze plaque that was unveiled in 1905 in memory of men from Cambridgeshire who died in the Boer War.