The Guildhall and Stonebow has been the meeting place of Lincoln City Council from medieval times to the present. The term stonebow is derived from Old Norse and means a stone arch. The first gateway on the site dates from around 211AD. The Guildhall which was located elsewhere was moved to above the stonebow in 1237. The present Guildhall however dates from 1520.
The Lloyd’s building, sometimes referred to as the Inside Out Building, for obvious reasons, is the headquarters of the insurers Lloyd’s of London.
The Town Mission Ragged School in Brook Street in Nottingham was built in 1858. Ragged schools were developed from an idea of John Pounds, a Portsmouth shoemaker, who believed that poor children should have basic schooling rather than being sent out to work. The Earl of Shaftesbury then formed the Ragged School Union in 1844.
The Hunterian Museum within the University of Glasgow is Scotland’s oldest public museum. Free to enter, the museum began when William Hunter, a Scottish anatomist and physician, died and left his collections to the university. The museum first opened in 1807 at the university’s old campus on the High Street and then moved to the new campus in 1870.
The University of Glasgow was founded in 1451 making it the fourth oldest university in the UK and second oldest in Scotland. They do run tours of the building for visitors but they weren’t running on the day I went so I did the self-guided tour which can be found on the university’s website.
Provand’s Lordship was built in 1471 and is one of Glasgow’s few surviving medieval buildings located not far from the Cathedral. It was built by Andrew Muirhead, the Bishop of Glasgow, as part of the then St Nicholas’ Hospital.
It should be obvious by now that I enjoy exploring a good cemetery and Glasgow’s Necropolis is one of the best. Established in 1832 it’s located on a hill next to Glasgow Cathedral (featuring in a future post) that, like Highgate in London, was inspired by Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
I visited Sandys Row Synagogue in Spitalfields as part of Open House London and was impressed both by the warm welcome and the interior which is much more beautiful than its exterior would suggest. The building started out as L’Eglise de L’Artillerie (the Artillery Church) in 1766 being consecrated as a synagogue in 1876 for the Dutch Ashkenazi Jews, economic migrants who had begun moving to the area in the 1840s.
I hadn’t heard of St Vedast-alias-Foster before I noticed it was forming part of Open House London last year. It’s dedicated to a French saint who was Bishop of Arras around the 6th century.
Weekday Cross used to be the site of Nottingham’s market place and the civic centre of medieval Nottingham. It’s unclear when the actual cross was erected though it’s first mentioned in around 1549 and was pulled down in 1804. The current cross was erected in 1993.
