The curious case of the crooked spire
Poor though they undoubtedly are—I snapped them through the streaked window of a moving train—these photographs show the curious spire of Chesterfield parish church.
Chesterfield is a Derbyshire market town thrust into the post-industrial modern world. Parts remain quite charming (eg the precincts of the church), but 20th and 21st Century development has been (and continues to be) unkind. Local heavy industry was associated with coal mining so, to some extent, it was invisible beneath the ground. Uglier sites and sights, like the Avenue Coke and Chemical Works, are demolished, replaced with soulless constructions of modern industrial estates or cramped estates of shoe-box housing. Never-the-less, the coke works was a far more dismal, hope-sapping sight on black winters' nights as I returned to Leicester and its art school after a weekend spent with my parents in Yorkshire.
Clearly a once-important town, Chesterfield had three railway stations but now has only one. Amongst its remaining assets is Revolution House, a 16th Century thatched cottage where, in 1688, conspirators first met and mooted the so-called Glorious Revolution that eventually displaced the Catholic King James II with the Protestant William of Orange. Just behind is the similarly vintage public house (pub) The Cock and Magpie (originally The Cock and Pynot, the latter being an old local word for the piebald corvid).
Famous sons of Chesterfield include the actor John Hurt, the photographic pioneer Francis Frith, and a number of famous parliamentarians. Though not originally from Chesterfield, its most famous MP is probably the late left-wing politician Tony Benn, formerly Sir Anthony Wedgewood-Benn (related to the famous ceramics pioneers), who gave up his peerage and his double-barrelled name to sit in the Commons. Father of the Railway, George Stephenson, also lived in Chesterfield towards the end of his life.
Added in the mid-14th Century, the crooked church spire rises to 228ft, leaning nearly 10ft from its centre while simultaneously twisting through 45°. Much speculation has been given to the cause of deformation, from the folkloric to more historically- and scientifically-based conjecture. I was only familiar with the first of the following fantastical explanations.
Legend suggests that, when a virgin married in the church, the spire twisted around in surprise to look at the bride. Another story tells of the Devil leaping over the spire in pain, knocking it out of shape after he was mis-shod by a blacksmith. Yet another has the Devil sitting on the spire so that, when the townsfolk rang the church bells to dislodge him, the startled demon jumped away with his tail still wound about the spire, pulling it out of true.
Etcetera...
More plausibly, the lead sheet covering the spire, heated by the sun and asymmetrically expanding and contracting over many decades, exacerbated by its 33-tonne-weight, applied torque beyond the structural capabilities of the timber bracing.
Other explanations also involve poor materials or inexperienced builders, including the absence of appropriately-skilled labour after the then-recent bout of plague. All the same, it's still there after six hundred years.
Outside of South Yorkshire and the north Midlands, I don't know how famous the church spire is, though it was seen nationally, as an engraving, in the titles of an early BBC TV sitcom centred on the misadventures of clergy in a fictitious cathedral town.
I found two videos that might be of interest in reference to Chesterfield. The older of the two, in black-and-white, depicts the re-leading of the spire. The second shows Revolution House, formerly The Cock and Pynot public house.