A ‘Close’ is the enclosed area around a Cathedral, or a residential cul de sac. ‘The Close’ in Salisbury is the Cathedral Close.
Often the Cathedral is enclosed by a wall all the way around. In Salisbury however, the River Avon forms a natural barrier, so the wall stretches only around 2 sides of the Close.
The wall was built in 1330s and 1340s 1, using stone from the demolished cathedral at Old Sarum.
James Wyatt, working for Bishop Shute Barrington, seems to have done a great deal to improve the Close, although the changes he made within the Cathedral are not universally appreciated – Pugin called him ‘a monster of architectural depravity’2. The Close lawns were created from what had been a boggy area, used partly as a graveyard and partly as a cow-pasture. 3
Today, in the words of Bill Bryson,
there is no doubt in my mind that Salisbury Cathedral is the single most beautiful structure in England and the Close around it the most beautiful space. 4
Footnotes
- Crittal, Elizabeth (editor) (1962). ‘Salisbury: The liberty of the close’, A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 6 (1962), pp. 72-79. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=41783. Date accessed: 26 June 2008. [↩]
- “Pugin, Salisbury and St Osmunds”, John Eliot, Sarum Chronicle 2002 [↩]
- Shortt, Hugh (ed) (1972). Salisbury; a new approach to the City and its neighbourhood, London: Longman, p52. ISBN 0582101239 [↩]
- Bryson, Bill (1995). Notes from a Small Island, HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-552-99600-9 [↩]
[...] Sarum fell. More prosaically, it seems that the Church already owned the land which was to become The Close, and the site had both easy access to water, and the natural barrier of the River Avon on two [...]