Durham Cathedral
The Tower covers are finally off, the scaffolding is down after 3 years & the main tower is open again!
This is what it looked like with the covers on and often a lot of stuff in front of it.
It's sad that most of the time these lovely buildings have to have so much work going on which maskstheir beauty but it's the price of keeping them alive for future generations. Here's the BBC article about the work.
St Mark's Basilica was covered for ages, I stopped taking photos of it when I was doing the Great Rail Journeys tours. I can't imaging what Notre Dame will look like as it is being renovated. Think it will take more than the 5 years they forecast but I'm sure they will do it even if it doesn't look like the original. It's hard to get the specialist people to produce the craft work necessary. Durham have their own team & train apprentices as I suppose all cathedrals do but the amount of work needed to renovate Notre Dame is colossal.
Now there's lots of work going on inside Durham cathedral providing new entrances to improve access and to show more of the architectural features of the doorways which have been hidden. Hopefully it will be finished by Christmas.
Today there were visitors from many countries including France, Canada, Australia & the USA. Hope they enjoyed their visit even though they are not seeing the cathedral at its best.
