Is Christianity on the retreat? Not in Fleet Street. I don't use the term metonymically, as referring to the press, but mean the place. The church of St Dunstan-in-the-West has a new peal of bells. When consecrating them, the Bishop of London observed that it's the fourth such ceremony that he's performed in the past couple of years. The 10 bells will first be heard ringing out a full peal for the Jubilee. The ringing of church bells is associated with St Paulinus, Bishop of Nola in the 4th century.
Nola is in Campania, hence campanology. Change ringing, however, is unique to these shores. The first bell ringers were university types, who delighted in complex mathematical permutations, the equivalent of Sudoku puzzles. Strictly speaking, the result, as Dorothy L.Sayers observed in The Nine Tailors, isn't musical, being purely systematic, but it's a joyous sound. The 10th-century St Dunstan was a bell founder, and the new bells are the work of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
Nobody in the packed church, whose Romanian congregation spills onto the streets at weekends, could doubt the spiritual vigour of the occasion. In Town Mouse's opinion, those responsible for filling the vacancy at Canterbury need look no further than the Bishop of London.
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Can't you hear me S.O.S? Our treasured native dog breeds are at risk of extinctionDo you know your Kerry blue terrier from your Lancashire heeler? A simple lack of publicity is often to blame for some of the UK's native dog breeds flying dangerously low under-the-radar.
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'There are architects and architects, but only one ARCHITECT': Sir Edwin Lutyens and the wartime Chancellor who helped launch his stellar careerClive Aslet explores the relationship between Sir Edwin Lutyens and perhaps his most important private client, the politician and financier Reginald McKenna.
