Practicalities
There are sections below on travel & weather; opening hours; related books and web pages; as well as information on the photographs and how these web pages were constructed. If you want to see details of the walks themselves, the material is presented in four parts on different web pages:
General Orientation. |
Once England's capital, but now a quiet market town, Winchester is built on the banks of the river Itchen in Hamphsire. The cathedral lies to the south of a high street which was originally laid out before the Romans came to Britain. |
The cathedral exterior. |
A walk round the exterior of the cathedral shows how it has been modified over the years, and how building techniques and architectural ideas evolved over the 800 years between the original construction (shortly after the Norman conquest), and the substantial repair work which became necessary in the 20th century. |
The cathedral interior. |
The motivation of the original builders can best be understood inside the building, which contains the graves of Saint Swithun, King Canute, Jane Austen, and Isaac Walton, among others. |
The environs of the cathedral. |
Nearby we find a number of historic buildings, some of which have close associations with the cathedral. Two walks around the town cover the highlights of Winchester architecture and history. |
Like all personal home pages, these are basically vanity publishing. Nevertheless, they have taken a lot of effort to assemble. In doing so, I had two aims:
Please send comments to:
Winchester@reedhome.clara.co.uk
Strangers to the town are best advised not to try street parking, which is difficult to find, and not very convenient.
The nearest car park to the cathedral is in Colebrook Street, behind the Guildhall, but this is also difficult to find, and usually full. The shoppers car parks in Friarsgate, close to the shopping centre are a better bet for easy access to the cathedral. Follow signs to city centre short stay car parks.
The car park in Chesil street is well placed for long-stay parking. It lies at the foot of St Giles's hill which gives the best panoramic view of the town centre. Alternatively, to avoid a steep climb, take the car to the top of St Giles' hill via Magdalen Hill, Quarry Road, and Northbrook Avenue.
Railtrack timetable search
The cathedral is about 1/2 mile walk from the railway station.
On weekdays there are services at 7:40 (Morning Prayer), 8:00 (Holy Communion) 12 (Holy Communion on Saint's Days and Thursdays), 5.30 (Choral Evensong)
There is a voluntary, and eminently reasonable, donation of £2.50 requested on entry. Tours of the tower carry an additional charge. There is no charge for photography.
Most of the external shots used the Canon FD 35-105mm f3.5 zoom. Internal shots were taken mostly taken with Canon FD prime lenses - either for extra aperture, or for wider angles of view. A few with cheap Vivitar equivalents which I have used while I wait to find (or save to afford) the Canon alternative. All equipment was bought second-hand, based on invaluable advice from the Canon FD pages.
| 35-105mm f3.5 Bayonet | Two touch zoom which handles well, and is extremely versatile, but large and heavy even by the standards of the day. This is my default lens for normal use, and by far the most heavily used. Most of the exterior shots were with this, but it does have some constraints. It provides insufficient aperture for cathedral interiors, has limitations in close focus, and in extreme circumstances, such complex optics have difficulty controlling flare. |
| 80-200mm f4 Breechlock SSC | Another two touch zoom which handles well, but again heavy. Used here for some of the distant shots, and for the gargoyle. |
| 24mm f2.8 Bayonet | I use this as widest angle available for internal shots. Needed for some internal views, but 24mm is about as wide an angle as I am comfortable with for normal circumstances. (I occassionally use a very old Sigma 18mm which is not great quality, but can produce dramatic effects in good light) |
| 28mm f2 Breechlock SSC | I only bought this recently to provide more aperture than 28mm f2.8. Very pleased with the quality and crispness of the results. |
| 28mm f2.8 Bayonet | Good budget lens, which I only replaced recently with the f2 - mainly to get more aperture for interior shots. |
| 35mm f2 Bayonet | A lovely lens, which I should use more, but mainly use when I need to control flare better than the 35-105 zoom. |
| 50mm f1.4 Breechlock SSC | The widest aperture I have available, and used for general shots at lower light levels. The 28mm f2, 35mm f2 and 50mm f1,4 make a good, well match mid-to-wide angle set. The 24mm f2.8 seems to be more contrasty than these. |
| 85mm f1.8 Bayonet | My widest aperture long lens - I use it too little, and rarely in Winchester, but when I do I'm always impressed by the clarity of the results. |
| 200mm f2.8 Bayonet | My longest prime lens - has a good reputation in general, but mine was bought cheap and in poor condition - probably a mistake. |
All pictures (so far) have been hand held, and with natural light
I am lucky enough to live about 15 miles from Winchester, so the pictures were taken during a number of brief (mostly half-day) visits from early 1997 to mid-1998. The most interesting external shots have been in autumn, winter and spring light. Inside the cathedral the light is most dramatic on sunny winter days. However, direct sunshine in a dark cathedral becomes very contrasty. General internal views are less risk on summer days with diffuse light. Not that any of this helps while the weather has a mind of its own, and I grab whatever opportunities I can. Essentially I take the only option I have of keep returning until I get the picture I am happy to live with.
One advantage of winter visits is that there are fewer other visitors competing for clear viewpoints. Early mornings help also.
I initially used Ektachrome Elite II, 200ASA almost exclusively (occasional experiments with Ektachrome Elite 100ASA) for its good colour saturation and practical working speed on interiors. Unsurprisingly, the notorious Elite 200 grain has not been a problem when digitising slides. It does show on projection in a few cases, but only a few cases. Now I use Elite Chrome - still at 200.
The slides were digitised by scanning onto Kodak Photo-CD: arranged through my local camera shop. It took about a week.
This must be the worst publicised service in the industry. I was considering buying a scanner until I discovered from the web that Kodak offered better quality scanning, at what is effectively a lower cost, and then happened to mention it to our local camera dealer. Subsequently I have discovered that the service is widely available.
I used Photo Paint (part of Corel Draw version 7) to crop and clean up the images. The pictures fall into two categories - thumbnails and headers embedded in HTML and background base pictures. The embedded pictures had brightness, contrast, perspective, and cropping adjusted for best effect. The others are simply converted to JPEG without any further editing.
Initially I used heavy compression for fast loading, but now sacrifice speed for better quality. All are stored in progressive JPEG format because personally I prefer to see the gradual emergence of a picture rather than a gradual reveal.
The maps and diagrams were developed in Corel Draw and held in GIF format.
Most of the original text was prepared in Microsoft Word for speed of entry, spell checking etc. This was pasted into HTML and edited using trial copies of various HTML editors. Once things were under way though, I came to the conclusion that it was more interesting, almost as easy, and cheaper to use a standard text editor - in this case GNU EMACS. I do not use any of the HTML extensions because I seem to find it easier to remember HTML grammar than extensions to the EMACS command set.
The style (such as it is) is loosely based on Philip Greenspun's suggestions, various style guides on the web and HTML: The definitive guide, by Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy, published by O'Reilly.
To speed loading of the pages I added image height and width using the perl program WWIS, which an be downloaded at http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~ark/wwwis/.
The pages are hosted by Clara.Net who were chosen on the basis that they offered a choice of Email addresses for different members of the family, a generous allocation of space for web pages, and a competitive price. Subsequently I also have experience of their excellent standard of support.
I have used various web based tools to monitor and improve the pages, for examples try The Web Site Garage and The link exchange
The pages have been in place now since October 1998, and I log all the accesses to them. For what its worth, here are some experimental analyses of the log. They are produced automatically by a set of Perl programmes which I am building mainly as an exercise in learning Perl.
Winchester cathedral web pages. Nicely presented pages with pictures, and practical details.
Photographs, plans and cross-sections. Part of a rich site on Medieval architecture, (but puts Winchester in Kent, not Hampshire).
History of the catholic see of Winchester. A brief history, up to dissolution.
Winchester information from IBM. Emphasis on local pubs and restaurants, a with city centre map. Provided by IBM, who have a centre nearby.
Winchester Town Pages. A directory.
Wincity. An innovative approach to building a virtual city based on Winchester.
Hampshire's Christian heritage. Other historic churches in Hampshire - from Hantsweb.
Winchester economic indicators. From the Department of the Environment - fascinating, if you like that kind of thing.
Hampshire county council. Provide comprehensive Hanstweb pages covering a wide variety of local information.
Area map. Including local web sites.
Travellers world. With local accommodation details.
Winchester sundials. Some sundials around the cathedral, with details of local walk.
Not an easy read, but well illustrated and fascinating to study.
Fascinating detail - but beginners, don't start here!
Generally well illustrated, its brief coverage of the cathedral and other famous historic buildings allows room for more broad coverage of Winchester’s domestic, military, public and other church architecture.
Not casual reading.
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