England: Monuments in Shrewsbury

 There is a strange link between these pictures

This is the magnificent 15th century "Angel ceiling" in the nave of the church of St Mary the Virgin in Shrewsbury. One night in February 1894 the town was hit by a terrible storm, part of the spire collapsed and brought it all down.

   Here is a contemporary photograph

  A steel roof was erected to keep the rain out, and the ceiling was all put together again. This must have been like a gigiantic jigsaw puzzle! Only one small part of the ceiling today is new wood: all the rest is the original oak! 

  The story goes that the vicar said that the storm was God's curse on the town - because of a proposal to erect a statue of Charles Darwin, Shrewsbury's most famous son! But if that was indeed the case, it didn't work, because the statue was erected anyway in 1897: it is outside what was once Shrewsbury school, where Darwin was educated, but which is now the town library.

Darwin would have come to the church with the school when he was a boy, but his family were Unitarians and worshipped at the Unitarian Chapel in the High Street, where there is a memorial to him.