I've tried several times over the past year to visit the church on Salmon Lane but the minister has been reluctant to let me inside - again last Sunday he told me it wasn't possible to look in the chapel, even just to peek at the windows. His resistance adds to the curious, closed and rather dejected feeling of the building and its community which, it seems, will remain something of an enigma to me... So instead I am turning my attention to the hexagonal glass windows in the loading bays at Smithfield Poultry Market.
From the very top of a cupola greater in size than that in St Peter's in Rome right down to the ground, enormous walls of wax, vertical, double and parallel descend; enormous geometrical constructions suspended in the darkness and emptiness...
Re-designed by Thomas Bennet after a fire destroyed the original Victorian building in 1958, the Poultry Market opened in 1963. From the street the walls are imposing, austere, and hive-like in their design: the double-height, tesselating glass and concrete panels topped by 'stacks' of rectangular windows and pitched roofs. Inside, the glass blocks illuminate the bays in stunning geometric pattern - like Modernist, monochrome stained-glass windows. I am reminded of Maeterlinck's description of the beehive-as-cathedral as he imagined how awesome a hive would look to us if we were the size of a worker bee. Also, again, of Ellard and Johnstone's Machine on Black Ground...
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