200words: the weston tower

Jesus said relentlessly, “the Kingdom of God is like..” and so his church, with similaic vigour, makes metaphors manifest. Ptolemy Dean was appointed in 2012 to make "these stones … speak to all of the beauty of God's holiness". (ref)

Like how?

This Kingdom of God is a buried treasure, a concealed weapon, a tower-counted-the-cost-of, a new shrine in old design skins.

This Kingdom of God is a burnished black lantern staircase in the nook of a niche, an eight pronged arachnoid, a coal scuttled gun black friar in hooded holster, a stealth bomber quartered in a smuggler's cove, a dark horse stabled in an ungilt American Radiator cupola, a gratuitous crossbreed of Hawksmoor's proportions and Heath Robinson's brass spun spindrel mannerism buttressed by dark satanic milled lead chevron gills.

This Kingdom of God is Ruskinian. A modern Gothic synthesis of the natural and the grotesque. A lift shaft in the Butterfield and Street tradition bores theological up through slathers of geological strata, with the same affectation to cover the same crisis of faith but now with less actual polychromy than the Victorians. The warmly textured, divinely authored fossil record, which layers authorship into archaeology is a metaphor now obscured by façadism's barcode vogue.

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(beyond 200 words)

This Kingdom of God is a spiral staircase, this spiral staircase, precisely in its inbetweening, imminently on-its-way not-yet, a betwixted cosmic interstice, the 108 steps to your best life now, in the now, not merely the winding route to @wabbey's cash in the attic, heavenly relics now postured spot-lit amongst the rafters of Quasimodo's loft apartment.

This Kingdom of God leads up to a private members' club. It's a £5 premium to be up in the gods, with less riff raff more ruffs in this inner sanctum. Glide the gloomy horseshoe, past the world's oldest stuffed parrot, to behold Heiman's monumentally melancholy portrait of a lone Liz the last queen of England.