City of legend

Kings, cobbles, secrets, superstition and literary fire power—Winchester has had it all in spades for centuries and is as desirable now as it ever was, says Jason Goodwin

- Jason Goodwin

SET into the flint wall that runs between the Abbey Gardens and the Paradise, at the eastern end of Winchester Cathedral, is a low archway picked out in brick, shuttered up with stone. Into it is distilled the history of Winchester and, perhaps, the secret of its agreeable charm: humble and royal, churchy, but not stuffy, practical and unobtrusive and layered, like the city around it, in wreaths of legend and fantasy. Throw in excellent schools, a buzzing, cobbled centre, trains to London in less than an hour and glorious, rolling river valleys on the doorstep and it’s easy to see why the ancient capital of Wessex is consistently ranked among the happiest places to live in the UK.

Winchester has always loved its kings—and the kings loved Winchester. ‘The king in Winchester, the primate in Canterbury, “like two strong oxen pulled the plough of England”’, wrote Hilaire Belloc in The Old Road (1904), which charted the pilgrim way between the two cities. The bones of Saxon and early Norman kings and queens are to be found above the choir in the cathedral, in reliquary chests called Foxe’s Boxes (after a wily 16th-century bishop); they have been hopelessly jumbled up ever since Cromwell's invading Puritans used them to smash the stained-glass windows. The violence unleashed on Winchester and its cathedral and castle after its capture by Parliamentary troops in 1642 reflects the depth of the city's Royalist and Anglican loyalties. Perhaps the most magnificent symbol of Winchester's sympathies is the extraordinary sweep of the Great West Window in the cathedral. Originally arrayed with the usual panoply of saints and saviours, the medieval glass, shattered by the Puritans, was swept up and hidden by the townspeople in bags and boxes until, almost 20 years later, with the Restoration, its fragments were reset in a glittering mosaic, creating an astoundingly abstract testament to memory and faith.