Something That's Like a Holy Well

The glorious structure pictured here stands in one of England’s most miserable town centres. Inside St Mary’s church, next to the vile blank sides of The Mall shopping centre in Luton, a 20ft octagonal stone enclosure from the 1330s rises above the font, with thin pinnacled buttresses and richly crocketed steep gables.

I’d mentioned recently that, though I’d left it a bit late to visit India, which should take a life’s work to understand, I might perhaps manage a visit to Luton. So last weekend I excitedly took my copy of Bedfordshire, the new volume of Pevsner’s Buildings of England series (edited by Charles O’Brien, Yale, £35), and sped off from St Pancras.