Cologne Cathedral
The Gothic cathedral beside Cologne’s main station; see Cologne.
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neither Here Nor There | Bill Bryson | subject | A mighty cathedral ruined for Bryson by the barren concrete plaza around it. |
Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)
Source: Readwise highlight
If you can imagine Salisbury Cathedral in the middle of a shopping-center parking lot, you may get the picture.
- Role: subject
- In the book: Chapter 7. “Cologne is a dismal place, which rather pleased me,” Bryson writes: it is comforting that the Germans “could make a hash of a city as well as anyone else”. You come out of the station and the cathedral stands at the top of an escalator, in “a vast, windswept, elevated concrete plaza that is heart-numbingly barren and forlorn”. He goes in, and walks on to the terrace over the Rhine. Later the station’s porn cinema puts him off staying, and he leaves for Amsterdam.
- Why it matters: It’s his evidence that postwar planning could wreck even a famous city, and the counterweight to the small cathedral at Aachen that moved him the day before.