Exeter
What to See
You’ll find accounts of Exeter’s tourist attractions in Towns of Two Halves (and of 91 other places: order the book now for £8 from info@townsof2halves.co.uk). For additional information plus shopping, eating out etc there’s Visit Exeter.
Links to local points of interest include:
● Bicton Park Botanical Gardens
● Custom House Visitor Centre
● Exeter Castle
● Exeter Cathedral
● Exeter Trails
● Quayside
● Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery
● The House That Moved
● Underground Passages
‘Any city with league football, Roman ruins, a Decorated Gothic cathedral and a waterfront has a lot going for it’
Towns of Two Halves extracts:
● “The west is the direction to approach [the cathedral] from. Across the entire width of the West Front, three ranks of carved figures stand. At ground level are angels, supporting on the middle tier kings of Judah, and above them apostles, evangelists, prophets and images of the Virgin Mary and of God. Originally the entire assembly would have been in colour. It must have been an astonishing sight.”
● “The Exeter Civic Society teasingly refers to the ‘Famous illuminated clock at St John’s’ without saying what made it Famous. The explanation may simply lie in the Society’s weakness for random capital letters; it also records the destruction of St Edmund’s in the 1970s ‘by Vandals’.”
● “The Northcott Theatre was putting on The Ministry of Fear, a dark Graham Greene novel turned into an opaque play. Someone had decided the production would benefit from musical accompaniment. The first half proceeded to the sawing of a bow across what might have been a one-stringed instrument. I sensed the interval would be too short for me to drink enough to fortify myself against much more of that.”
These are taken from the Exeter chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To order a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.