Great Stairs: Lytham Hall

One of the greatest features of the Georgian style of building is its pleasing symmetry. While the Victorians enjoyed sticking turrets here and bays there, and the Tudors typically just extended whatever they inherited, builders in the eighteenth-century saw the value of balance, equipoise, and equilibrium. Take the main staircase at Lancashire’s Lytham Hall:

But for the posture of the sculpture and the head inside the oil painting, the left might be a mirror reflection of the right. All is perfectly matched and harmonised.

Becoming a Christian does not make our bodies heal from the effects of Adam’s curse, nor do we become more intelligent. Yet the sense of balance we lost is slowly restored. Those scales tipped in favour of self tend to lift in favour of God and others, as we become the people God originally intended us to be: more balanced, more stable, more composed.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. Gal. 5:22-23, NKJV