SALISBURY

Salisbury is a medieval cathedral city in the southern English county of Wiltshire. It’s 9 miles south of the iconic prehistoric stone circle at Stonehenge, which stands on the grassland of Salisbury Plain. The city’s ornate 13th-century cathedral has a 123m spire, a working 14th-century clock and an original copy of the Magna Carta (the Great Charter), a key document from 1215 A.D.

When we visited there was an exhibition of tapestries by the artist Grayson Perry “The Vanity of Small Differences”. The tapestries look at English class through the story of the life of Tim Rakewell, and his progress through modern British society from humble birth to famous death. They are composed of characters, places and objects that Perry encountered on his travels through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and the Cotswolds. As well as drawing on these experiences, Perry also took inspiration from art-historical imagery: often early Renaissance religious works but also, and most importantly, William Hogarth’s series of paintings A Rake’s Progress (1733), which tells the story of the rise and fall of a young man who loses his inherited fortune through a series of bad decisions.