IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
The Pavilion, High Street, WALTHAM CROSS, EN8 7BY

Looking across the Waltham Cross shopping centre. The Eleanor Cross can be seen just to the left of the building with the high chimney. I wonder if this used to be a house.

Plaque commemorating the restoration of the Eleanor Cross in 1989 on the centenary of Hertfordshire County Council.

Looking across towards the Moon and the Cross Wetherspoon, with the Embassy Gala Bingo, formerly cinema, to the right.

According to the name above the entrance this used to be the Embassy Cinema. It is presently being used as a Gala Bingo.

The Eleanor Cross was restored by Hertfordshire County Council in 1989. The ugly building behind is the Pavilions Shopping Centre.

Eleanor Cross as seen from the pedestrianised area near Fishpools.

One of the three remaining of the original 12 Eleanor crosses erected by King Edward I to mark the overnight resting places of the funeral cortege of Queen Eleanor, following her death in Harby on November 28th 1290. Architecturally, it follows the same design as the cross at Northampton http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/535329 and the lost crosses of Cheapside and Charing in London, though more Decorated in style. Hexagonal in plan, it rises through diminishing stages of blind tracery with heraldic motifs, through a second tier of six elaborate pinnacled canopies. These house three statues of Eleanor in traditional pose by master mason Alexander of Abingdon, to a third hexagonal tier of blind tracery surmounted by a cross. Waltham Cross has somehow miraculously survived more than 700 years of adversity including Civil War, encroachment by adjacent buildings, road schemes for turnpikes, the misguided intentions of Victorian restorations and bombs dropped during the Second World War. It now stands much restored and rather ignominiously as the centrepiece of a modern pedestrian shopping area.

Waltham Cross shopping centre with Fishpools on the right and the Pavilions Shopping Centre on the left. The whole of the gallows sign for the now demolished Four Swans public house can be seen. Part of the Eleanor Cross can just be seen on the left of the image just past the Pavilions building.

Fishpools Furniture Store in Waltham Cross is in the pedestrianised area now, but originally had a prime position on the High Street. Part of the gallows sign of the Four Swans Image]can be seen to the left of the image, with the date stamp of 1893 Image] behind the street lamp.