week 10: St Ethelburga's wall

You may be forgiven for thinking I snuck off  to some Moroccan destination, looking at this photo. The truth however is even more interesting. This lovely location is right here in the heart of London, though I will admit the sky doesn't actually look like that; I replaced the drab building in the background with this sky, but it is a London sky taken last year in October, so its not cheating too much :-)

St Ethelburga's centre for reconciliation and peace is a London based charity situated in a small (rebuilt) church and its backyard. Though the charity is independent of the Church of England, the church bit of their property is still consecrated ground and christian services are held there. The backyard is less traditional (and also where this photo was taken). It consists of a lovely little space with raised beds and a water feature (on the other side of this wall) and to the left of the photo would be the yurt in which they hold several different kinds of events ranging from reconciliation talks to meditation sessions. Though they are Christian-led, they provide hospitality for people to resolve conflicts from across the world, including interfaith conflicts and hold that they want authentic dialogue between peoples of different faiths without either side trying to "convert" the other. Quite an different point of view from what one usually hears.

The photo as I said was processed to have the lovely blue sky in the background, which immediately lightens up the photo enormously (this was taken in the shade on a slightly overcast day) I wish I could have gotten the whole window into the composition too, but I was as far back as I could go, and changing the angle would have cut off the door, but I want to go back there and take this shot again with a wide angle lens when I have a camera that can do that.