Professor Vale

Scholar of sacred topography, who reads London’s ruined chapels and old route shrines as though the city were a layered commentary waiting to be decoded.

Professor Vale is one of the celebrities London’s learned and technical world has made of its own, named with Professor George Hatherley of the antique mechanics lectures and Professor Alexander Flint of the foundries. Where they deal in instruments and metal, Vale deals in ground. His subject is sacred topography: the ruined chapels, old route shrines and holy places of the capital, which he reads as though the city were a layered commentary waiting to be decoded.

His standing rests on method as much as on learning. To read a roadside shrine or a chapel in ruins as one line in a longer text is to treat London itself as a document, and Vale has made himself a celebrity by doing it. A company whose business turns on an old chapel, a disused shrine or a route whose sacred markers have been forgotten would find him the scholar most likely to know what the place once meant, and what else lies beneath it in the layers.

In person

Professor Vale is tall and exceptionally thin and angular, in his late forties, with very dark, straight hair worn to the shoulder and a streak of silver over the right temple. He wears a narrow pointed beard and moustache on a long, angular face, and thin circular spectacles with one lens darkened. He dresses in a charcoal travelling coat over a dark-violet waistcoat, with a tall hat, and carries a closed umbrella along with his maps, sacred-topography papers and restrained survey instruments.