Category Archives: Sacred Places

Amazing Grace

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Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco

Grace Cathedral, up on the heights of Nob Hill above downtown San Francisco, is an uplifting space.

It’s a pure thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, built of concrete between 1928 and 1964 to the designs of Lewis Parsons Hobart (1873-1954) to replace a predecessor destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.  Hobart’s wife was a cousin of William H Crocker, the donor of the site.

In the tradition of much older churches, the interior of Grace Cathedral is an essay and a narrative, with murals by Jan Henryk De Rosen, and stained glass by Charles Connick of Boston and Gabriel Loire of Chartres, two of the greatest stained-glass designers of the twentieth century.  The bronze Ghiberti west doors are the reproductions that the Nazis made of the Florentine originals which they removed during the Second World War.  The 44-bell carillon in the north tower was built by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, and donated by a Methodist dentist from Penzance, Nathaniel T Coulson:  it was first played in 1940.

It’s a beautiful building to visit – light, spacious, peaceful, welcoming.  The glass tints the interior blue, Gabriel Loire’s preferred colour because, he said, “La paix donne la joie.” (Peace gives joy.)  There are two labyrinths, one on the forecourt and the other at the west end of the nave – mysterious aids to meditation based on the medieval original at Chartres.

There’s something curiously Californian about this inclusive, relaxed place that takes itself seriously with delicacy.

The Grace Cathedral website is at http://www.gracecathedral.org.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Gothic New York: St Patrick’s Cathedral

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St Patrick's Cathedral, New York City

St Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City

When building began on the site of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1858, New York City’s Catholics complained about how far out of town it was.  The cathedral fills the block between 50th and 51st Streets, Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue.

In mid-Victorian times the area was barely populated;  now it’s in the midst of “the most expensive street in the world”, directly opposite the Rockefeller Center, from where it’s possible to gaze down on the 333-feet-high spires of James Renwick Jnr’s very conventional English and French Gothic Revival church.

The church, built of brick faced with white marble, was dedicated in 1879, and the towers added in 1888;  Charles T Mathews designed the Lady Chapel addition which was finished in 1906.  It was eventually consecrated, having being declared free from debt, on October 5th 1911:  it had cost, up to that time, around $4 million.

The impact of twentieth-century development on its surroundings is stunning.  Yet, inside its dark portal, the seductive darkness of soaring Gothic arches provides a dramatic sense of entering a different world with different priorities to the world outside.

Over the years it has been the centre of solemn events not only for New York’s Catholics but for its wider population:  here in June 1968 Edward Kennedy eulogised his dead brother Robert, the New York Senator;  here also were ceremonies to remember the victims and heroes of 9/11.

Somehow, the thick walls and dark glass shut out the noise of Manhattan.  Here is a haunting, dignified, echoing space in which to rest and be thankful.

I’ve visited New York City repeatedly, and even if I’m only there for a day or two I always try to visit St Patrick’s.

The St Patrick’s Cathedral website is at http://www.saintpatrickscathedral.org.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

2 Corinthians 9:7

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St Martin-on-the-Hill Church, Scarborough, North Yorkshire: Miss Mary Craven's pew

St Martin-on-the-Hill Church, Scarborough, North Yorkshire: Miss Mary Craven’s pew

St Martin-on-the-Hill Parish Church (1861-2) on the South Cliff at Scarborough is celebrated for its rich collection of pre-Raphaelite art.

It was financed by Miss Mary Craven as a memorial to her father, a wealthy Hull surgeon.  She provided £7,600 of the initial £8,000 cost of this remarkable building, and in the period up to the time of her death in 1889 contributed a further £2,000.

Naturally, this meant that she largely got her own way in determining what the church would be like, and how it would be run.  Her architect was the young George Frederick Bodley, whose father was a Hull physician, and he introduced his friend William Morris and his associates Edward Burne Jones, Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb.  Between them, they provided brilliant stained glass, wall decoration, carving and furniture.

Mary Craven’s role as sponsor also allowed her to choose the first vicar, Rev Robert Henning Parr, previously the young and enthusiastic curate of Holy Trinity, Hull.  It seems that the establishment of this beautiful church was a remarkably harmonious project:  Mary Craven, G F Bodley, William Morris and Robert Henning Parr all appear to have got on well with each other.

This is just as well, because the High Church tendencies of the new parish upset many Anglicans in Scarborough, and for a time Archbishop Thomson refused to consecrate it because Rev Parr declined to charge pew rents.  Even then, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s exquisite painted pulpit had to be curtained over to avoid offending the archbishop.

Ironically, one pew was reserved, and still carries its brass plate – “Miss Mary Craven’s seat”.

Furious arguments about the Anglo-Catholic goings on at St Martin’s were tempered for a long time by Archbishop Thomson’s friendship with Archdeacon Blunt of Scarborough, with whom he regularly spent seaside holidays.

So often, the history of Victorian parishes reads like a Trollope novel.  Here at least the vicar didn’t end up in jail [see Liverpool 8 Churches (1)].

And Scarborough has, to this day, the finest collection of pre-Raphaelite art in the north of England.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral (Gibberd version)

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Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool

When I take groups to Liverpool, I love to lead them from one cathedral to the other, usually from the Anglican Cathedral, which has pointed arches and a vista towards a distant high altar, to the spectacular circular space of the uncompromisingly modern Catholic Cathedral.

The Metropolitan Cathedral, as it is properly known, was initiated in 1960 when Archibishop (later Cardinal) John Heenan decided a cathedral had to be built, and quickly, on the Brownlow Hill land that had been a building site since the 1930s.

His brief, in the years before the Second Vatican Council, was to have a building that would give a congregation of two thousand an uninterrupted view of the high altar, would cost no more than a million pounds, and could be built within five years.

The competition winner was Sir Frederick Gibberd, who engineered a circular space, with a corona supported by ring beams held in place by sixteen angled pillars and diagonal concrete buttresses.

Within each bay of this structure he placed a variety of free-standing chapels, most of which were initially left plain for future generations to embellish.  The echoing space of the interior is lit by John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens’ deeply coloured glass.

The Metropolitan Cathedral was consecrated in 1967 – completed on time and within budget.

Like so much 1960s architecture, the haste to complete meant that new, untried materials were used which did not stand the test of time.  Within a generation, the leaking roof had to be reinstated and much of the cladding replaced.  The processional approach that Gibberd intended was only constructed at the start of this century.

Nevertheless, the spiky profile of the Metropolitan Cathedral has integrated into the Liverpool skyline with a much lighter touch than Lutyens’ bombastic basilica ever could.

It’s ironic that the architect of the Anglican Cathedral, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, was a Catholic;  Sir Frederick Gibberd, architect of the Catholic Cathedral, was in fact a Methodist.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral (Lutyens version)

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Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool: Lutyens crypt (foreground); Gibberd cathedral (background)

Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool: Lutyens crypt (foreground); Gibberd cathedral (background)

When Liverpool’s Catholic community returned to the task of erecting a cathedral in 1930 under Archbishop Richard Downey using the site of the former Brownlow Hill Workhouse, they planned a church to dominate the cityscape even more than E W Pugin’s elegant Gothic design of 1853 at Everton would have done.

Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) designed a monster basilica in what he called his “Wrenaissance” style.  Nearly as long, yet wider and higher than St Peter’s in Rome, its dome would have been half as tall again as the tower of the Anglican Cathedral, and significantly larger than the domes of St Peter’s or London’s St Paul’s.  The Victoria Tower of Liverpool University, across the road on Brownlow Hill, would have fitted inside the entrance arch.

A vast architectural model, seventeen feet long and over eleven feet high, was built as an aid to fund-raising:  it has survived and is displayed in the Museum of Liverpool at the Pier Head:  [http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/conservation/departments/models/lutyens]

Lutyens cheerfully declared that the actual cathedral would take four hundred years to build.  The foundation stone was laid in 1933 and the first mass said in the crypt in 1937.  At the time of the 1941 Blitz, the sole remaining mason was obliged to down tools and work stopped entirely.  The crypt, which had already consumed four million blue bricks, was partly adapted as an air-raid shelter, and otherwise left open to the weather.

After the war, a reduced version of Lutyens’ design was commissioned from Adrian Gilbert Scott, brother of the architect of the Anglican Cathedral, but dismissed as unworkable.  The incomplete crypt was put to use for worship and as a parish centre.

What was built of Lutyens’ cathedral is an awesome space which hints at the scale of the unbuilt structure.  Within, under what would have been the high altar, the tombs of some of the early archbishops are contained in a vault guarded by a seven-ton marble rolling stone, representing Christ’s tomb in Gethsemane.

I once saw the rolling stone roll.  It’s operated by the sort of winch that’s still sometimes used for the house-tabs in school assembly halls.  The sound of seven tons of marble rolling into a doorway is like nothing else.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral (Pugin version)

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Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Everton, Liverpool (1990)

Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Everton, Liverpool (1990)

Almost as soon as Liverpool became the centre of a re-established Catholic diocese in 1850, the first bishop, Alexander Goss, commissioned Edward Welby Pugin to design a magnificent Gothic cathedral which was to stand on Everton Brow.

There is an image of E W Pugin’s perspective view of the planned St Edward’s Cathedral at https://www.liverpoolmetrocathedral.org.uk/the-first-cathedral.  The complete building would have been a dignified cruciform structure with a tall tower and spire, providing a fine landmark overlooking the Mersey.

From the Wirral bank of the Mersey, or from a vessel in the river, you can pinpoint its location behind and slightly to the north of the existing St George’s Parish Church

Building began in 1853, and stopped again three years later because of the pressure to provide churches, schools and welfare for the huge population of Irish and other immigrants that flooded into mid-nineteenth century Liverpool.  There simply wasn’t the money to spare for grand building projects.

All that was ever built of Pugin’s great cathedral was the Lady Chapel and its two side chapels, and these were converted into an odd-looking parish church, Our Lady Immaculate, which stood on St Domingo Road until it was demolished in the early 1990s.

It was said at that time to be unsafe, though I felt – and still feel – that it was a pity that this relic of the early Victorian growth of Catholic Liverpool wasn’t somehow preserved.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Island of hidden gems

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Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church, Ramsey, Isle of Man

The Isle of Man lacks a volume of Pevsner’s great buildings series:  Sir Nikolaus spent much of his life compiling the first edition Buildings of England, and since he completed the original series in 1974 his successor editors have additionally laboured at the Buildings of Wales, Buildings of Scotland and Buildings of Ireland.  The Isle of Man belongs to none of these territories, and so far has no comparable catalogue of its architectural heritage.

This is a pity, because the island contains a wealth of structures, from pre-medieval crosses and chapels, called keeills, to high-quality nineteenth- and twentieth-century churches and public buildings.  Among the nationally-known architects who have worked on the island are George Steuart, Peter Paul Pugin, John Loughborough Pearson and his son Frank Loughborough Pearson, Ewan Christian (based in England but descended from an old Manx family), Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and the theatre-architect Frank Matcham.

Alongside these luminaries, Giles Gilbert Scott built Our Lady Star of the Sea & St Maughold RC Church on the seafront at Ramsey in 1908-10.

It’s immediately recognisable as by the same hand as Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral by its simple, sheer surfaces, tricked out with decorative features high up, including a crucifix high on the liturgical east wall (which actually faces west) and a balcony at the top of the hip-roofed tower.  Carving dies into the stonework, exactly like the Lady Chapel of Liverpool Cathedral.  Much of the Horsforth stone tracery is obscured on the outside by protective glazing.

Within, the interior is lit only on the (geographical) south:  the opposite wall is blank except for a low Gothic arch opening into the Lady Chapel and the windowless wall behind the altar is dominated by a dramatic full-height painted triptych.

Designed when Scott was in his twenties, shortly after he began work on his great cathedral, Our Lady Star of the Sea is an unexpected, precious piece of architectural genius in the wide-open spaces of the under-developed resort-town.

The Isle of Man is full of surprises.

Service times for Our Lady Star of the Sea & St Maughold are available at http://www.ourladyandstmaughold.org.  Background information on all the Catholic churches on the Isle of Man is at http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/parishes/rcath/rc.htm.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Younger architect in Liverpool

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Liverpool Cathedral

Liverpool Cathedral

The achievement of Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, winning two competitions to design what became St George’s Hall, Liverpool, between the ages of 25 and 27, is remarkable;  even more surprising was the result of the competition to build Liverpool Cathedral fifty years later.

1880s plans to build an Anglican cathedral on the St John’s site, backing on to St George’s Hall, came to nothing:  no-one could find a way of building a church that would sit comfortably alongside Elmes & Cockerill’s great classical temple.

The eventual site, St James’ Mount, was chosen and the customary architectural competition organised, with a controversial stipulation that Gothic designs would be preferred.

When the 103 anonymous entries were assessed, the judges were disconcerted to discover that the winner was the 21-year-old Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott, who had designed, amid much else, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station.  To add to their discomfort, Giles Scott was a Roman Catholic.

The committee asked him if he’d designed anything before.  Yes, he said, a pipe-rack for his sister.  In the end, Scott was given the commission, as was his right, but under the supervision of one of the assessors, the veteran Gothic Revival architect, George Frederick Bodley.

Bodley’s influence is apparent in the florid decoration of the first section of Scott’s cathedral, the Lady Chapel, begun in 1904.  It was an uncomfortable arrangement:  Giles Scott’s resignation was ready to post when he heard the news of Bodley’s death in 1907.

By the time the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1910, Scott went to the building committee and calmly proposed a radical redesign.  Instead of twin towers, he wanted a single tower above a majestic central space.  This was not straightforward, for the foundations of the two towers were already in place, which is why the cathedral as built has twin transepts and twin central porches, one of which stares vacantly over the chasm of St James’ Cemetery.

The 331-foot Vestey Tower, named after the Dewhurst butchers’ dynasty that paid for it, contains the highest and heaviest ringing peal of bells in the world.  The central space below could accommodate Nelson’s Column if Nelson took his hat off.  The tower was completed in 1941, in the darkest days of the Second World War.  “Keep going, whatever you do, even if you can only go on in a small way,” King George VI advised on a wartime visit.

Sir Giles Gilbert Scott died in 1960, his final contribution the Nave Bridge which frames the vista towards the High Altar.  The west end was eventually finished, to modified designs by his professional partner, Frederick Thomas in collaboration with Roger Pinckney, and dedicated in the presence of HM Queen Elizabeth II in 1978.

Sir Giles and Lady Scott’s remains lie before the west door of the completed cathedral.  The Winter 2010-11 edition of C20 – the magazine of the Twentieth Century Society mentioned that the stone marker of [their] grave has been removed and that they rest “in an unmarked grave as cars and delivery vans to the café and shop frequently drive over [them]”.

That may be true, but it can’t be right.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

The Padley Martyrs

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Padley Chapel, Grindleford, Derbyshire: interior

Padley Chapel, Grindleford, Derbyshire: interior

North Lees Hall was built by the Jessop family, associates of George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, probably in the 1570s.  Lord Shrewsbury was staunchly Protestant, and had a political need to distance himself from the Catholic captive queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, whom he guarded for fourteen years.  The pressure to demonstrate adherence to Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant settlement was at its most intense in the late 1580s, the period of Mary Stuart’s execution and the Armada, and Lord Shrewsbury made a particular point as Lord Lieutenant of enforcing the recusancy laws that oppressed practising Catholics.

The resulting atmosphere of paranoia and persecution must have been akin to modern totalitarian regimes.

At that time North Lees was leased to Richard Fenton, one of the original Twelve Capital Burgesses of Sheffield and a Mayor and alderman of Doncaster who lost influence in the late 1570s because of his Catholicism.  By 1580 he had chosen to retire to obscurity at North Lees:  on his way through Sheffield his baggage was searched and revealed “books and other furniture for Mass”, a discovery which aroused no immediate comment but was doubtless carefully noted.

On Candlemas Day, 1588, acting under the Earl’s orders, one Roger Columbell –

…went to the Northelees and took Mr Fenton, and searched his house, but found no suspicious persons.  He used himself very obediently and came with him willingly to Haddon where he shewed a protection and desireth if it may stande with your Lordship’s pleasure, to have the benefit thereof for the liberty to be in his owne house,…And if this cannot be graunted him then his humble request is that he maye have respit to goe to his own howse for a week to take order for his things, and, chiefly, to comfort his doughter [sic], who was broughte in bed the same morninge and seemed amazed at his soden apprehension.

It seems likely that Richard Fenton was not released to return to North Lees until he left detention in London late in 1589.  He was repeatedly imprisoned until his death around 1604.

A couple of miles away, Padley Hall, outside Grindleford, belonged to Sir Thomas Fitzherbert, a recusant who in 1588 was found to be harbouring two priests, Nicholas Garlick (c1555-1588), Robert Ludlam (c1551-1588), who along with a third priest, Richard Simpson (c1553-1588), were subsequently martyred at Derby on July 25th of that year. These three – energetic and determined men in the prime of life – were beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987.

Sir Thomas Fitzherbert, who was also arrested, died in the Tower of London in 1591.

Padley Hall itself gradually declined until in the late nineteenth century much of it was ruinous.  In 1933 the remaining barn was converted into a Roman Catholic chapel to commemorate the Padley Martyrs by the Sheffield architects, Hadfield & Cawkwell.

Padley Chapel is usually open to visitors on Sundays through the summer.  Its website is still under construction but details of opening arrangements are at http://www.derbychurch.net/find/detail.php?OrgRef=padleychapel.  The nearest Tourist Information Centres are Bakewell [01629-816558] and Castleton [01433-620679].

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No expense spared 2: Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool

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Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool: library

Alongside the three Horsfall churches I mentioned in Liverpool 8 Churches (1), the Toxteth area is studded with fine Victorian places of worship.  Almost next door to St Margaret’s, Princes Road (1868) is the Old Hebrew Congregation Synagogue (1871), and across the road the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas (1870).  Round the corner, as Princes Road widens into a leafy dual carriageway where the trams once ran on a reservation, stands the Adult Deaf and Dumb Institute (1886-7) which had an octagonal chapel so that the whole congregation could see the minister’s signing, and further down on the opposite side is the desperately sad wreck of the Welsh Presbyterian Church (1868), apparently the richest and finest of them all, now a largely roofless shell.

Of all the Christian places of worship in Liverpool 8, perhaps the most surprising is the Ullet Road Unitarian Church, designed by Thomas Worthington and his son Percy in two stages, 1896-9 and 1900-1.  Unitarianism is a very individualistic creed, centred on the belief in the single personality of God, which regards Jesus Christ as a prophet rather than a divine person of the Holy Trinity.  It comes as a surprise to the non-Unitarian visitor, then, that the Worthingtons’ church has virtually all the features of an Anglican parish church, pews, pulpit, lectern, choir-stalls and reredos, all in the finest Gothic Revival style using the very best materials.

The place is an opulent essay in Gothic and Art Nouveau, with reliefs and wall paintings by George Moira and Morris & Co stained glass mostly designed by Edward Burne-Jones.  The electroliers that light the nave are original, and tucked away behind the chancel arch are original 1890s electric lamps.

This was a congregation that wielded heavy political clout in nineteenth-century Liverpool:  the previous church in Renshaw Street included among its members the poet and anti-slavery campaigner William Roscoe, William Rathbone V, who was Mayor of Liverpool in 1837-8, his son William Rathbone VI, who was MP for Liverpool from 1868 to 1880 and helped found University College Liverpool and the University College of North Wales, and Robert Durning Holt, the last Mayor and first Lord Mayor of Liverpool in 1892-3.

The generation that moved their church out of the city-centre to Sefton Park could command serious money.  Robert Durning Holt’s mother, Mrs George Holt, didn’t like the idea of an interior in bright red Ruabon brick, and paid for it to be faced in dignified Runcorn sandstone.  The cloister and meeting hall were funded by Sir John Brunner, whose chemical company later formed the basis for ICI, and Sir Henry Tate, whose name lives on in the sugar company and the gallery that he gave to the nation.  Sir John Brunner appears in one of Moira’s wall-paintings as the philosopher Aristotle.

To see all these places of worship around Sefton Park would take two days minimum.  Even to see a couple is a forcible reminder that this was a city of huge mercantile wealth a century ago, a place where adherents of every faith sought to assert their presence with the finest architecture of their day.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on Liverpool architecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.