In turning what began as a fascinating idea into the reality of a book I have visited or revisited almost all of the ‘other cathedrals’. Some seemed like old friends; others were new to me. Most rewarding in architectural and artistic terms have been those medieval churches fully of cathedral size and splendour and still in use today – such as Beverley Minster, Tewkesbury Abbey and Westminster Abbey. But many others are equally exciting. Some are mutilated but still in use. Chester St. John, though now only a parish church, began life as a Norman cathedral: the outside is battered and partly in ruins, but the inside is splendid. At Bridlington Priory only the nave still stands, but this is convincingly of cathedral scale and quality. Also wonderful are some of the successors to lost Anglo-Saxon cathedrals, especially the thrilling abbeys of Dorchester (Oxfordshire), Hexham and Sherborne.
Rewarding in a different way are those that are now in ruin. Some, such as the famous Fountains Abbey, are superb and inspiring even in their roofless state. Others are much more ruinous: for example, though enough remains of Bury St. Edmunds Abbey to show how enormous and magnificent it must have been, one’s main feeling must be regret for what has been lost.
A very different pleasure has been seeing the cathedrals of the nineteenth century and later. Many of these have been new to me; indeed, most are little known. Yet they are often a delight. An example is Portsmouth’s Anglican cathedral. From east to west it has first beautiful work of about 1180, then of the late 17th century, then the 1930s, and finally of 1991. Another is the Roman Catholic cathedral at Brentwood, most of which was built in 1989-91, remarkably not ‘modern’ but in an exquisite baroque style that might have been designed by Wren.
Some visits have been memorable for other reasons. One took me deep into the bowels of Welbeck Abbey to see the surviving medieval parts of what might have been made a cathedral by Henry VIII. The abbey is now a vast mansion mostly of the seventeenth century and later. For sixty years it was used as an army college, but in 2005 it returned to being entirely a private home. As a house it is amazing; but equally so are the underground rooms and tunnels built round it for the eccentric Victorian fifth Duke of Portland. Some are dark and mysterious, but the ballroom, newly decorated, is a vast and wonderful room lit by skylights. Extraordinary in an entirely different way was a visit to the Central Church of the Catholic Apostolic Church. This once-important denomination now has no priests or services. The huge and splendid church stands near the British Museum in Bloomsbury; yet it is little known: it is normally inaccessible, and being unfinished it lacks its intended 300-foot tower and spire.
Equally exciting have been aspects such as the history revealed by these ‘other cathedrals’…
