Cathedrals, even more than palaces, were built to impress the ages.
They proclaim wealth and achievement in architecture, engineering, art—and power. They are theatrical, imposing, and inspiring: immense halls that once sparkled with jewels, brilliant glass, precious stone, and polished surfaces. Their vaulted ceilings rise like forest canopies of stone, or like vast tents hung with painted cloth.
Look again, however, and the dim spaces are crowded with graves and ghosts. The stone is worn smooth by centuries of worshippers; the fabric bears scars from warfare, riot, neglect, and repair. The Dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in the 1530s inflicted irreversible damage on many of England’s greatest religious buildings, and later conflicts—the wars of religion and the Civil War—compounded the losses.
Restoration, too, has often been destructive. Designs were revised, surfaces scraped back, fittings replaced, treasures discarded. Yet I remain an admirer of Sir George Gilbert Scott and the craftsmen who worked with him—especially John Hardman Powell—during the great Victorian restorations of the mid-nineteenth century. Their work was not archaeologically neutral, but it was generally conservative, highly skilled, and sympathetic to both Norman mass and Gothic line. Much of what they made has become inseparable from our sense of what an English cathedral is.
The photographs in these albums were taken during a short visit to the west of England in October 2025. They are not attempts at completeness, but at attention: to surfaces altered by time, to light filtered through old glass, to repairs that reveal rather than conceal history. If these buildings were made to impress the ages, they are now best understood by looking closely at how they have endured them.
Bath Abbey
Chester Cathedral & Gt Malvern Priory
Gloucester Cathedral
Hereford Cathedral
Worcester Cathedral
Cover images only. See below for links.
You'll find these PDF albums here: Bath, Chester & Gt Malvern, Gloucester, Hereford, Worcester. Each is about 10MB. Please open them in e.g. Adobe Acrobat or Preview and view them "full screen".
Or, why not download all five albums at once and browse the set? The compressed folder is here (about 48MB)
Or, why not download all five albums at once and browse the set? The compressed folder is here (about 48MB)
