Bristol Cathedral

We fully visited the Cathedral on Saturday 13th November 2021.

The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Bristol, was another building we tried to visit on the afternoon of the12th, but it was closed to visitors as they were doing graduation ceremonies for Bristol University on that day. So, we returned on the Saturday.

We tried to walk around the outside first, only to find an ugly concrete carbuncle cutting off the view from the south of the building. (Don’t worry, the carbuncle isn’t pictured.)

It has been said that St Jordan, one of St Augustine’s companions had been buried at a chapel where College Green to the north of the Cathedral sits, which suggests there has been a place of worship here since the early seventh century, although no physical evidence of this remains. (It’s a good story though.)

The current building started life as St Augustine’s Abbey, founded by Robert Fitzharding in 1140. The transepts and chapter house date from the twelfth century. The Elder Lady Chapel from 1220, and the choir, Berkeley Chapel (pictured below) and Eastern Lady Chapel from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

The tower and cloister were added in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Abbey extended. However, this expansion ceased with the reformation and the planned building of the nave ceased until the later half of the nineteenth century.

After the dissolution of the Abbey, the church was raised to become a Cathedral in 1542, its diocese being created from parts of the Gloucester and Wells dioceses. It was reabsorbed into the Gloucester diocese in 1836, before again becoming its own diocese again in 1897.

Between 1868 and 1888 the current nave and west front was built in Gothic Revival style under architect G.E. Street and completed by John Loughborough Pearson, one of the foremost restoration architects of the Victorian era, and as a whole it forms one of the best examples of a hall church (nave, aisles, choir and transepts roofs are all the same height) anywhere in the world, and it was described by Pevsner as “superior to anything else built in England and indeed Europe at the same time”.

I managed to resist my usual inclination and actually went around the building in a clockwise direction, I’m usually hard wired to default to heading around churches and Cathedrals in an anti clockwise direction (and against the numbered laminated guides they let you have). And in doing so I visited the two Lady Chapels in the correct order, both from an age and a wow factor perspective, and I was glad I did so.

The Elder Lady Chapel off the north transept is a large impressive space and has some very interesting carvings on the walls and at the foot of the memorial in the alcove.

It is a good size (though granted nowhere near as large as Ely’s Lady Chapel which is larger than a lot of churches I’ve visited), and I was quite impressed by it. Right up until the point when I walked into the Eastern Lady Chapel.

Just wow, I haven’t seen anything quite like it in this country. The gilding, the colours, the stained-glass windows, the carvings. It’s difficult to do it justice in words (or pictures). Just take a seat and look around in wonder.

It is no surprise to me at all to find that when I bought the guide book upon leaving (after having to track one down now they no longer have their own gift shop), the front cover is a picture of the chapel.

There isn’t a lot of stained glass throughout the rest of the Cathedral, with just fragments in most of the windows of the aisles. What is there, especially on the north side where a lot of windows were replaced after bombing in the Second World War, is very good.

John Loughborough Pearson returned to restore the stunning light stone fifteenth century reredos in 1899,

which creates a wonderful contrast to the dark wooden seats of the choir, and the magnificent Baroque organ that dates from 1682, renewed by J.W. Walker & Sons in 1907, it is said to be one of the finest English Romantic organs in existence.

There is a lot to see and enjoy in the Cathedral, although it is probably not a good idea to visit it straight on the back of having been to St Mary Redcliffe. And usually I would exit through the gift shop, but as I mentioned earlier they no longer have one due to the third party that was running it having pulled out when Covid started. And having been to A LOT of Cathedrals and churches over the last five years and buying items in all of their gift shops, they are missing a fundraising trick.

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