Coventry Cathedral Porch, Wide Shot - a photo on Flickriver

            Looking up the monumental St Michael’s Steps, an important part of the Coventry Cathedral site and an important pedestrian route in Coventry City Centre. The porch of Coventry Cathedral is an integral part of Basil Spence’s design, connecting the current building to the bomb-destroyed ruins of its predecessor. On the right of shot is the plain glass West Screen which does so much to light the nave of the cathedral (as the modern cathedral is geographically oriented perpendicular to the ecclesiastical sense, this faces south towards the midday sun). Peeking through is part of the floodlit 72 metre high spire of the nearby Holy Trinity Parish Church, originally 14th Century but rebuilt in the 1660s.

Jacob Epstein’s 1958 statue ‘St Michael's Victory over the Devil’ is visible in vividly green oxidised bronze on the lower right of the shot. The statue is 7.6 metres high, with the angels wings spreading for 7 metres, which gives some idea of the scale of the Cathedral complex. On the top left is part of the tower of the original St Michael’s.

The original St Michael’s was almost completely destroyed by the Luftwaffe; the rubble was not cleared for seven years. Only the tower, spire, the outer wall and the bronze effigy and tomb of its first bishop, Huyshe Yeatman-Biggs, survived. Largely constructed in the late 14th and 15th Centuries in red sandstone, it was one of the largest parish churches in England and only elevated to cathedral status in 1918 with the creation of the Diocese of Coventry as a result of rapid population growth in the industrial West Midlands. The Perpendicular Gothic spire still dominates the site: the top of the weathervane is 88 metres above the ground, making it the tallest structure in Coventry; among Church of England cathedrals, only Norwich and Salisbury have a higher spire. The ruins remain a permanent memorial to the 600 or so residents of Coventry who died on the night the cathedral was destroyed. The site of the ruins is open to visitors is are occasionally used for acts of worship, particularly those related to reconciliation.

Just occasionally people tell me they don’t like Coventry Cathedral. I couldn’t disagree more; a powerful symbol of Resurrection, restored to a very different life barely twenty years after being destroyed in the Blitz on 14 November 1940. The Modernist Cathedral of St Michael of the 20th Century both surrounded by and incomprehensible without the ruins of 14th Century building that surrounds it. 

Coventry Cathedral incarnates the twin and interconnected British revivals of the two decades after the end of the Second World War – a revival of high culture and a revival of Christian faith. Basil Spence’s cathedral housing Jacob Epstein’s sculptures, John Piper’s massive arrangements of stained glass into windows, and Graham Sutherland’s tapestry, still in 2021 the largest in the world, represent collectively a totemic achievement in modernist visual arts and architecture.

The brief for the competition to select the architect of the new Cathedral demanded that the design emphasise the celebration of the Eucharist; Spence himself had a further vision of the building as the repository of great modern works of art. He described his building as “a plain jewel casket”. Piper’s windows cast shafts of colour into the heart of the nave, while the plain glass West Screen, which faces to the geographical south, allows much natural light into the building, essential given that the east end is entirely filled with Graham Sutherland’s great tapestry, still the largest in the world at 22 metres tall by 12 metres wide.

Coventry Cathedral was built to a tight budget – “not more than £985,000” – and making much use of reinforced concrete, the new cathedral was constructed in just six years, between Queen Elizabeth II laying the foundation stone on 23 March 1956 and the dedication ceremony on 25 May 1962.

Could there have been a finer or more appropriate setting for the world première of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem on 30 May 1962? On that night, the Cathedral’s great post-War religious theme was also incarnated in the three soloists: Peter Pears (Britten’s partner) from the host nation, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau from Germany, Galina Vishnevskaya from the USSR, representing three belligerent nations. That tri-national partnership continues to be symbolised by the presence of a replica of the Stalingrad Madonna given by the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, where the original hangs, with a second copy being in Kazan Cathedral in Volgograd.

A building that breathes with the presence of the Holy Spirit, giving new life the Church in every generation.

Taken in: UK / England / Coventry (show map)

Taken on: August 1, 2018

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Sets appears in: • Cathedrals of the Church of England

Camera: Nikon D750, f/4.0, 1/13 sec, 40mm, ISO 6400 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D750
Lens:	24.0-120.0 mm f/4.0
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Exposure Time:	0.077 sec (1/13)
Focal Length:	40mm
ISO:	6400
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