To paraphrase John Lennon, Westminster Cathedral isn’t the most famous church in the world, it’s not even the most famous church in Westminster. While millions of tourists a year flood through the ticket office of Westminster Abbey, keying numbers in the inexplicably sicky audio guides and gawping through the railings at ancient Kings and Queens, only five minutes down the road stands a neighbour who is seldom included on a pre-planned itinerary. Westminster Cathedral is halfway between Victoria Station and Parliament Square but it might as well be halfway between Venice and Istanbul. The largest Catholic church in the country and yet it seems to exist by stealth, nestled between corporate offices and unobtrusive townhouses.
It cannot claim the prestigious lineage of its more famous neighbour, as is the case with most of Britain’s Catholic infrastructure, it had to wait for more tolerant times to reestablish itself, built between 1885 – 1903 it is a child of the Victorian/Edwardian sensibility. But where it lacks physical history it reclaims prestige by adopting the most archaic form of Christian architecture, the Byzantine style. Finding it by accident, as most people do, while killing time before a train to the South Coast, on an aimless city stroll, or in an attempted shortcut to the river, one is transported to an era of Adriatic splendour and orthodox mysticism, by way Kubla Kahn and the Alhambra.
The architect was a Yorkshireman, John Francis Bentley, and his cathedral constitutes not only the crowning glory of his career but also virtually his only work of note as his output was otherwise limited to just a handful of gothic-revival parish churches in London and the home counties. He would seem an unusual choice for the most major Catholic building project in Britain since the reformation, being described by the MacMillan Encyclopaedia of Architects as “generally considered a mediocre talent”, but significantly he was the “the most important Roman Catholic architect in England in the late nineteenth century and a key figure in the evolution of an English Roman Catholic architectural style.” Bentley had converted in his twenties after having been apprenticed to another Catholic architect and so, by the 1880s, he was one of a small pool of talent the church had to choose from when it came to their new cathedral.
With the Great Reform Act of 1829, Catholics in Britain regained the civil rights stripped from them by the reforming Tudor monarchs, and by the middle of the century were engaged in the project to restore a major presence of the church to the heart of the nation, the city of Westminster. Several sites and designs were considered, including a “creditable if somewhat bland” neo-gothic design by Clutton, Bentley’s previous teacher. However, a cathedral in the Gothic style, less than a mile away from the medieval wonders of the Abbey would surely be seen in terms of direct competition – something else was needed, but what possible architectural style was there for a cathedral other than the familiar northern-European gothic?
The new archbishop of Westminster, Herbert Vaughan, found a new site, a new architect, and a new design. Bentley was given the parameters that his cathedral must not be in the gothic style and ought to take its reference point from the ancient Roman and Byzantine churches at Sant’ Ambrogio in Milan, San Vitale in Ravenna, and the famous San Marco in Venice. Therefore it ought to have many shallow domed vaults, gold mosaic and marble finishings, a towering interior, and a red brick exterior. Bentley’s eventual design manages to effectively quote from all these sources while remaining one of the most individual and original buildings in London.
In its essence, the floor plan follows a standard Latin-cross plan, a long nave with aisles meeting shorter transepts at the crossing, and beyond a sanctuary and quire forming the head of the cross with an apse to finish. However, Bentley employs elements more common to the Italian churches of the Baroque by squaring off this plan with a row of side chapels off the aisles as well as a Lady Chapel and Chapel of the Sacred Heart that sit parallel to the sacristy and visually continue the path of the aisles beyond the stubby transepts. The overall effect of this is not entirely comprehensible inside, but from the outside, this boxing off of the cruciform shape gives the cathedral a mountainous solidity. No dainty, leaping flying buttresses here, no organically growing gothic tracery in walls of glass, but rather a rippling, cascading mass of brick and Portland stone in bands, opening up to vast honeycombed lunette windows, round-arched arcades, and a forest of minaret-like towers and pinnacles. Moorish, Levantine, Venetian and Norman all via a Victorian Yorkshire mill town for good measure.
These high walls, like a palace or a prison, entirely disguise one of the great wonders of this building, three giant shallow saucer domes that make up the nave and crossing. Raised high on heavy, solid piers, they leap very wide and, with the exception of a fourth dome over the sacristy, have no windows. Had ill health not prevented Bentley from completing his Mediterranean research trip at the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople then we might be looking at a very different, and I wager worse space. The large and high shallow domes at Hagia Sophia sit weightlessly on the building they surmount, and each is rimmed with many small rounded windows allowing diagonal shafts of light to criss-cross the space and serve to physically lighten the atmosphere. At Westminster this would not have worked, for a start the cathedral is a different shape, offering no large central dome, and the weak, grey London light would not make any great impression were there windows in the domes, it would hardly penetrate the incense. Instead, we get impenetrable, heavy domes that sit on the nave in a cavernous, almost subterranean way. This effect is heightened by the cathedral’s unfinished state.
Bentley died in 1902, a year before the main structure of the cathedral was complete and as such left very few designs for the interior decoration. The side chapels that line the aisles are bejewelled with vivid mosaic, the predominant colour of which is a shimming exotic gold, many of the designs prominently feature the heraldry and even country estates of the wealthy catholic gentry who funded their decoration, the Crichton-Stuart family of Mount Stuart, the Marquises of Bute to name but one. However in the nave of the cathedral, the marble and mosaic stop abruptly only a couple of metres above head height and from there on the church rises in the sooty gloom of brickwork blackened by years of candles and oil lighting. An aspirational watercolour hangs over the domination box at the entrance which shows a vision of a completed ceiling covered in the field of golden mosaic, very much in the idiom of San Marco but inflated to an enormous scale. Whilst I have little doubt that, were it to be achieved, this would be quite breathtaking, there is something to be said for the strange solemnity of the blackened brick. It is a pleasing antidote to the opulence of the lower levels and invites a contemplation much like a painting by Mark Rothko, or maybe more appropriately, by Barnett Newman. When the cathedral is lit brightly and the incense hangs like a low mist over the pews, the cool dark expanse of the domes can become like a gazing into the night’s sky and, most atmospheric of all, seemingly hovering against that sky, is the large byzantine style crucifixion, richly red and gold, apparitional in that vast space.
It was only in the 1970s that the west front of the cathedral became visible to the main thoroughfare of Victoria Street, the road that connects the station with the Abbey. Before, this forgotten cathedral was only accessible down small alleyways that lead into a miniature piazza, no wonder it was hardly a tourist hotspot. Most today will stumble upon it from Victoria Street and the more curious will pop in for a look, but we are all criminally guilty of not looking up in cities for if we did we would be rewarded by wonderful art on every street corner, or in the case of the cathedral one of the tallest pre-skyscraper towers in London. The cathedral’s campanile is a stunning mixture of Bankside Power Station and the Torre del Mangia in Sienna, a thin, striped, brick tower that rises to an explosion of architectural nonsense at its summit – an arched colonnade below a fan of buttresses supporting, in turn, a high drum capped with a hemispherical dome reminiscent of a miniature St Paul’s Cathedral. Fantastical in 1903 and still thrilling today. For a modest fee, the church authorities will allow you to struggle to the top for a seldom-seen panorama.
Of course, to its more famous neighbour’s historical credentials, the eponymous Abbey, Westminster’s forgotten cathedral cannot hold a candle. By comparison, it is a new kid on the block, an upstart, a juvenile despite the old faith it represents. However, history and tradition aside, ignoring the Abbey’s star-studded list of internments, for sheer architectural bombast, excitement, and no-holds-barred opulence, Westminster has my vote for Britain’s most underrated cathedral and well worth going out of our way to discover.
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Morgan Haigh 