Tag: Cathedral

The Forgotten Cathedral: Byzantium comes to Westminster

"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."

Ashes to Ashes: Fires, Cathedrals, and Resurrections

On the 11th June 1144 Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St Denis, Paris, gathered the bishops of France for the dedication of his newly built choir and east end. This marked a sea-change in architecture, gone was the heavy solidarity of the Romanesque and in came the lightness and delicacy of the Gothic. In the years after the meeting of the bishops, many of their home cathedrals would burn down only to rise from the ashes in the new gothic style of Suger’s St Denis.