Lichfield Cathedral

Lichfield Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Chad, is an Anglican cathedral in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in the English Midlands. The present Gothic building was raised between about 1195 and 1340, on a site where churches have stood since the early eighth century. It is the only medieval cathedral in Britain with three spires, nicknamed "the Ladies of the Vale". Much of what visitors see today, especially the sculpture of the west front, is the result of a long Victorian restoration led by Sir George Gilbert Scott from the 1850s and continued by his son John Oldrid Scott.

What you are looking at

The photograph shows the west front, the cathedral's ceremonial entrance, with its two western spires rising above twin towers. (The third, taller central spire stands over the crossing further east and is hidden from this angle.) The whole front is built of warm red sandstone, quarried locally, which glows pink in sunlight and darkens almost to purple in rain.

The façade is a screen of arcading, tier upon tier of pointed niches, most of them filled with standing figures of kings, saints, prophets and apostles. In the center, above the main doorway, a great window with tracery lights the nave. Three deeply recessed portals lead in at ground level. The spires are crocketed, their edges studded with small carved leaves, and pinnacles cluster at their bases.

A detail many visitors miss: almost none of the figures on the west front are medieval. Of the original statues, only a handful survive. The rest were carved in the nineteenth century, largely during the Scott restoration, to a scheme intended to recreate what the medieval façade might have looked like.

A building with a long history

Saint Chad, bishop of the Mercians, made Lichfield his seat in 669 and died in 672. His shrine drew pilgrims for nearly nine centuries. A church to house his remains was built around 700 by Bishop Hedda, and the Lichfield Angel, a carved and painted limestone panel probably from his shrine, was discovered under the nave floor in 2003 and is now displayed in the cathedral. The cathedral library holds the St Chad Gospels, an illuminated gospel book of the eighth century.

The Norman church that replaced the Saxon one was itself replaced, bay by bay, by the Gothic cathedral: the choir first, from about 1195, then the transepts, nave, west front and finally the Lady Chapel in the early fourteenth century. The three spires were complete by the mid-fourteenth century.

War and decay

During the English Civil War, Lichfield's cathedral close was fortified and besieged three times between 1643 and 1646. The central spire was brought down by Parliamentarian cannon fire, the medieval stained glass was smashed, the shrine and tombs were defaced and the library was looted. After the Restoration of 1660, Bishop John Hacket rebuilt the central spire and reroofed the building.

The eighteenth century brought further decay. Statues on the west front were removed or covered, and some replacements were made in a cheap artificial stone. The architect James Wyatt carried out alterations in the 1780s and 1790s that are now generally regretted, including removing the medieval screen between the choir and nave.

The Gilbert Scott restoration

Sir George Gilbert Scott, the most prolific Gothic Revival architect in Victorian Britain, was engaged from 1856. His aim was to undo Wyatt's changes and restore what he believed was the medieval appearance. He designed a new choir screen in ironwork, brass and copper made by Francis Skidmore, reinstated a sense of the choir as a separate space, and began the restoration of the west front. The re-statuing of the façade continued under John Oldrid Scott into the 1880s and beyond.

Scott's work at Lichfield is typical of his approach: scholarly, confident, and in places more Victorian than medieval. Modern conservationists debate how much he invented, but without him the building might not have survived as a coherent whole.

The glass

Although the Civil War destroyed the medieval glass, the Lady Chapel now holds a great treasure: sixteenth-century Flemish stained glass from the Cistercian abbey of Herkenrode, near Hasselt in present-day Belgium. It was bought for Lichfield in 1802 by Sir Brooke Boothby after the abbey was dissolved, and was conserved and reinstalled after 2010. It is among the finest Renaissance glass in England.

Inside

Highlights include Francis Chantrey's marble monument The Sleeping Children (1817), showing two young sisters asleep in each other's arms, the Lichfield Angel, the Herkenrode windows and the medieval chapter house with its painted fragments.

Where to see it

Lichfield Cathedral is open daily for worship and visitors in the center of Lichfield, about 25 kilometers north of Birmingham. It is a Grade I listed building. For other Gothic churches in the catalogue, see Siena Cathedral, Abbaye de Beauport and our guide to Gothic art.