Coventry Cathedral
Coventry Cathedral is one of the Church of England’s newest Cathedral buildings. the construction of the present structure was begun in 1956 - but it wasn’t always this way.
Coventry Cathedral is a Cathedral that speaks to what has been, and to understand it, you must, first, understand what happened in Coventry on the 14th of November, 1940. The worst night of the Coventry Blitz.
Coventry is a town in the middle of England - mostly unremarkable, these days - I live nearby, and even so, I rarely visit. But in World War II the many factories in Coventry, which normally made bicycles, planes, cars, and various types of engine, were turned towards the war effort. 25% of all British aeroplanes produced during the war were manufactured in Coventry. This meant the city was a target of air raids, with a handful of bombs dropped 17 times between August and October 1940. This meant it was common, as the war progressed, for the citizens to evacuate the city each night, sleeping in surrounding villages, away from the factories - Those who remained were usually close to air raid shelters.
November 14th was different. That evening 449 German bombers set out from France, heading for Coventry. They would arrive a little after 7pm, and the bombing would last 11 hours. over 500 tonnes of explosive fell from the sky onto Coventry that night, alongside 50 landmines and around 30,000 incendiary bombs. It would be the fires that did the most damage, in the end.
After the previous raids the Rev’d Graham Clitheroe, Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, just meters from the Cathedral, had been spending his nights sleeping in his church porch. When the sirens sounded, he headed to the roof with his son, another priest, and the churchwarden. They spent the night using brooms to push the bombs off of the church roof. He wrote, later, of standing there, high above the city, surrounded by flames and smoke and noise, and watching the cathedral burn, knowing, all he could do, was save that one church. Knowing, in the morning, the people who lived would need it, as a symbol, and a space to gather.
The Provost of the Cathedral, the Rev’d Richard Howard, had done the same, but there were too many incendiary bombs raining down from the sky, the fire caught, and he was forced to flee, grabbing what he could from the burning building, and retreating to his bomb shelter.
When dawn arrived, and the planes finally left, over 43,000 homes had been damaged (around half of the cities housing stock), but, thanks to air raid shelters, the death toll was much lower than expected. There were 554 confirmed deaths, though hundreds of others remain unaccounted for to this day. Most of the dead were buried in a mass grave.
All that remained of the Cathedral were the outer walls, and the tower. Everything else had been destroyed.
The government acted as governments so often do - declaring that they would wreak revenge upon Germany for what had happened. The Cathedral responded somewhat differently.
Rev’d Richard Howard, The Provost, the priest in charge of the Cathedral, made the decision, then and there, that they would rebuild - not as an act of defiance, but an act of faith. He walked through the cathedal, the rubble still smouldering, and with a piece of chalk, wrote the words “Father, Forgive” on the east wall, behind what was left of the altar. He pointedly stopped Jesus quote (Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”) at two words - knowing that to place “father forgive them”, would suggest a division, and that Coventry, and England, as a whole, had no need of forgiveness. He wanted everyone to recognise their own part in the pattern of destruction and hatred that leads to such things as war.
The work of clearing the rubble began soon after. There wasn’t the capacity to remove it all from the church, so an aisle was made in the debris, and, as it was being made, Jock Forbes, a stonemason working for the Cathedral, noticed two of the roof beams had fallen in the shape of a cross; tying them together, he erected it at the East end of the church. Soon after, the words, first added in chalk, were engraved into the stone, a declaration of belief.
Finally, less than two months after the bombing, on Christmas Day, 1940 the Provost shocked the country. In a radio broadcast from the ruins of the Cathedral, he called for peace, and reconciliation - when all expected a call for retribution, and revenge. At the time, BBC Radio was listened to across the world, with people in occupied nations listening in secret as an act of defiance. This was Richard’s opportunity to speak. And he did, saying “what we want to tell the world is this, that, with Christ born again in our hearts today, we’re trying, hard as it may be, to banish all thoughts of revenge […] we’re going to try to make a kinder simpler, more Christchild-like world in the days beyond this strife.”
Then, the handful of remaining members of the Coventry Cathedral choir, stood out in the cold December air, surrounded by the ruins of their Cathedral, and the microphones of the visiting BBC crew, began to sing.
When the war was over, work towards a new Cathedral began in earnest. In 1951 a competition to design the new building was launched, and, despite the prevailing view that the new cathedral should be in the Gothic style, just like the old one, a modern design by Basil Spence was chosen. In 1956 the foundation stone was laid.
Many of the submitted designs involved building on the site of the old cathedral, but the winning design was to be built beside but connected to the ruins.
In the church there’s a thing called “the liturgical compass”, most churches ‘face’ East, with their altars at the east end, waiting the metaphorical resurrection of the sunrise at dawn, anticipating new life. The new build was turned 90°, though liturgically the ‘east’ end, the altar stands to the north. The entire church is turned, towards something new. It was designed to be separate, but still connected, with a vast connecting porch, joining the ruins to the new cathedral. As you enter, the west end is a glass wall, covered with etchings of ascending angels.
Outside, the ruins are cleared and stabilised. An acknowledgement of what has happened, not a clearing away of the painful past. The original wooden cross of charred roof beams is now protected inside the new Cathedral, but a copy has been placed where it once stood, and there, on the back wall, behind the altar, those original words, now gilded: “Father, Forgive”
Coventry Cathedral upheld the promise it made the morning after it burned, and the Cathedral is a bastion of Reconciliation. Every weekday, in the ruins of the old Cathedral, a short service is held in which the Litany of Reconciliation is said.
Inside, the entire building is a monument to peace, and reconciliation.
Inside, the first thing that strikes you is the vast tapestry of Jesus, woven in one piece on a huge 500 year old loom in a village in France, took 2 years to complete, was the largest continuously woven tapestry in the world when it was completed, and fills the entire east wall.
From afar, but particularly close up, Christ seems almost pregnant, preparing to bring forth that new world which Rev’d Richard Howard had spoken of on Christmas Day, all those years before.
I was lucky enough to be able to see the original design for this tapestry, and there, too, that vast oval stomach takes up the central part of the image - a modern mirror of the medieval metaphor of Christ as mother, labouring on the Cross to bring forth a new world.
In front of the tapestry, the choir stalls, topped with wooden decorations designed to mimic the crown of thorns, which almost look like great origami birds, taking flight.
And, above our heads, the ceiling undulates, on slender concrete columns.
The Cathedral has an emphasis on light, with huge stained glass windows running down the sides. The design often confuses visitors, because you can’t really see them when you walk in, but that’s by design. The thing about this Cathedral is that it’s designed as a great metaphor, in so many ways, and this is one of them. When you enter you get this great sense of light, and see streaks of colour slashing across the floor. You see the effect of the light, but the walls seem grey, and plain. But after you journey into the Cathedral, after approaching the great tapestry of Christ, after - during a service - receiving the Eucharist… that’s when you turn, and you finally see the source of the light itself; these great vertical windows, swelling with colour.
I adore this. I think it’s one of my favourite pieces of Cathedral design of all time - and it’s so simple. To make it so you can see the light and the colour, but it is by approaching, receiving, and turning, that you see the source of it all.
The most famous stained glass in the Cathedral can be found in the Baptistry, on your right when you enter. It’s the only stained glass you can see when you first walk in, a curved wall of windows studded into the concrete.
At the base of the window is a font, made from a boulder donated by the government of Jordon, and shipped from a hillside near Bethlehem, it was carved by a German sculptor named Ralph Beyer, who was hired to lots of work on the new cathedral.
Just like before, each fragment of glass in the Baptistry is beautifully detailed.
The Cathedral also has a series of side chapels - I like this, as, one thing that can be a problem with large open spaces like this, is the lack of a sense of privacy, or of being held by the space.
My two favourites are the Chapel of Christ in Gethsemane, and the Chapel of Christ the Servant.
The chapel of Christ in Gethsemane is screened off by a great iron crown of thorns, beyond which a full wall of gold mosaic makes you feel like you’ve entered a Klimt painting, as the small window to one side, and the circular skylight above, cast shifting light across the shimmering golden tiles.
The Chapel of Christ the Servant is altogether different. It’s made almost entirely of glass, and was once known as the Chapel of Industry, because it was surrounded by industrial buildings.
Suspended over the undecorated altar is a huge cross, surrounded by a crown of thorns which cunningly hides a light fixture. Both hang beneath a circular ceiling of heavenly gold.
There is, in the Cathedral, an unusual chapel, off to the left as you enter - this is the Chapel of Unity, legally separate from the Cathedral, on a 999 year lease, and managed by an ecumenical council - this, too, is designed for reconciliation - a bringing together of churches, with the aim of understanding and of peace.
Suspended from the ceiling is a huge black cross. The architect designed it to be in mourning, hoping, one day, for it to be gilded, in celebration of unity which currently remains lost.
This commitment to peace, reconciliation, and unity, remains a central ideal of the cathedral, with the Community of the Cross of Nails spreading across the world. The Community has three guiding principles: ‘Healing the wounds of history’, ‘Learning to live with difference and celebrate diversity’, and ‘Building a culture of justice and peace’.
It began when Rev’d Arthur Philip Wales was walking through the ruined Cathedral, and, finding three medieval nails on the floor, left behind by the burning roof, he tied them together with some wire into a cross. Soon, all the nails that could be found were collected, and turned into crosses too.
The Coventry Cross of Nails became a symbol of peace and reconciliation. So many were gifted to other churches that the medieval nails ran out, and new ones are made from replica nails.
The first cross to be given away was in 1947, just two years after the end of the war. The Provost of Coventry visited Kiel, a city in Germany that had been heavily bombed by the Allies during the war, and gifted a cross to the church of St Nikolai, which had also been destroyed.
I went to Kiel recently, and, though I was unable to visit St Nikolai, I was able to visit the University Church. It, too, was heavily damaged in the bombing, and had to be rebuilt. There, in another country, in another modern church, all glass and concrete and light, on a little wooden display stand, stood a simple cross made of old iron nails.
