Coventry Cathedral Visit

During the first lockdown in 2020 one of the ways I amused myself and kept my hand in was by making a series of detailed ink sketches of beautiful Britain. Of necessity these were all based on photographs. I made 32 altogether, mostly just ink sketches, although I did apply watercolour to a few. Of the 32, only about 5 depicted places I’d never been to before. Of all of them, I reckoned that Coventry Cathedral was the most appropriate for a day trip. I’ve already stayed in Edinburgh and then London this school holiday, but a couple of days ago the time was right, and so I went.

Now, I can pretty much guarantee that if you’d asked me my opinion of Coventry Cathedral a few years ago, the phrase ‘beautiful Britain’ wouldn’t have featured in my answer. But when I started on my Britain sketches last year, every time I googled to find out what other people considered examples of Britain’s best buildings, Coventry cathedral featured on a surprisingly large number of lists. It made me take another look at least. Then I made last year’s sketch, and to me there are few things that make you appreciate a building as much as sitting down to look closely and seriously at it while you try to sketch it.

Which is not quite the only reason why I made the trip on Tuesday. Not long after we first connected to the internet 20 and some years ago, I did a lot of research into my family history. My mum’s father’s mother was a Rainbow from Coventry. The Rainbows were, I believe, originally Huguenot silk weavers who originally settled in Spitalfields, then moved to the Midlands, and in the later 18^th and the first half of the 19^th century they were movers and shakers in the silk industry in Coventry, living in Foleshill. Then, in June of this year, the BBC showed a very good documentary called “Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain”. After I’d watched this, a visit to the cathedral went from being a possibility to a certainty.

Getting older is certainly to my mind preferable to the alternative, Still, one of the things that you have to guard against as you get older is becoming more inflexible and less ready to take on board different ideas and opinions from those you’ve held for a long time. 25 years ago I had no time for anything built after the First World War, which come to think of it was a ridiculous attitude anyway. Particularly as I started looking more closely at London Underground stations I came to appreciate futurism, modernism and art deco in architecture. Now, I’m starting to take a more open minded look at post war architecture. Okay, I somehow doubt that I’m ever likely to become a believer in the virtues of brutalism, but what the hell. Although Coventry Cathedral wasn’t consecrated until 1962, it really is a child of the 50s, born in the same time as the Festival of Britain. In fact Basil Spence, who won the competition to design the new cathedral which was launched in 1950, also designed a pavilion for the Festival of Britain.

It's quite possible that Coventry Cathedral might have ended up very different from today’s cathedral. The decision to rebuild the cathedral was taken very quickly, and the eminent Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was commissioned. His design, produced in c.1945, was very radical in terms of the interior, and probably not radical enough in terms of the exterior. The designs exhibited in the Royal Academy Exhibition certainly made it look a heavy and gloomy , sort of cleaned down and slightly streamlined gothic. Allegedly the bishop wasn’t happy, wanting a more modern looking building which would have a better chance of appealing to younger people. I have to be honest, looking at what we have now I can’t say that I think he was wrong.

Entering the cathedral I was struck by a number of things. Firstly, it’ a huge empty space, but on the other hand everywhere you look around the walls there are impressive works of art. I personally really like the massive glass screen with John Hutton’s engraved figures of saints and angels on each glass panel. I think that the figures are incredibly evocative, with their elongated necks and limbs, and their clothing resembling death shrouds, their strange, tormented, almost alien features. They’re not comfortable to look at, but my goodness, they’re effective. They’re also a hell of a contrast with Graham Sutherland’s gigantic Christ In Majesty tapestry, and also the panels of stained glass windows on either side. I’m not religious – not boasting, not apologising, just stating a fact – but if I lived close to the cathedral I could see myself often nipping in to spend a little time in quiet reflection – it really is that kind of space.

I like the clever way that the walls are built out in zigzagging ribs – stop me if I’m getting too technical here, and that they are broken up further by the stained glass panels. However, for me the real star turn on the exterior is the statue of St. Michael’s Victory over the Devil. It was one of the very last works created by Sir Jacob Epstein.I’ll be honest, I don’t unconditionally love every sculpture or statue that Sir Jacob produced. . . but I think that this one is fantastic. Hence the sketch. I did read that the devil’s head was allegedly partly based on Epstein himself, who had practiced expressions in a mirror. The head of the Devil is supposed to be modelled on his daughter’s two husbands – her first husband the artist Lucien Freud, and her second husband the economist Wynne Godley. It looks more like Godley than Freud but has resemblance to both of them in my opinion.

I liked Coventry Cathedral. In my opinion it’s one of those buildings where all of the hype you’ve heard or seen about it seems justified. Where cathedrals are concerned it’s probably true that you won’t get a true idea of how beloved, great or important they are for until they’ve been there for at least 100 years. It’s not impossible that I’ll be around in 2062, but not particularly likely. But I like it, and for the time being, that’s enough.