Dec 23

Dec 23 Winchester Cathedral

I made two trips to Winchester to photograph the cathedral. The first one (Pre-COVID) was a complete bust as I hadn’t bothered to check that the cathedral was open. It was being used for a university graduation ceremony. Which was annoying as I’d decided to stay overnight to photograph the Cathedral and some of the other churches in Winchester. I did have a great night and meal and photographed the other churches.

Before the Norman conquest, Winchester was the capital of England which it had been since the Roman Conquest. The present form of the city dates from reconstruction in the late 9th century when King Alfred the Great obliterated the Roman street plan in favour of a new grid in order to provide better defence against the Vikings. There was a fire in the city in 1141 during the Rout of Winchester. In the 14th century, William of Wykeham played a role in the city's restoration. As Bishop of Winchester he was responsible for much of the current structure of the cathedral, and he founded the still extant public school Winchester College. During the Middle Ages, the city was an important centre of the wool trade, before going into a slow decline.

Winchester Cathedral or The Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, Saint Peter, Saint Paul and Saint Swithun. The first Christian church can be traced back to around 648, when King Cenwalh of Wessex built a small, cross-shaped building just north of the present building. This building, known as the Old Minster, became the cathedral for the new Diocese of Winchester in 662, a vast area stretching from the English Channel to the River Thames.

William the Conqueror, installed his friend and relative Walkelin as the first Norman Bishop of Winchester in 1070, and nine years later, in 1079, Bishop Walkelin begins the construction of a huge new Norman cathedral, on a site just to the south of the Old and New Minsters, the site of the present building.

The cathedral was completed around 1532 and is dedicated to numerous saints, most notably Swithun of Winchester. It has a very long and very wide nave in the Perpendicular Gothic style, an Early English retrochoir, and Norman transepts and tower. With an overall length of 558 feet (170 m), it is the longest medieval cathedral in the world and only surpassed by the more recent churches of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City and the Basilica of Our Lady in Aparecida. With an area of 53,480 square feet (4,968 m2), it is also the sixth-largest cathedral by area in the UK, surpassed only by Liverpool, St Paul's, York, Westminster (RC) and Lincoln.