Portsmouth Cathedral: The Anglican Cathedral of St Thomas of Canterbury
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, English
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page16 sections
History
Portsmouth Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, and the seat of the Bishop of Portsmouth. Formally known as the Cathedral Church of St Thomas of Canterbury, it belongs to the Diocese of Portsmouth and the Province of Canterbury. Its origins lie in a chapel founded by Augustinian canons in the late twelfth century, while its present form reflects medieval, classical, and twentieth-century rebuilding.
Foundation and medieval church
Around 1180, Jean de Gisors, a wealthy Norman merchant and Lord of the Manor of Titchfield, gave land in his new town of Portsmouth to the Augustinian canons of Southwick Priory. These religious community members followed the Rule of St Augustine. The grant enabled them to establish a chapel dedicated to Thomas of Canterbury, also known as Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. His martyrdom led to widespread medieval veneration.
The chapel was completed and dedicated in 1188. The medieval church was cruciform, with a central tower over the crossing. The tower served as a lookout point and as a lighthouse for shipping. In the fourteenth century, the chapel became a parish church, extending its role within the growing town.
Conflict, closure, and royal rebuilding
The church survived a French attack on Portsmouth in 1337, during the Hundred Years’ War, the prolonged conflict between England and France. In 1449, Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester, was murdered by local sailors. Portsmouth’s inhabitants were subsequently excommunicated, and the church remained closed until the excommunication was lifted and it reopened in 1508. Elizabeth I worshipped at St Thomas’s Church in 1591.
During the English Civil War, the seventeenth-century conflict between supporters of Parliament and supporters of King Charles I, the Royalist garrison used the church tower to observe Parliamentary forces attacking Portsmouth in 1642. Parliamentary artillery from Gosport fired on the tower, damaging the church and leaving the medieval tower and nave in ruins.
After the Restoration, the return of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, the king authorised a nationwide church collection to raise £9,000 for rebuilding. Reconstruction of the tower and nave took place between 1683 and 1693. The new nave was built in the classical style, replacing the medieval nave and tower while retaining the medieval chancel and transepts.
Parish church to cathedral
Galleries were added in 1708 for the growing congregation and extended in 1750. A wooden cupola with a lantern for shipping was added to the tower in 1703. Repairs and alterations continued during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The church closed from 1902 to 1904 for work on its foundations, and St Mary’s Colewort served as the temporary parish church during that period.
The Diocese of Portsmouth was created from part of the Diocese of Winchester in 1927. On 1 May that year, St Thomas of Canterbury became the new diocese’s pro-cathedral, a church serving temporarily or provisionally as the cathedral of a newly created diocese. By 1935, that provisional status had ended and the church had been established as the cathedral.
Twentieth-century extension
Charles Nicholson presented an initial extension plan in October 1932 to enlarge the church for its cathedral role. He chose a Neo-Byzantine style, characterised here by round arches, to harmonise with the classical seventeenth-century work. By 1939, the outer quire aisles, tower, transepts, and three bays of the nave had been completed, and arches had been opened through the base of the seventeenth-century tower.
Construction stopped after the Fall of France in June 1940. The unfinished nave was sealed by a temporary brick wall that remained for more than fifty years. The cathedral also suffered minor wartime damage to its windows and roof. After Nicholson’s death in 1949, attempts led by Bernard Montgomery to complete the extension in the 1960s failed because sufficient funds could not be secured. A 1966 design by Seely & Paget, with Pier Luigi Nervi as consulting engineer, proposed a 76-foot-wide reinforced-concrete western extension with room for 1,200 worshippers to view the nave altar without obstruction.
By the mid-1980s, the temporary brick wall had become unstable and threatened to collapse. The diocese’s needs had changed, so the nave was completed in shortened form rather than to Nicholson’s original length, with the final west wall placed close to the temporary wall. Work began in January 1990. The completed cathedral was consecrated in November 1991 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
Remains
Portsmouth Cathedral combines the surviving medieval chancel and transepts with the classical tower and nave rebuilt between 1683 and 1693 and the Neo-Byzantine extension begun in the 1930s. The completed nave forms a square space enclosed by a low, vaulted outer ambulatory, a passage around or behind the central worship space. The cathedral’s interior therefore brings together several periods of construction while retaining the crossing and eastern parts of the earlier church.
Medieval and classical fabric
Chancel and transepts
The medieval chancel and transepts are the surviving parts of the original cruciform church. A transept is the arm crossing the main body of a cruciform church. The south chancel aisle contains a large memorial dated 1631 to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, who was assassinated at the nearby Greyhound Inn.
Tower, nave, and furnishings
The late-seventeenth-century rebuilding created the present classical nave, tower, and side aisles. The tower contains twelve bells. A ring of eight was given in 1703, and two additional bells were cast in 1957. All were made at Taylor’s Bell Foundry and hung in the wooden octagonal part of the tower. The 1693 pulpit is the surviving part of a three-decker pulpit, while the Nicholson organ case, dated 1718, carries carved cherubs and an image of King David playing the harp.
Neo-Byzantine extension
Western nave and ambulatory
The twentieth-century extension uses Neo-Byzantine round arches and includes the tower, transepts, outer quire aisles, and nave bays. Granite used in the 1939 work came from Pulau Ubin in Singapore, then a British colony. The shortened nave completed in 1991 includes a fourth bay, western towers, tower rooms, a rose window, a gallery, and an ambulatory. Its furniture is not fixed, allowing the square interior to be rearranged for services, concerts, exhibitions, and other uses.
Entrance, font, and altar
The formal entrance is through bronze west doors designed by Bryan Kneale. Their Tree of Life design represents the renewal of life. The tower is pierced to create an organ loft above a low, dark passage. A new stone font, installed in 1991, stands centrally between the nave and quire, the area reserved for clergy and choir, and follows a ninth-century Greek design. The principal altar rests on a Purbeck-stone podium decorated with mosaic work by Richard Noviss. The lectern was given by Edward VII in 1903.
Art and memorials
Nave sculpture and transept works
Beneath the nave organ case, on the rood screen, stands Christus, a sculpture by Peter Eugene Ball. A rood screen separates the nave from the quire and is traditionally associated with a cross. The south tower transept contains a bronze statue of St John the Baptist by David Wynne, cast in 1951 as a memorial to a Winchester College pupil who died on the Matterhorn. Its north wall displays William Lionel Wyllie’s painting The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. The north tower transept contains a ceramic plaque of the Virgin and Child by the Florentine sculptor Andrea della Robbia.
Organ case and maritime imagery
The nave organ case was designed by Didier Grassin in 2001, with the interiors of its panels designed by Patrick Caulfield. One side depicts night and a stylised lighthouse shining over the sea; the other shows daylight, the sun, and the hull of a fishing boat. This imagery refers to Portsmouth’s motto, “Heaven’s Light Our Guide.”
Organs and musical fabric
A three-manual and pedal organ with forty-nine stops was installed in 1994 by Nicholson & Co. It incorporates pipes from a John Nicholson organ made for Manchester Cathedral in 1861, moved to Holy Trinity Church, Bolton, in 1874 and rebuilt by Jardine & Co in 1905. A West Great Organ was added in 2001 to direct sound into the relatively enclosed nave, and its doors were painted by Patrick Caulfield. A small three-stop chamber organ by Kenneth Tickell & Co followed in 2007. Above the main entrance, the 2017 Trompete de Maris provides a high-pressure fanfare reed division.
