Gloucester Cathedral

In 1327 a deposed king was murdered at Berkeley Castle, and the great abbeys of the west country would not take the body. Bristol refused it. Kingswood refused it. Malmesbury refused it. The abbot of Gloucester sent his own carriage, brought Edward II here and buried him north of the high altar — and within a generation the abbey was rich enough to rebuild its entire east end in a style nobody had seen before. Whether that money came from pilgrims or from the Crown is still argued about. What it bought is not in doubt: the first Perpendicular quire in England, the earliest fan vault in the world, and a window the size of a tennis court.

A Norman abbey with a Gothic cage inside it

Serlo, the first Norman abbot, began the present church in 1089 on a site that had held a religious house since 679. What he built is still there and still obvious: the nave marches east on colossal cylindrical piers, plain, heavy and Romanesque, and that is what visitors see first. The crypt underneath is his too, one of only four apsidal cathedral crypts in England.

Then, after Edward II’s burial, the monks did something clever and thrifty. Rather than demolish the Norman quire, they encased it. A skin of slender vertical stone panelling was built over and inside the old Romanesque work, the roof was raised into a lierne vault, and the east wall was replaced with glass. The Norman masonry is still behind it, carrying the load. Stand in the quire and you are inside a fourteenth-century cage that has been fitted into an eleventh-century box, and the joint is nearly invisible.

That remodelling, from about 1337 onwards, is where the Perpendicular style — the last and most English phase of Gothic — effectively begins. It then ran for two hundred years, and the great town churches of East Anglia and Somerset and the chapels of Cambridge and Windsor are all descendants of what was worked out here on a budget.

The monastery was dissolved in 1540 and re-founded the following year as a cathedral, which is why so much of the monastic layout — cloister, chapter house, lavatorium — survives intact when most English monasteries are grass and stumps.

The visitor’s cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Norman nave

Fourteen bays of drum piers over six feet in diameter, carrying round arches, with a thirteenth-century vault dropped on top after a fire. It is deliberately unfashionable: by the time the east end was being rebuilt in the newest manner the monks left the nave alone, and the contrast between the two halves of the building is the whole point of a visit here.

The quire and its vault

High above the floor, the lierne vault knits so many short ribs together that the roof stops reading as a series of bays and becomes a single continuous net. Look for the angel musicians in the bosses. This is also one of the best places in England to hear an organ; the case is seventeenth century and survived the Commonwealth.

The Great East Window

Around 1350 the entire east wall was replaced by glass: twenty-two metres high and twelve across, about the size of a tennis court, and the largest window in the world when it was made and still the largest surviving expanse of fourteenth-century glass in the country. It is thought to commemorate local men who fought at Crécy in 1346, and among the saints and kings in the upper lights there is a small figure of a man hitting a ball with a club — often called the earliest image of golf in existence, which is a claim worth enjoying and not leaning on.

Edward II

North of the high altar, under a canopy of pale stone cut so fine it looks like sugar work, lies the king this building was paid for by. The effigy is alabaster, and it does not look like a man who died badly: the face is calm, young and idealised, which was the point. He was killed at Berkeley Castle in September 1327 after being deposed by his wife and her lover, and the manner of his death is the subject of a story so lurid that it has crowded out the evidence for what actually happened. His son Edward III paid for the tomb.

Robert Curthose

In the middle of the quire, a painted wooden figure lies with its legs crossed: Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror, who went on the First Crusade, was offered the crown of Jerusalem, turned it down, lost England to his youngest brother and spent the last twenty-eight years of his life a prisoner. The effigy is thirteenth century, carved from bog oak, made long after he died, and it is one of very few wooden effigies to survive in England.

The chapter house, and the Domesday court

Off the east cloister walk is the chapter house, Norman, barrel-vaulted, and carrying one of the better claims in English history. At Christmas 1085 William the Conqueror held his court at Gloucester and, in the chronicler’s words, had “deep speech with his counsellors” about the survey of England that became the Domesday Book. The court met at Gloucester: that much is solid. Whether it sat in this room is not, because the chapter house as it stands was probably built a little after 1085 — so the order was most likely given a few yards from where you are standing, in the building this one replaced. The cathedral tells it carefully, and so should anyone repeating it.

The coronation of Henry III

On 28 October 1216 a nine-year-old boy was crowned king in this church. His father John had died ten days earlier with half the country in French hands and the royal regalia lost in the Wash, so the ceremony was improvised: no crown, no Westminster, a hurried service in the abbey that had happened to be safe, and a plain gold circlet said to have been his mother’s. Henry III was crowned again at Westminster four years later, once the kingdom was back together. He remains the only English monarch since the Conquest to have been crowned anywhere other than Westminster Abbey — which makes this one of only two churches in England where it has ever happened.

The building kept its habit of hosting the state. Parliament met here in 1378, in the monastic buildings, and Richard II came with it.

The cloister, and the first fan vault

Out of the north aisle and into the reason architects come here. Between about 1351 and 1412 the cloister was rebuilt with a vault of inverted stone cones, each rib springing from the same point and opening at the same angle, so the ceiling reads as a row of half-open fans. Nobody had built one before. Every fan vault afterwards — Bath, King’s College, Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster — descends from this cloister, and it was worked out here on a monastic corridor rather than in a cathedral nave.

The Hogwarts corridors

The same cloister played the corridors of Hogwarts in the first, second and sixth Harry Potter films, and a good share of the cathedral’s visitors arrive because of it. The film crews chose it for exactly the reason it matters architecturally: nothing else in England looks like that. Walk it twice — once for the films and once looking up.

The lavatorium

In the north walk, a long stone trough runs under a row of windows: the monks’ washing place, with a recess opposite for the towels and a small room beside it for the monk whose job was to keep them. It is the most ordinary thing in the building and the most direct link to the people who lived here.

The crypt

Down the steps from the south transept is Serlo’s crypt of about 1089, low, round-arched and almost unaltered. The piers were reinforced within a few decades of being built, because the Normans overreached and the church above began to move. The 25-minute crypt tour is the cheapest thing on the price list and the one that most changes how you read the rest of the building.

The Lady Chapel

Beyond the east window, all but detached from the church, the Lady Chapel was finished around 1500: a glass box with barely any wall left, and the last major work before the monastery was dissolved. Its modern glass by Tom Denny, installed in 1992, is worth going in for on its own.

The tower

Two hundred and twenty-five feet, finished in the fifteenth century by a mason who signed his work into the stonework, and crowned with an openwork parapet that is structurally pointless and visually perfect. The tower tour is 269 steps and takes an hour; on a clear day the Malverns are about forty miles off and entirely visible.

Tickets and tours

Don’t miss

• The first fan vault In the cloister, begun about 1351. Everything of its kind anywhere descends from it.
• The golfer A small figure with a club in the Great East Window, often called the earliest image of golf.
• The lavatorium The monks’ washing trough in the north walk, with the towel recess opposite.
• Robert Curthose A crusader in painted bog oak, one of the few wooden effigies left in England.
• The join in the quire Norman masonry behind a Perpendicular skin. Look for where the old work shows through.
• The crypt 1089, almost untouched, and reinforced within decades because it was already moving.
• Tom Denny’s glass 1992, in the Lady Chapel, and entirely at home among the medieval work.

Insider tips

Donate. Entry is free and they suggest £5, against a running cost of £7,600 a day with no regular public funding. A cathedral that charges nothing is making a choice that only works if visitors make theirs.

Sunday is the awkward day — two short visiting windows either side of services, and easy to get wrong. Any weekday is better.

If the tower tour is the reason you are coming, book it before you travel. Sixty minutes, 269 steps, minimum age six, no bags, and it does not run every day.

Ask at the desk about the whispering gallery. It exists, high up behind the Great East Window, but access is limited and it closes at short notice when there is a service in the quire.

Where to stay and eat nearby

The cathedral sits in a close in the middle of the city, ten minutes from the station, and Gloucester Quays has redeveloped the Victorian docks into somewhere worth eating. The cathedral has its own café in the south transept. Gloucester also makes a practical base for the Forest of Dean and the Wye Valley, and it is forty minutes from Bath by road.

More English cathedrals

• Wells Cathedral — the other great West Country cathedral, and an hour and a half south.
• Bath Abbey — whose fan vaults are the descendants of the ones in this cloister.
• Durham Cathedral — Norman architecture at its most uncompromising.
• Ely Cathedral — another Norman nave with an astonishing later invention dropped into the middle.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →