Westminster Cathedral

Walk toward the altar and look up: gold mosaic across marble and soaring domes. Walk twenty feet back and look up again: bare, soot-blackened brick. More than 120 years after it opened, the decoration of Westminster Cathedral is still less than half done — and that is not a failure, it is the plan. The architect built a structure and left the finishing to whoever came next, chapel by chapel, as the money appeared. It is the only great building in London where you can see exactly where the money stopped.

Why it looks like this

Not Gothic, on purpose

By the 1890s English Catholics had been able to worship openly for sixty years and had no cathedral in London. Cardinal Herbert Vaughan set out to build one, and made the decision that shapes everything you see: not Gothic.

There were two reasons and both were sound. He wanted a broad, uninterrupted nave with the high altar visible from everywhere — Gothic means piers, aisles and screens, all of which get in the way of a congregation seeing an altar. And Westminster Abbey stood a few hundred yards up the road: a new Catholic cathedral attempting Gothic in that company would have invited a comparison it could only lose. Brick was also faster and far cheaper than stone, which mattered because the whole thing was paid for by donors rather than by Rome.

So John Francis Bentley was sent to study the early Christian basilicas of Italy and came back with Neo-Byzantine: twelve and a half million bricks banded in Portland stone, domes instead of vaults, and an interior meant to be lined in marble and mosaic like Ravenna or Hagia Sophia.

The dates, and the architect who never saw it

Begun 1895. Structurally complete and opened 1903. Bentley died in 1902, a year before it opened, having never seen the inside of the building he designed with its roof on. The cathedral was consecrated in June 1910, once the last of the debt was cleared — canonically it could not be consecrated while it owed money. Bentley's name appears nowhere in the building.

The campanile

St Edward's Tower rises 284 feet, not far short of the Elizabeth Tower at Westminster, and it is the most easily recognised thing about the building. The viewing gallery at 210 feet is reached by lift — which makes it, for anyone who cannot manage 300 spiral steps, the most accessible high view in central London. It costs £10 and looks straight down Victoria Street and across to the Abbey, Parliament and the river.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The nave, and the line where the money stopped

Go in and walk to the middle. The nave is the widest in England and there is nothing between you and the altar — which was the whole point of the design.

Then look up, and find the line. The lower walls are sheathed in polished marble; above that, in the completed areas, gold mosaic; and above that, running across most of the building, bare brick darkened by a century of London air. Bentley meant it. He built the shell and left the decoration to later generations, to be added as funds allowed, and the work has crept upward chapel by chapel ever since without ever reaching the top. There is no completion date, and this guide could not find any scheme currently under way.

It produces an effect no finished building could: the richest interior in London and the barest, in the same room, ten feet apart.

The marble

Over a hundred different kinds of marble from twenty-four countries — more than in any other building in England. Bentley's sourcing was deliberate and sometimes pointed: the dark green Thessalian marble in the nave columns came from the same Greek quarries that supplied Hagia Sophia, which is a fairly direct statement about what he thought he was building.

There is Norwegian white and pink, Derbyshire fossil limestone, Italian and African stone, and the yellow Verona marble of the baldacchino columns. Look at the cut faces in the nave: some of the panels are book-matched, sawn and opened like a book so the veining mirrors itself.

The high altar, the baldacchino and the rood

The high altar sits under a baldacchino of yellow Verona marble columns carrying a canopy — a deliberate echo of St Peter's, at a fraction of the scale and none of the noise. Sources disagree on the column count, with the cathedral's own page saying six and the standard published figure eight, so count them yourself when you are there.

Hanging across the nave in front of the sanctuary is the rood: a painted wooden cross about thirty feet high, made in Bruges, carrying an eighteen-foot figure of Christ on one face and the Mater Dolorosa on the other. The vermillion ground with green edging was suggested by John Singer Sargent. Hung in the dim upper air of a half-dark nave, it is the most theatrical object in the building.

Eric Gill's Stations of the Cross

Fourteen shallow relief panels in Hopton Wood limestone, carved by Eric Gill between 1913 and 1918 — the cathedral's own dating; they are commonly cited as 1914–18. They are spare, linear, and cut so shallowly that they change completely as the light moves round the building during the day, which is exactly how Gill designed them to be seen. They made his reputation and are widely held to be his finest work.

They are also, now, difficult. Fiona MacCarthy's 1989 biography, working from Gill's own diaries, established that he sexually abused two of his daughters and his sister. That has made his devotional art a permanent argument about whether and how such work can be shown, and there have been campaigns to remove or recontextualise Gill's work elsewhere. Westminster Cathedral has made no public statement that this guide could find, and the Stations remain in place. Visitors should know before they look.

The chapels, and who made the mosaics

The side chapels are where the decoration actually got finished, and they were done piecemeal over a century by very different artists, which is why no two look alike:

• Holy Souls — William Christian Symons, the only scheme carried out in Bentley's own Art Nouveau idiom, and arguably the closest to what he intended.
• Lady Chapel — Gilbert Pownall, with earlier work by Gertrude Martin of 1912–13. Look for London landmarks worked into it: Tower Bridge and the Tower of London are in there.
• Blessed Sacrament and St Paul's — Boris Anrep, 1960–65. The same man who made the mosaic floors at the National Gallery.
• St George and the English Martyrs — Tom Phillips, who also made the panel of St John Henry Newman.
• St Joseph, Holy Family and St Alban — Christopher Hobbs, who also did the Thomas Becket chapel in 2006.
• St David — Ivor Davies, blessed by Benedict XVI on his 2010 visit.
• St Francis — Leonard McComb, with mosaic songbirds.
• St Andrew's — not mosaic but marble, ebony and mother-of-pearl, and widely regarded as the finest single chapel design in the building.

The crypt

Below the sanctuary, the Chapel of St Peter holds Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, moved here from Kensal Green, and relics of St Edmund of Abingdon. It is not part of the normal visitor route and is generally seen by arrangement or on a guided tour.

One correction worth making, because a great many guides get it wrong: Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop from 1976 until his death in 1999 and the most publicly loved English Catholic churchman of the last century, is not in the crypt. He is buried in the cathedral above, in the Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine.

The music, which is the real reason to come

Westminster Cathedral Choir is the only Catholic cathedral choir in the world that sings Mass and Vespers every day. That is the fact to hold on to: not a weekly service, not a concert series — daily, in term, as ordinary practice.

The choir was founded in 1901 and the choir school opened that October with eleven boys. Its first Master of Music, Richard Runciman Terry, spent his tenure digging out and performing the Tudor and Renaissance polyphony that England had largely forgotten — Byrd, Tallis, Taverner — and that revival is the foundation of the choir's reputation. Vaughan Williams's Mass in G minor and Britten's Missa brevis were both premiered here, Britten's written for these singers.

The Grand Organ is Henry Willis III's, inaugurated in 1922 and completed in 1932, and is often called his masterpiece; there is a second, older apse organ near the choir, and since 1926 one player has been able to control both from a single console.

The practical advice: the 5.30pm solemn Mass on weekdays and the noon Mass on Sunday are the ones to aim for. They are free, they need no ticket, and they are a better experience of this building than any amount of looking at mosaics.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The line where the mosaic stops Stand in the nave and find it. It is the most honest thing in any London church.
• Gill's Stations of the Cross Fourteen shallow reliefs that change with the light through the day — and a genuinely uncomfortable question attached to them.
• The hanging rood Thirty feet of painted cross from Bruges, with a colour scheme suggested by Sargent.
• The Holy Souls Chapel Symons's mosaics, the only ones done in Bentley's own idiom.
• The Thessalian marble Nave columns from the quarries that supplied Hagia Sophia, which is not an accident.
• The tower 210 feet, by lift, £10, and a view straight down Victoria Street to the Abbey.
• Daily sung Mass and Vespers The only Catholic cathedral choir in the world that does both, every day. Free.

Insider tips

Time your visit around Mass, not around the clock. The building is open 7.30am to 7pm but sightseeing is discouraged during services, and there are several a day. Roughly 9 to 10.15 in the morning and 1.15 to 4.45 in the afternoon are the clear runs on a weekday.

The tower is Wednesday to Sunday only. If the view matters to you, that rules out two days a week entirely.

Do the Abbey and the Cathedral on different days if you can, and if you cannot, do them in that order — the Cathedral is free, so it survives being the second stop far better than the Abbey would.

Look for the piazza. It was cleared long after the building went up, and for decades the front was hidden behind other buildings; the open forecourt is the only reason you can see the facade at all, and it is a good spot for the photograph.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Victoria is a transport interchange rather than a destination, and the streets immediately around the station are priced for people catching trains. Walk five minutes into Pimlico for better-value hotels and considerably better restaurants, or into St James's if the budget allows. The cathedral's own advantage is location: it is a few minutes from Victoria, Buckingham Palace and St James's Park, and free, which makes it the best half-hour in London to fill a gap with.

More English cathedrals

• Liverpool Cathedral — the other great twentieth-century English cathedral, and the Catholic one up the road from it.
• Canterbury Cathedral — the Anglican mother church, an hour from St Pancras.
• Salisbury Cathedral — Britain's tallest spire and an original Magna Carta.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →