Winchester Cathedral

The Normans built the longest church in medieval Europe on a peat bog, and eight hundred years later it was going down. Between 1906 and 1911 a diver in a brass helmet went under the south and east walls, six hours a day, in water so thick with silt that he worked entirely by touch, and packed the trenches beneath the foundations by hand. The building is still standing because of what he and the engineers around him did. Inside it are Jane Austen, six chests of scrambled Anglo-Saxon kings, and the finest Romanesque wall paintings left in England. This guide walks the lot.

England's old capital, and a church that would not stay up

Before the Normans

Winchester was the capital of Wessex and, for a while, of England: Alfred the Great's city, where the kings of the house of Cerdic were crowned and buried. The Old Minster stood immediately north of the present building — its footprint is marked in brick in the grass outside, and it is worth two minutes to walk it — and it held the shrine of St Swithun, bishop, who died in 862 and whose relics were translated on 15 July 971. He is the reason for the rain superstition, which comes from the story that it poured for forty days when they moved him.

The Norman church, and the tower that fell

Bishop Walkelin began the present building in 1079 and it was dedicated on 8 April 1093, at which point the monks moved across and the Old Minster was demolished. It was, and is, colossal: 558 feet long. The safe way to state the record is the way the cathedral does — the longest medieval cathedral in the world, and the longest Gothic nave in Europe. Comparisons of total length with Seville or Milan get contested, and Liverpool is longer but is not medieval.

In 1107 the central tower collapsed. Contemporaries blamed the burial beneath it, seven years earlier, of William Rufus — killed by an arrow in the New Forest in 1100, in circumstances nobody has ever satisfactorily explained — whose impiety was said to have offended God. Chroniclers with more building sense noted that the tower had probably just been badly made.

The nave that was carved, not rebuilt

The transformation from Norman to Gothic happened here in an unusual way, and it is the single most interesting structural fact about the building. Instead of pulling down the Norman nave, William of Wykeham's masons in the late fourteenth century cut the Perpendicular Gothic out of the existing Norman piers — encasing, recutting and refacing the massive round columns into slender clustered shafts and throwing new vaults across.

Go to the north transept, which was left alone, and you can see the raw Norman work that is still inside every pier in the nave. That comparison, transept to nave, is the best free lesson in medieval architecture in England.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Great West Window

Look up as you come in, and notice that the west window makes no sense. There is no scheme, no figures, no narrative — just a vast abstract mosaic of coloured fragments.

That is deliberate, and it is the best small story in the building. In December 1642 Parliamentarian soldiers under Sir William Waller sacked the cathedral: they smashed the glass, destroyed the statuary and the organ, tipped the mortuary chests out and threw the royal bones at the windows, and rode horses down the nave. Afterwards the townspeople gathered up what was left of the glass and, at the Restoration, put it back — not as pictures, which was impossible, but as a patchwork. It is a seventeenth-century act of salvage made out of fifteenth-century glass, and it is more moving than the window it replaced would have been.

Jane Austen

In the north aisle of the nave, set in the floor, a black marble ledger stone. She died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, aged 41, having come to the city for medical treatment, and was buried here because her brother could arrange it.

Read what it says. It praises “the benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind”, and identifies her as the daughter of the late Revd George Austen. It does not mention that she wrote novels. She had published anonymously, and her family chose to commemorate her piety.

The omission was corrected later, twice. A brass tablet on the wall of 1872, paid for out of the proceeds of her nephew's memoir, describes her as “known to many by her writings”. And a memorial window by C. E. Kempe of 1900, funded by public subscription, stands above the grave. The sequence — the stone that does not say it, the brass that half says it, the window the public paid for — is the history of her reputation in three objects, in one bay.

William Walker, the diver

Near St Swithun's shrine is a statue of a man in a diving suit, and he is the reason the building exists.

By 1905 the south and east walls were cracking badly: the Normans had built on peat over a high water table, and the foundations were failing. The water could not be pumped out without collapsing the trenches, so the consulting engineer Francis Fox and the architect T. G. Jackson had the walls underpinned underwater. William Walker, a professional diver, arrived on 5 April 1906 and worked until 1911: around six hours a day in a 200-pound suit, at depths of up to six metres, in water so thick with disturbed silt that he was in complete darkness and worked entirely by touch. He removed the unstable peat and packed the trenches with bags of concrete so that bricklayers could work in the drained sections afterwards. The scheme used something like 25,800 bags of concrete, 114,900 concrete blocks and 900,000 bricks, and cost around £113,000. Walker was made MVO.

Two corrections to the legend, both worth making. He did not do it alone — he was one diver on a large engineering project with a substantial workforce, and “one man saved the cathedral” is a compression. And the statue itself was wrong for decades: the sculptor worked from a photograph in which the wrong man had been identified, so until May 2001 the memorial to William Walker was a likeness of Francis Fox. It was replaced with a correct one.

The crypt, and Sound II

Down from the north transept is the crypt: c.1079–93, and the least altered part of the entire building — this is Walkelin's church, unmodified. It also sits below the water table, and it floods in most winters, usually somewhere between December and March.

Standing in it is Antony Gormley's Sound II, of 1986: a life-size lead figure with its head bowed, holding a bowl of water in cupped hands. When the crypt floods the figure is ankle-deep or knee-deep and doubled in the reflection, and it becomes one of the most photographed objects in English cathedral architecture. When it floods you cannot go in and must look from the gate. Write it in your plans as “most winters”, not “every winter”, and ask at the desk on the day.

The choir stalls

The stalls in the quire were carved about 1308 by a carpenter named William Lyngwode, and they are the oldest complete set of choir stalls in England. The canopies are a thicket of foliage and heads; under the seats are the misericords, with the usual medieval carpenter's private world of grotesques, animals and jokes. Ask a steward whether one can be lifted.

The Great Screen

Behind the high altar, a late fifteenth-century stone screen of tier upon tier of canopied niches. Every statue in it was smashed at the Reformation, and every figure you can see is a Victorian replacement of the 1880s and 90s. The frame is medieval, the population is not, and knowing that changes how it reads.

The mortuary chests

High on the stone screens either side of the presbytery sit six painted wooden chests inscribed with the names of Anglo-Saxon and Norman royalty: Cynegils, Cynewulf, Egbert, Æthelwulf, Eadred, Cnut, Emma, William Rufus, and the bishops Wini and Stigand. Then in 1642 Waller's soldiers pulled them down, tipped the contents onto the floor and threw the bones at the windows. What was recovered was put back more or less at random.

Between 2012 and 2019 a research project run with the University of Bristol went through them properly, and what it found is better than the legend. Over 1,300 bones sorted into at least 23 partial skeletons — considerably more people than the fifteen the inscriptions name. Radiocarbon dates in the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman range, consistent with the names. Two adolescent boys aged roughly ten to fifteen, which nobody expected and which may point to the sons of Cnut or of Edmund Ironside. And at least one mature female — and since Emma is the only woman named on any chest, the researchers said carefully that these could be the remains of Emma of Normandy, wife of two kings and mother of two more.

Could, not are. No DNA identification has been announced. But standing under a painted box in Hampshire that probably contains an eleventh-century queen is a fair reason to look up.

St Swithun's shrine and the retrochoir

The whole east end beyond the high altar — the retrochoir, built about 1202–35 in Early English Gothic — exists to handle the crowds who came to St Swithun. His medieval shrine was destroyed in 1538 in Henry VIII's dissolution; what marks the site now is a modern canopy of 1962. The retrochoir around it is one of the loveliest spaces in the building and gets a fraction of the traffic the nave does.

The Holy Sepulchre Chapel

Off the north transept, a small chapel with twelfth- and early-thirteenth-century wall paintings — a Deposition, an Entombment, a Harrowing of Hell — among the finest Romanesque wall painting surviving anywhere in England, and startlingly complete. There are two layers, the later painted over the earlier and both now visible. Almost nobody in the nave knows it is there.

The chantry chapels

Winchester has the best series of bishops' chantry chapels in England — stone rooms built inside the building for a bishop's tomb and for masses to be said for his soul. William of Wykeham's, in the nave, is the one to find: he died in 1404, founded Winchester College and New College Oxford, and has three small monks carved at his feet. Tradition says his chantry survived the Reformation because a New College man among the soldiers protected his founder's tomb.

Bishop Fox's, beside the presbytery, is the other must: it has a cadaver effigy — the bishop carved as an emaciated corpse, a memento mori of extraordinary bleakness. Beaufort's, Waynflete's and Gardiner's are all here too.

Izaak Walton

In Prior Silkstede's Chapel in the south transept lies Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, who died in Winchester in 1683 aged ninety. The memorial window above him was paid for by anglers, and there are fish in it. It is an entirely appropriate monument.

Kings and Scribes, and the Winchester Bible

The exhibition in the refurbished south transept and triforium, opened in 2019 and included in the ticket, holds the cathedral's real treasure: the Winchester Bible, begun about 1150–80 and the largest and finest surviving twelfth-century English illuminated Bible. It was written out by a single scribe and illuminated by several artists known only by style — the Master of the Leaping Figures, the Amalekite Master — and it was never finished, which means you can see the drawing underneath the gold in places where the painting stops.

It lives in a climate-controlled room and can only be open at one page, so the exhibition uses screens to let you turn the rest. The same exhibition tells the mortuary chest story and the history of the Old Minster. It runs shorter hours than the cathedral and depends on volunteers, so do it first rather than last.

The Close, and the buildings round it

Winchester was a Benedictine priory as well as a cathedral, and the precinct survived the dissolution better than most. The Close is still walled, still private, and still full: the Deanery incorporates the thirteenth-century Prior's Hall; the Pilgrims' Hall has the earliest hammerbeam roof in England, of about 1310; and Cheyney Court, the timber-framed house by the gate, was the bishop's courthouse. Walk out through the passage into Kingsgate and there is a tiny medieval church, St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate, built into the city gate itself.

None of this needs a ticket. The Close is open to walk through, and it is the pleasantest ten minutes in Winchester.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Holy Sepulchre Chapel Off the north transept: twelfth-century wall painting of a quality that survives almost nowhere else in England, and almost nobody looks in.
• The north transept Left as the Normans built it — walk from here to the nave and you can see exactly what the fourteenth century did to the same building.
• The west window An abstract made of the fragments soldiers smashed in 1642, swept up and reset by the people of Winchester.
• Jane Austen's ledger stone And what it conspicuously does not say. Then find the brass of 1872 and the window of 1900.
• The mortuary chests 23 partial skeletons where the labels name 15 people, two unexpected adolescent boys, and possibly Emma of Normandy.
• Bishop Fox's cadaver effigy A bishop carved as a corpse, beside the presbytery.
• The Winchester Bible In Kings and Scribes: the finest 12th-century English Bible there is, unfinished, so you can see how it was made.
• William Walker's statue The diver — and, until 2001, a portrait of the wrong man entirely.

Insider tips

Check the closure dates before you travel. The cathedral shuts for several days each autumn for the flower festival and for graduations, and parts of it close for services and conservation without refunds.

Walk the Old Minster footprint outside. The brick outlines in the grass north of the cathedral are the Anglo-Saxon church — the actual capital of Wessex — and they cost nothing and take two minutes.

Ask about the crypt on the day. It floods most winters, and when it does you can only see Gormley's figure from the gate. That is arguably the better view, but it is not the one people are expecting.

Use the year. It is an annual pass, Winchester is an hour from London, and this is a building that rewards a second, slower visit far more than most.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Winchester is small, prosperous and walkable, and the Cathedral Close — still a walled precinct with medieval and Georgian houses round a lawn — is one of the most attractive in England. Stay in the centre; everything is within ten minutes. The High Street and the streets around the Buttercross have the eating, and the water meadows walk out to St Cross Hospital — a medieval almshouse that still gives travellers a Wayfarer's Dole of bread and ale if you ask at the porter's lodge — is the best hour in the city after the cathedral itself.

More English cathedrals

• Salisbury Cathedral — the tallest spire in Britain and an original Magna Carta, half an hour west.
• Canterbury Cathedral — the murder of Becket, and the crypt that survived everything.
• Wells Cathedral — the scissor arches, and the oldest working clock face in the world.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →