Winchester Cathedral: Interior, Showing the Choir Screen

Winchester

Other Views and Related Material

Winchester Cathedral

Exterior, north side

Interior, showing the Great Screen

Detail of Great Screen (St Hedda)

Detail of wood carving in choir

Jane Austen's gravestone in the nave

Scott's Choir screen: A Brief Discussion

Monument to Bishop Wilberforce

Monument to Bishop Brownlow North

Memorial to Charles Berkeley Pigott

Photograph and commentary by Jacqueline Banerjee. Many thanks to Rowland Wateridge for a correction and additional information. Click on the image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.

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Winchester Cathedral is regularly included among the twenty-nine cathedrals on which Scott worked, thanks to a list published in the The Builder after he died. But Scott himself explained that he did very little here. He was called in twice about the screen, at first declining the project for fear of "altering old work," but finally deciding it was safe to make some adjustments (he talks about the "opening out of the screen," 352). Scott also designed the monument to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the south transept, with an effigy sculpted by H. H. Armstead. Although Scott based his designs on earlier ones, his work here was criticised at the end of the period — the screen partly just for "the pallor of its wood" (the oak looked paler then, when the older woodwork was more darkly stained), and the monument with its Gothic canopy for being "out of place in its Norman surroundings" (Sergeant 50, 68). For a fuller discussion of the screen, see "Scott's Choir Screen: A Brief Discussion."

References

Scott, Sir George Gilbert. Personal and Professional Recollections, ed. G. Gilbert Scott. Ed. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879. See Chapter 8. Internet Archive. Contributed by the University of Michigan. Web. 12 April 2015.

Sergeant, Philip W. The Cathedral Church of Winchester: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See. London: George Bell, 1903. Internet Archive. Contributed by the University of Michigan. Web. 12 April 2015.

Created 13 April 2015