Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist

The Cathedral Church of St John the Evangelist — usually known simply as Salford Cathedral — stands on Chapel Street in Salford, Greater Manchester: the seat of the Bishop of Salford, mother church of the Diocese of Salford, and a Grade II* listed building. When it rose between 1844 and 1848 it was the first cruciform Catholic church built in England since the Reformation, and its spire, at 240 feet, was the tallest in Lancashire — a defiant Gothic exclamation mark over the industrial Irwell.

St John's Church was designed by Matthew Ellison Hadfield of Weightman and Hadfield of Sheffield and built by Benjamin Hollins of Manchester. Hadfield's design was a learned anthology of medieval England: the "west" front (actually facing south) and the nave are copied on a reduced scale from Howden Minster in the East Riding of Yorkshire; the choir and sanctuary closely follow Selby Abbey in North Yorkshire; the decorations of the groined vault come from the church of St Jacques in Liège, Belgium; and the tower and spire derive from St Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent. Two local businessmen, Daniel Lee and John Leeming, each gave £1,000 toward the building and furnishings, and both are commemorated in chantries at the liturgical east end of the choir; the total cost reached £18,000. The great "east" window of 1856, by William Wailes of Newcastle, tells the whole story of Catholic Christianity in England, from the conversion of Ethelbert by St Augustine in 597 to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850 — the very event that made this church a cathedral.

The foundation stone was laid in 1844 by Bishop James Sharples, coadjutor to Bishop George Brown, Vicar Apostolic of the Lancashire District, and the church opened on 9 August 1848 with a Solemn High Mass celebrated by Bishop Brown before the bishops of the other vicariates of England and Wales. When the Diocese of Salford was erected in September 1850, St John's was elevated to cathedral status in 1852 — one of the first four Catholic cathedrals in England and Wales since the English Reformation. On 25 July 1851 William Turner was consecrated first Bishop of Salford here, and in the same ceremony the cathedral's own rector, George Errington, was consecrated first Bishop of Plymouth.

The building's history since has been a long contest with weather, gravity and fashion. In October 1881 a violent storm seriously damaged the spire; Canon Beesley, the administrator, raised the funds for repairs and a general refurbishment, and in 1884 furnished the new Blessed Sacrament chapel in the "south" transept to designs by Peter Paul Pugin, third son of A. W. N. Pugin. By early 1890 the last £1,000 of the original building debt was paid off — clearing the way for the cathedral's consecration that year by the second Bishop of Salford, Herbert Vaughan, later Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. In 1919–20 the turrets of the "west" front were found to be in danger of collapsing into the street; they were taken down and rebuilt by O'Neill & Son of Sheffield under Charles M. Hadfield, grandson of the original architect. The War Memorial Chapel in the "north" transept opened in 1924, honouring the fallen of the First World War. In 1934 the spire itself was found to have strayed from the perpendicular, and the civic authorities ordered some sixty feet removed; repairs were not completed until 1938, just in time for wartime damage that required restoration in the immediate post-war years.

The Second Vatican Council brought re-ordering in 1971–72 at a cost of £80,000, including a new free-standing altar under the crossing; a further re-ordering of the choir in 1988 removed the original stone high altar and reredos of 1853–55, designed by George Goldie. In 1994 a new stained-glass west window marked the 150th anniversary of the foundation stone: titled "When I am lifted up I shall draw all to myself," it depicts in semi-abstract form the crucified Christ flanked by the Virgin Mary and the cathedral's patron, St John. External stonework of the spire and front was restored in spring 2007, major roof and masonry repairs followed in 2018 — and in November 2021 the cathedral closed for a multi-million-pound restoration lasting until 2024, designed in part to reinstate some of the Victorian heritage stripped out in the 1970s, under a new roof.

The cathedral's organs trace a curious technological history. The earliest recorded instrument was a four-manual by W. E. Richardson in the north transept, installed in 1887. In 1938 Compton supplied a short-lived experimental design with remote pipework relayed into the cathedral by microphones and loudspeakers; Jardine rebuilt it as a conventional two-manual pipe organ in 1951, reusing some Compton pipework, with the console in the south aisle and the pipe case in the west gallery. Since 2002 the cathedral has used a four-manual Makin digital organ — still uncommon in cathedrals — with a versatile stop list and speakers set in the clerestory windows above the nave to support choir and congregation.

Hadfield's borrowed Gothic — Howden's front, Selby's choir, Newark's spire, Liège's vault — thus serves its third century as the Catholic mother church of Salford: storm-battered, shortened, re-ordered and now restored, with Wailes's window still narrating thirteen centuries of English Catholicism beside the chantries of the two Salford merchants who paid to begin it all.