St George's Cathedral, Southwark

The Metropolitan Cathedral Church of St George, usually known simply as St George's Cathedral, Southwark, is the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark and the seat of the Archbishop of Southwark, standing on Lambeth Road in south London opposite the Imperial War Museum. As the mother church of the entire Roman Catholic Province of Southwark — which covers all of London south of the Thames, together with Kent, north Surrey and the dioceses of Arundel and Brighton, Portsmouth and Plymouth — it is one of the most important Catholic churches in England. Designed by the great Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin, devastated in the Blitz and rebuilt in the 1950s, it has had a turbulent history, yet it remains a focal point of Catholic life in the capital.

The cathedral was built in 1848, at a moment of revival for English Catholicism. The local Catholic community had previously worshipped in a small chapel on London Road, also dedicated to St George, but the arrival of large numbers of Irish immigrants in the area made a larger church essential. The new St George's was opened by Bishop Nicholas Wiseman — later the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster — and it was designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, the most influential architect of the Gothic Revival and the man who, with Charles Barry, created the decoration of the rebuilt Houses of Parliament. Pugin designed St George's in the Decorated Gothic style, built of yellow stock brick with Portland stone dressings, and he had a personal connection with the building from the very start: he was the first person to be married in it, to his third wife Jane, on 10 August 1848.

The church's status was transformed just a few years later. In 1850 the Roman Catholic hierarchy was restored in England and Wales, and in 1852 St George's became one of the first four Catholic churches in the country — and the very first in London — to be raised to the dignity of a cathedral since the Reformation, becoming the seat of the new Bishops of Southwark. It was further restored and redecorated by the Scottish ecclesiastical architect Frederick Walters between 1888 and 1905. The cathedral was also a place of great events: in October 1920 it was the setting for the funeral Mass of Terence MacSwiney, the Irish nationalist Lord Mayor of Cork, who had died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison — a funeral of such moment that it was commemorated in a celebrated painting by Sir John Lavery, now in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork.

The cathedral's greatest trial came in the Second World War, when Pugin's building was badly bombed and largely destroyed. For years afterwards the adjacent Amigo Hall served as a pro-cathedral while the future was decided. Within the surviving external structure of Pugin's church, the architect Romilly Craze designed a rebuilt cathedral in the twentieth-century Gothic Revival manner, which was opened in 1958. Among the elements that had survived the bombing were the two chantry chapels and the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, which had been designed by Pugin's son, Edward Pugin, in 1856 — so that the rebuilt cathedral preserves precious fragments of the original work of both father and son. One feature of Pugin's design was never realised, in either the original building or the rebuilding: his intended tall towers and spire, for which there was never sufficient funding, so that the cathedral stands to this day without the soaring silhouette its architect had imagined.

Since its reconstruction, St George's has resumed its central role in the life of Catholic south London and has welcomed many distinguished visitors. Pope John Paul II prayed here during his historic visit to Britain in 1982 — an event commemorated in one of the cathedral's stained-glass windows by Goddard & Gibbs — and the Dalai Lama visited in 1998. The cathedral's musical life is served by a fine organ: the two pre-war instruments, by Willis and by Bishop & Son, were both destroyed in the bombing, and were replaced by a large 72-stop John Compton organ in 1958, since modified and partially restored. With its rebuilt Gothic nave, its surviving Pugin chapels and its rich liturgical life, St George's continues to serve as the spiritual heart of the archdiocese.

The cathedral stands in a historic part of south London, on the corner of Lambeth Road and St George's Road in the London Borough of Southwark, close to the green space of St George's Circus. Directly opposite is the Imperial War Museum, housed in the former Bethlem Royal Hospital, and nearby are the headquarters of the Catholic aid agency CAFOD, the cathedral's own primary school, and the wider attractions of Lambeth and Southwark — the South Bank with its galleries and theatres, the Lambeth Palace home of the Archbishops of Canterbury, the Houses of Parliament across the river, and the bustling life of central London a short distance to the north.

From a chapel for Irish immigrants raised into a great Pugin cathedral in 1848, through its elevation to cathedral status in 1852, the funeral of Terence MacSwiney, its destruction in the Blitz and its rebuilding by Romilly Craze in 1958, to the visits of Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama, St George's Cathedral gathers nearly two centuries of the history of English Catholicism into one building. A Grade II listed cathedral and the mother church of the Province of Southwark, it remains the seat of the Archbishop of Southwark and a living focus of Catholic worship in south London — a Pugin masterpiece twice built, and the first Catholic cathedral in London since the Reformation.