St Mary's Church, Shrewsbury

St Mary's Church in Shrewsbury is the largest and one of the most magnificent churches in the county town of Shropshire, famous above all for its extraordinary collection of stained glass — among the finest in England — and for its soaring spire, one of the tallest in the country. A Grade I listed building, included by the architectural writer Alec Clifton-Taylor among the "best" English parish churches, it is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, which made St Mary's its very first "Conservation Church" in 2015. Though no longer a parish church, it remains a building of the first importance, a treasure-house of medieval and Renaissance art.

St Mary's began as a collegiate church of great dignity — the Collegiate Church and Royal Free Chapel of St Mary the Virgin, a "Royal Peculiar" answerable directly to the Crown. According to tradition it was founded by King Edgar in the tenth century, and by at least the thirteenth century it was served by a dean and nine canons. Excavations in 1864 revealed traces of an earlier church with an apsidal chancel beneath the present building. The construction of the present church began in the twelfth century, with an aisleless nave, a cruciform east end and a large west tower; over the following centuries it was steadily enlarged and enriched — the aisles were added in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the crossing rebuilt, the chancel lengthened, the Trinity Chapel added in the fourteenth century, and, in the fifteenth, a clerestory built and great new windows inserted. The tall spire that crowns the west tower, one of the tallest church spires in England, was probably added in this final medieval phase.

The glory of St Mary's is its stained glass. The church possesses one of the most important collections of medieval and continental stained glass in the country, gathered both from its own medieval windows and from churches and monasteries across Europe in the nineteenth century. Its greatest treasure is the fourteenth-century Jesse Window, depicting the Tree of Jesse — the genealogy of Christ springing from the body of Jesse — one of the finest pieces of medieval glass in England. Around it, the windows glow with glass from England, Germany, the Low Countries and elsewhere, making the interior of St Mary's a dazzling museum of the art of stained glass across the centuries.

The church is also remembered for a famous tragedy. In 1739 a steeplejack and showman named Robert Cadman attempted to "fly" down a rope stretched from the top of St Mary's spire across the River Severn; the rope broke, and Cadman fell to his death before the watching crowd. A memorial inscription on the west tower commemorates his fate, a curious and poignant reminder of the great height of the spire.

By the twentieth century the congregation had dwindled, and St Mary's was declared redundant; but rather than be lost, it was vested in the Churches Conservation Trust, which has cared for it ever since and has made it a flagship of its work. Today the church is open to visitors, who come to marvel at its stained glass, its medieval architecture and its soaring spire, and to attend the occasional services and concerts still held within its walls.

The church stands in St Mary's Place, in the heart of the medieval town of Shrewsbury, within the great loop of the River Severn. The timber-framed streets of the old town, the castle and the abbey, the Quarry park beside the river, and the birthplace connections of Charles Darwin all lie close by, along with the round church of St Chad, the Shropshire countryside, the Shropshire Hills and the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site, all within easy reach.

From its origins as a collegiate royal chapel said to have been founded by King Edgar, through the building of the great medieval church and its spire, the gathering of its incomparable stained glass, and the tragedy of Robert Cadman, to its preservation by the Churches Conservation Trust, St Mary's Church gathers many centuries of history and art into one building. A Grade I listed church and a treasure-house of stained glass beneath one of England's tallest spires, it remains one of the glories of Shrewsbury — a masterpiece of medieval craftsmanship at the heart of the town.