Qualla: Derby Cathedral

Derby Cathedral: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Soloist at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. On a February night in 1723 the vicar of All Saints, Derby, decided his church was too far gone to repair, so he hired a gang of workmen and had the building demolished before dawn. The Mayor and Corporation woke up to a fait accompli and a heap of rubble where their parish church had stood, and they did the only thing they could: they started fundraising. Two years later the great Georgian architect James Gibbs completed the elegant Neo-Classical hall that still forms the body of Derby Cathedral. Above it rises a Perpendicular Gothic tower from the 1530s, the only piece of the old church the midnight workmen spared. Today the tower is famous for the peregrine falcons that nest on a platform near its top and for the fact that its clock mechanism is driven by gun barrels.

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Image: The original uploader was Soloist at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Derby Cathedral: From Edmund I to Bonnie Prince Charlie

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Park, CC BY-SA 2.0. The site has been a church for more than a thousand years. King Edmund I, an Anglo-Saxon monarch of the mid-tenth century, founded a royal collegiate church of All Saints here around 943, of which nothing physical survives. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 the church belo...

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Image: Colin Park | CC BY-SA 2.0

Derby Cathedral: Joan Waste and the Burning Road

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Roaming Picture Taker, CC BY 2.0. Not every chapter of the church's history is comfortable. In 1556, during the reign of Mary I, a blind weaver named Joan Waste was tried for heresy inside All Saints. She had refused to abandon the Protestant translation of the New Testament she had paid to have read aloud to her...

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Image: The Roaming Picture Taker | CC BY 2.0

Derby Cathedral: Bakewell's Iron, Gibbs's Restraint

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0. When James Gibbs rebuilt the nave between 1723 and 1725 he did so on the cheap. "It is the more beautiful for having no galleries," he wrote in his Book of Architecture, "which, as well as pews, clog up and spoil the insides of churches." The Neo-Classical interior was deliberate...

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust | CC BY-SA 2.0

Derby Cathedral: Bess and the Cavendishes

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poliphilo, CC0. The cathedral is also the burial place of the most powerful Englishwoman of the Tudor age. Bess of Hardwick, four times married, four times widowed, the builder of Hardwick Hall and grandmother to half the English nobility, lies in the south chancel under a stately alabaster effi...

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Image: Poliphilo | CC0

Derby Cathedral: Carbines and Falcons

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Parkywiki, CC BY-SA 4.0. Restorers in 1964 discovered something unexpected about the clock that drives the cathedral's two stone dials. The long metal tubes driven through the tower walls to connect the dial faces to the mechanism turned out to be cavalry carbine barrels, almost certainly looted or salva...

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Image: Parkywiki | CC BY-SA 4.0