Qualla: Shrewsbury Cathedral

Shrewsbury Cathedral: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JohnArmagh, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shropshire is one of the few English counties that never quite got an Anglican cathedral. The 1922 bill that would have made one out of Shrewsbury Abbey was defeated in the House of Lords four years later by a single vote. So when locals say "the cathedral," they mean the Roman Catholic building on Town Walls - a Gothic Revival church by Edward Pugin, consecrated in 1856, with a story of fathers and sons, of money running out, and of saints painted on walls before being hidden under decades of beige emulsion.

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Image: JohnArmagh | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrewsbury Cathedral: The Earl Who Died Too Soon

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. John Talbot, sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury, commissioned the cathedral. He wanted Augustus Welby Pugin - the master of the English Gothic Revival who had drawn the Houses of Parliament - to design it. Both men were Catholic converts at the high tide of nineteenth-century Catholic ...

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Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrewsbury Cathedral: An Edward Pugin Building

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abingdon13, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edward Welby Pugin was eighteen when his father died, and he spent the rest of his short life - he died at thirty-nine - completing and reinterpreting the work. His Shrewsbury cathedral is recognisably a Pugin building: pointed arches, polychrome stonework, a steep gabled west fr...

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Image: Abingdon13 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Shrewsbury Cathedral: Margaret Rope's Windows

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gnesener1900 Created by using, CC BY-SA 3.0. The cathedral's stained glass is some of the most striking Arts and Crafts work in the English Catholic Church. Most of it is by Margaret Agnes Rope, a Shrewsbury woman who later became a Carmelite nun first at Woodbridge in Suffolk and then at Quidenham in Norfolk. Rope was extr...

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Image: Gnesener1900 Created by using | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrewsbury Cathedral: The Paintings Beneath the Paint

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Jasonjsmith assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. In the 1970s and 1980s, two successive refurbishments painted over the walls of the cathedral. The work was called "unsympathetic" by Sophie Andreae of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales - a tactful word for whitewashing a Pugin interior. When restoration work ...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Jasonjsmith assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Shrewsbury Cathedral: Inside the Severn Loop

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nessy-Pic, CC BY-SA 4.0. Stand outside the cathedral on Town Walls and you are on what was once Shrewsbury's southern defensive perimeter, looking down through the trees toward the river. Behind you the buttressed west front of the cathedral rises against the sky. The medieval Town Walls Tower is just al...

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Image: Nessy-Pic | CC BY-SA 4.0