Qualla: St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham

St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G-Man at English Wikipedia, Public domain. A dusty velvet-covered box sat under an altar in Aston, near Stafford, until a parish priest named Benjamin Hulme decided to clear out the chapel. Inside the box were long bones - femurs, by all appearances - that had been smuggled out of Lichfield Cathedral in 1538, just ahead of King Henry VIII's reformers. They were said to be the bones of Chad of Mercia, the 7th-century bishop who had brought Christianity to the Midlands. The Catholic priests who had hidden them passed the box hand to hand through three centuries of penal laws. When Fr Hulme finally presented the relics to Bishop Thomas Walsh, the Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, they were welcomed into a brand-new church on Bath Street in Birmingham, designed by a young architect who would become the patron saint of Gothic Revival: Augustus Welby Pugin. The building was consecrated on 21 June 1841, and a century and a half later, Oxford radiocarbon-dated the bones and found that all but one of them really did come from the 7th century.

Image: G-Man at English Wikipedia | Public domain

St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham: A Church for a Banned Religion

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GavinWarrins, Public domain. St Chad's is one of the first four Catholic churches built in England after the Reformation - the long, brutal centuries in which English Catholics could be fined, imprisoned, or killed for celebrating Mass. The foundation stone was laid in October 1839, only ten years after Cath...

Image: GavinWarrins | Public domain

St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham: A German Solution to an English Site

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Hassocks5489, CC0. Pugin did not get the site he wanted. The plot near St Chad's Queensway was narrow and sloped sharply, and English ecclesiastical custom expected stone. Pugin had to work in brick. Forced into a tight footprint and a humble material, he looked east instead of west. The late-medie...

Image: User:Hassocks5489 | CC0

St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham: What the 1960s Took Away

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Westley, CC BY-SA 2.0. Pugin lived only eleven years after St Chad's was consecrated; he died in 1852 at the age of forty, exhausted and mentally broken by his prodigious output. The cathedral that bears his fingerprints suffered a different kind of unmaking in the 1960s, when post-Vatican II liturgica...

Image: Michael Westley | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham: The Relics in the Canopy

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Bradley, CC BY 2.0. The relics of Chad of Mercia rest today in a casket in the canopy above the high altar. Chad died on 2 March 672, having served as Bishop of Mercia for only three years. He was a pupil of St Aidan of Lindisfarne, part of the great Northumbrian missionary movement that re-Christia...

Image: James Bradley | CC BY 2.0

St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham: A Cathedral on a Queensway

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G-13114, CC BY-SA 4.0. St Chad's now stands a little oddly, its brickwork separated from the rest of the old city by St Chad's Queensway and the ring road that carved through central Birmingham in the postwar decades. Pugin's adjacent Bishop's House was demolished in 1959 to make way for road widening,...

Image: G-13114 | CC BY-SA 4.0