Qualla: St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham

St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JimmyGuano, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the early months of the Second World War, a group from the Birmingham Civic Society went into a Baroque church on Colmore Row, climbed scaffolding, and carefully removed four enormous stained-glass windows. They had been designed by Edward Burne-Jones in the 1880s, four pre-Raphaelite masterpieces in red and blue and gold depicting the Ascension, the Crucifixion, the Nativity and the Last Judgement. Burne-Jones had been baptised in this church. The Civic Society stored the panels somewhere safe. On the night of 7 November 1940, German bombs gutted the cathedral, burning through the timber roof and reducing the interior to a shell. When the building was restored in 1948, the windows came home unharmed. They are still there. Standing in front of them on a sunny morning, with the dome of Thomas Archer's 1715 church curving overhead, you are looking at something that has already survived more than most buildings ever have to.

Image: JimmyGuano | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: A Parish Church on a Hill

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 3.0. St Philip's was not built to be a cathedral. By the 1700s Birmingham was outgrowing its medieval parish church of St Martin in the Bull Ring, and the wealthy merchants of the booming town wanted somewhere of their own. A landowner named Robert Philips donated a piece of high grou...

Image: Andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: The Bells and the Brock

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Towers and bells have a knack for becoming the slow heartbeat of a building. The tower was finished in 1725 and Joseph Smith of Edgbaston cast a ring of eight bells for it, eventually augmented to ten. Those bells proved unsatisfactory, and in 1751 the vestry sent them to the Whi...

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: From Parish to Cathedral

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Broster, CC BY 2.0. Birmingham grew, and grew again, and by the early 20th century the case for a separate diocese had become unanswerable. When the Diocese of Birmingham was created in 1905, the bishop needed a cathedra, and St Philip's was the obvious candidate - the grandest church in the city ce...

Image: Peter Broster | CC BY 2.0

St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: The Burne-Jones Glass

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rwendland, CC BY-SA 4.0. Edward Burne-Jones was born in Birmingham in 1833 and baptised at St Philip's. He went on to become one of the leading Pre-Raphaelite painters and a founding partner of Morris and Co. Between 1885 and 1897 he designed four windows for his childhood church: three at the east end a...

Image: Rwendland | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham: What Else the Walls Remember

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0. Outside the cathedral stands an obelisk unveiled by Lord Charles Beresford on 13 November 1885, marking the men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment killed in the Sudan campaign. An earlier red marble monument once stood in the churchyard to honour Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Unett, ...

Image: Stephen McKay | CC BY-SA 2.0