Qualla: Truro Cathedral

Truro Cathedral: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jack Pease Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0. On Christmas Eve 1880, in a wooden hut so cold in winter and stifling in summer that the parishioners complained from both directions, the new Bishop of Truro stood up to try something. Edward White Benson wanted his Cornish congregation kept out of the pubs on Christmas Eve, so he wove together nine scripture readings and nine carols and held what he called a Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The hut held fewer than four hundred people. The service it inaugurated is now broadcast every Christmas Eve from King's College Chapel, Cambridge, to a global audience in the tens of millions. The cathedral that finally replaced that draughty wooden building was the first Anglican cathedral to be raised on a new English site in 660 years.

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Image: Jack Pease Photography | CC BY-SA 4.0

Truro Cathedral: A New Cathedral, A Cornish See

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Crombie, Public domain. The Diocese of Truro was established in December 1876, the first new Anglican see in Cornwall in roughly a thousand years. Edward White Benson, its first bishop, was consecrated at St Paul's the following April. Construction of his cathedral began in 1880 on the site of the paris...

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Image: Mark Crombie | Public domain

Truro Cathedral: Pearson's Spires

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0. The architect was John Loughborough Pearson, one of the leading Gothic Revivalists of the Victorian age. He gave Truro three spires, a central one rising to 250 feet, two western towers reaching 200 feet, and the design read as somewhere between Early English England and the cath...

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Image: Lewis Clarke | CC BY-SA 2.0

Truro Cathedral: Father Willis, Father Pearson

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit shining.darkness, CC BY 2.0. In the same year the choir was completed, Henry Willis built an organ. "Father" Willis, as the trade called him, was the most celebrated English organ-builder of the 19th century, and the 1887 Truro instrument is still widely considered one of his finest. The pipework arrived in ...

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Image: shining.darkness | CC BY 2.0

Truro Cathedral: Choir of Cornwall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AtticTapestry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Truro has kept an unbroken choral tradition since 1876. The current choir is twelve adult lay vicars and choral scholars, joined by either eighteen boy choristers or eighteen girl choristers. Truro Cathedral School closed in 1982, so the choristers attend Truro School on bursarie...

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Image: AtticTapestry | CC BY-SA 4.0