Southwark Cathedral

• 1. Introduction

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  Southwark Cathedral sits just metres from the south bank of the Thames, close to London Bridge, and it has been a place of Christian worship for more than a thousand years. Its full formal name is the Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie, a mouthful that carries centuries of layered identity. Yet for most of those thousand years, this was not a cathedral at all. It only achieved that rank in 1905, when the Church of England created the Diocese of Southwark. Before that, it had been a priory, a parish church, a site of heresy trials, a burial place for Elizabethan playwrights, and a perch from which an artist drew one of the most famous panoramas of London ever made. The questions worth asking here are not just about stones and spires. They are about the people who prayed, plotted, sang, and were buried within these walls, and about a building that the railway nearly swallowed whole.

• 2. Legends and Origins

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  John Stow, a historian writing in the 16th century, set down a story he had heard from Bartholomew Linsted, who had been the last prior of Southwark Priory before it was dissolved. According to Linsted, the site had been founded as a nunnery by a young woman named Mary, who used the profits of a river ferry she had inherited from her parents. Later, a noble woman named Swithen converted it into a college of priests. Finally, in 1106, it was refounded as an Augustinian priory.

  That tale of the ferryman's daughter proved popular, but it attracted sceptics early. A guidebook written in 1862 proposed that Swithen had in fact been a man: Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, who held that role from 852 or 853 until his death in 863. In the 20th century, Thomas P. Stevens, who served as succentor, sacrist, and later honorary canon of the cathedral, accepted this identification in his own guidebooks. He went further and placed the founding of the original nunnery at around the year 606, though he offered no evidence for that date.

  Today an information panel inside the cathedral still states that a convent was founded there in 606 AD and that a monastery was established by St Swithun in the 9th century. Historians have noted there is no proof for either claim. What is certain is that the earliest surviving written record of the site appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, where the minster of Southwark appears to have been under the control of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, half-brother to William the Conqueror.

• 3. Fire, Rebuilding, and Gothic Form

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  The Great Fire of 1212 severely damaged the church, and rebuilding work stretched through the 13th century. The reconstructed building took a cruciform plan with an aisled nave of six bays, a crossing tower, transepts, and a five-bay choir. That basic layout survives to this day, making this the first Gothic church in London.

  A chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalen sat in the angle between the south transept and the choir, serving local parishioners. Later, a further chapel was added east of the retrochoir. By the 17th century this had become known as the Bishop's Chapel because it was the burial place of Lancelot Andrewes.

  In the 1390s fire struck again, and around 1420 Henry Beaufort, then Bishop of Winchester, helped fund the rebuilding of the south transept and the completion of the tower. During the 15th century, stone ceiling vaults in the nave and north transept collapsed in 1469, and wooden vaults replaced them. Some of the carved bosses from that vault, destroyed in the 19th century, are still held in the cathedral. The poet John Gower, who lived in the priory precinct in the 14th century, is entombed in the church beneath a memorial with polychrome panels. A recumbent knight carved in timber rather than brass or stone is also here, and the church suggests it dates from the 13th century, which would make it one of the oldest such memorials in existence.

• 4. Dissolution, Drama, and Heresy

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  In around 1520, Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, carried out a programme of improvements, installing a stone altar screen and new windows. Two decades later, the priory came to an end. Henry VIII dissolved all religious houses in England, and St Mary Overie was surrendered to the Crown in 1540 by a royal receiver named William Saunders. The church took a new dedication, St Saviour, and absorbed two neighbouring parishes, including the old parochial chapel of St Mary Magdalen. The parishioners leased the building from the Crown for decades before purchasing it outright in 1614 for £800.

  The retrochoir where monks had once worshipped became a setting for something grimmer during the reign of Queen Mary. In January 1555, six senior clergymen, including John Hooper, the former Bishop of Gloucester, were condemned to death for heresy in that very room.

  As the parish church for the Bankside area, St Saviour's stood at the heart of London's theatrical district. William Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund was buried here in 1607. His grave is unmarked, though a commemorative stone was later set into the choir floor. John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, two other dramatists, were also buried in the church. A large stained glass window depicting scenes from Shakespeare's plays, and an alabaster statue of the playwright, now stand inside. John Harvard, baptised in the church on the 29th of November 1607, would later travel to New England, where he helped found the university that bears his name. His father Robert, a local butcher and inn-holder, had been a business associate of Shakespeare's family.

• 5. The Altar Screen of Bishop Fox

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  Between 1520 and 1528, during the episcopate of Richard Fox, a stone altar screen was erected that remains one of the cathedral's most discussed features. It stands about thirty feet high and fills the entire east wall below the window. Two small doors pass through it to the retrochoir behind. Whether all the original statues were ever placed in their niches is unclear, since the screen was completed just before the Reformation, when such figures were outlawed.

  In 1703, workers hacked back the Gothic canopies almost to a flat surface to fit a classical wooden reredos. When that wooden screen was removed in 1830, the original stonework was restored by architect Richard Wallace, though altered in many ways. The original portions are of Caen and firestone; the restored sections use Painswick stone. A woodcut published in 1834 in the periodical The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction records what the screen looked like just after that restoration.

  Among the genuinely old fragments that survive are small carvings of the Lamb of God and the Pelican in her Piety, which served as a heraldic badge of Bishop Fox himself. Hidden in the spandrels of the two doorways are grotesque carvings depicting hunting scenes, including a man chasing a fox, a carved joke at the bishop's expense. The majority of the niched statues were carved by Messrs Nicolls of Lambeth from 1905 onwards and represent figures central to the church's own history.

• 6. A Cathedral Almost Swallowed by Rail

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  By the early 19th century the building was in a sorry state. The interior had been, as Francis Bumpus later described it, pewed and galleried to a fearful extent. Between 1818 and 1830, George Gwilt Jun. restored the tower and choir, aiming to return the church to its 13th-century appearance, though his invented east-end elevation drew criticism. In May 1831 a vestry meeting voted to strip the nave roof, which had become unsafe, leaving the interior open to the sky.

  The roofless nave was demolished in 1839 down to within seven feet of the ground, then rebuilt to a design by Henry Rose. The result drew sharp criticism from the architect Pugin, who wrote: "It is bad enough to see such an erection spring up at all, but when a venerable building is demolished to make way for it, the case is quite intolerable."

  The same decade brought a far more existential threat. When the main railway viaduct connecting London Bridge station to Blackfriars, Cannon Street, and Charing Cross stations was extended in 1852, the alternative to running it just eighteen metres from the cathedral's southeast corner was to demolish the building entirely. The viaduct was the compromise that let the cathedral stand. Between 1890 and 1897, Anthony Thorold, Bishop of Rochester, directed a fresh rebuilding of the nave by Arthur Blomfield, intended to recreate its 13th-century predecessor as faithfully as possible. An appeal in 1895 called for around £8,000 to complete the restoration of the choir and tower.

• 7. Choirs, Cats, and Controversies

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  The Cathedral Choir performs music drawn from schools across London and the surrounding areas, since the cathedral has no choir school of its own. Girls join the choir typically between the ages of ten and eleven; boys between seven and ten. There are six Lay Clerks, three of them supported by endowments from The Ouseley Trust, the Vernon Ellis Foundation, and the Friends of Cathedral Music. Former choristers include Chuka Umunna, who later served as Member of Parliament for Streatham, and Richard Marlow, who went on to direct the choir at Trinity College, Cambridge. The Cathedral Choir also performed the music for the television series Mr. Bean.

  In 2004 the cathedral founded a second ensemble, the Southwark Cathedral Merbecke Choir, named after the Tudor composer John Merbecke, who lived from 1510 to 1585. Merbecke himself had been tried for heresy in the cathedral's own retrochoir in 1543. He was condemned to death but was spared by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who concluded that, as a mere musician, Merbecke knew no better.

  The cathedral attracted a different kind of attention in 2008, when a brown female stray cat began visiting in search of food and shelter. She was named Doorkins Magnificat by Dean Colin Slee, who intended her name as a reference to the prominent atheist Richard Dawkins. Doorkins met both the Mayor of London and Queen Elizabeth II, became the subject of a children's book, and in 2018 was commemorated with a stone gargoyle inside the cathedral itself. She retired in October 2019 and died on the 2nd of October 2020. Her memorial service, held on the 27th of October 2020, was reported in the national press as apparently unprecedented for a cat. A successor, Hodge, a black and white tuxedo cat adopted from a rescue organisation, arrived coincidentally on the same day Doorkins died.