Coventry Cathedral was designed by Basil Spence and built between 1951 and 1962 beside the ruins of the medieval cathedral destroyed in the Second World War. It holds one of the most ambitious groups of post-war glass in Britain, and it is a good place to discover how far twentieth-century artists took ecclesiastical stained glass.
Hutton’s engraved screen
The glass wall at the west end carries 66 figures of saints and angels, designed and engraved by hand by John Hutton. The cathedral records that the work took ten years. The screen closes the end of the nave while still letting the eye pass through it: from inside, the ruins of the old cathedral can be seen between the figures, and from the steps outside, visitors see their own reflections among them.
The nave windows and the Baptistery
Ten tall windows rise the full height of the nave walls. They were commissioned in 1952 from the Royal College of Art, where Lawrence Lee, head of stained glass, shared the work with two former students, Geoffrey Clarke and Keith New: each created three windows and the tenth was a joint work. Their colours change along the nave, from the tones of childhood towards those of maturity.
The Baptistery window, designed by John Piper and made by Patrick Reyntiens, was completed in the early 1960s. It rises about 25 metres in nearly 200 panels, which together form a single mass of colour. The Chapel of Unity has glass by Margaret Traherne.
| Place | Details |
|---|---|
| Location | Coventry, West Midlands, England |
| Type | Cathedral |
| Period | Modern |
| Glass artists | John Hutton (West Screen); John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens (Baptistery); Lawrence Lee, Geoffrey Clarke and Keith New (nave); Margaret Traherne (Chapel of Unity) |
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Related pages
- Stained glass tour of the UK
- John Hutton: engraver of the Coventry glass screen
- Guildford Cathedral
- Masters of Glass
- Churches and Cathedrals
- Window styles by period
- Famous workshops and makers
- How to read a church window
- Ecclesiastical stained glass
Published 19 October 2026 · Last updated