Westminster Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The mother church of the Catholics of England and Wales does not look like any other church in London: striped in red brick and white Portland stone, crowned with domes and an 87-meter campanile, John Francis Bentley's neo-Byzantine masterpiece was built in less than a decade, from 1895 to 1903, on ground that had once held a prison. Cardinal Vaughan wanted a cathedral for a Catholic community newly restored after centuries in the shadows, and he dedicated it to the Most Precious Blood of Jesus. Inside, the widest nave in England opens beneath vaults of bare, dark brick, still waiting for the mosaics that lower walls already wear in more than a hundred kinds of marble; the unfinished darkness above the glittering chapels has become the cathedral's own strange beauty, as if the work of faith were honestly shown as incomplete. Eric Gill carved the Stations of the Cross here during the First World War, and in 1982 John Paul II celebrated Mass in this cathedral on the first papal visit to Britain in history.