Coventry Cathedral [antikvár]

COVENTRY CATHEDRAL A NEW CATHEDRAL FOR THE MODERN WORLD The 14th-century cathedral church of St. Michael was reduced to ruins by fire bombs during the night of Thursday 14th November 1940. This was the night when Coventry suffered the longest air-raid of any one night on any British city during the Second World War. The outer walls and the tower and spire remained intact, but the wooden roof, the heavy oak ceiling, the pews, the floor and the screen were completely destroyed. To somé it seemed to be the end of a fine perpendicular church, a building which Ruskin had once admired and which in its richness had been a witness of the prosperity of medieval Coventry. But two precious relics grew out of the destruction. A few days after the bombing, two irregular pieces of the charred roof beams were tied together by wire and set up at the east end of the ruins. This "Charred Cross" (opposite) is now world famous, standing behind the stone altar in the sanctuary of the ruins, having as its reredos the carving of the simple words father forgive. The second relic of the ancient church which became a spark of life in the ministry of the new church is the "Cross of Nails". As the roof burned, large fourteenth-century hand-forged nails which had fastened together its beams littered the ruined floor of the sanctuary. The following morning the inspiration came to form three of the nails into the shape of a Cross. It was not the only imaginative decision to be made that day. Of far greater importance was the immediate resolve, as the ruins still smoked, to rebuild the cathedral. From that day until the consecration of the new building the life of the cathedral went on in the ruins of the old. The rubble was cleared and two undergroun< were repaired and furnished. Services v regularly in the open air of the ruinec practice which is being continued, wit services at Easter and Whitsun. In 1947 the Reconstruction Commi entrusted by the Cathedral Council with of rebuilding and a design competition architects of the British Commonwealth There were 219 entries, and the compet won by Mr. (now Sir) Basil Spence. The reconstruction began on 8th June 19 laying of the foundations started on 7t 1955 and the cathedral was virtually c on 28th April 1962, when the "flying ci lowered on to the fléche from a helicoj consecration took place on 25th May 19 presence of Her Majesty The Queen. Coventry had once been enclosed b; Within this wall were many churcl greatest was the Church of St. Mary dictine Monastery, built in 1043. This when enlarged in the 13th century, wa to and in fact larger than the present Cathedral. Lady Godiva, wife of Leofrií Mercia, supported its foundation with able wealth. Further ruins of its walls a in Priory Row, to the west of the new < Hard by the west wall are visible the base of the massive buttresses which suppc first great cathedral of Coventry. Joine new cathedral by the porch are the rui second cathedral church of St. Michael. I third cathedral stands as a massive link the first and the second-a symbo indestructibility of the faith which it e