Lotherton Chapel is a small building dating to the 12th century that is next to Lotherton Hall in Leeds. It fell into disrepair until 1913 when Colonel Gascoigne, the then owner of the Hall, had it refurbished to be used as a family chapel, though it is still Church of England property.
St Leonard’s is the parish church of Rockingham Village and sits just below the walls of the castle – it is open to visitors on days when the castle is open to the public. There was probably a chapel inside the castle in the 11th century and in the 15th century a church on the site of the present building was destroyed in the Civil War; the present church dates to 1650.
The Memorial Chapel at the University of Glasgow can, in normal times, be visited every weekday from 9 till 5 and when I visited I had the whole place to myself for a few minutes before more people came in. It was completed in 1929 to serve as a memorial for members of the university who had died in both World Wars and interestingly both Protestant, Catholic and humanist marriages can take place there.
The chapel was designed by John James Burnet around 1913 but building was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War. It’s not surprisingly a small building but a lovely space nonetheless and has some wonderful stained glass windows designed and made by Douglas Strachan. He died before he could install all the windows he’d designed, so these were worked on by others from the 1950s to the 1960s.
You can find some more photos here.
Provand’s Lordship was built in 1471 and is one of Glasgow’s few surviving medieval buildings located not far from the Cathedral. It was built by Andrew Muirhead, the Bishop of Glasgow, as part of the then St Nicholas’ Hospital.
Glasgow Cathedral is the oldest cathedral on mainland Scotland, the present building being consecrated in 1197. It’s a large impressive stone building with very high ceilings next to the Necropolis.
St Mary Abbots Church on Kensington High Street was built in 1872 and designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott (architect of the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office among many others), though church buildings had been on the site before then.
Fitzrovia Chapel is another place I visited as part of Open House London last year, somewhere that had been on my radar since seeing some pictures on Instagram, and I was pleased to have my expectations exceeded. Designed by John Loughborough Pearson in 1891 it was built as a tranquil space for the staff and former patients of Middlesex Hospital but by the time the chapel was finished and opened in 1929 the hospital had been demolished.
I’d seen some pictures of All Saints Margaret online and decided that it was somewhere that I wanted to see for myself. In fact this Victorian church, tucked away down a side street not far from Oxford Circus was even more breathtaking than I’d imagined.
The Stained Glass Museum inside Ely Cathedral is the only UK museum of its type and as someone who loves the beauty and details of stained glass I was really looking forward to visiting and was not disappointed. Since it was founded in 1972 it has collected and preserved over 1,000 different stained glass panels and windows dating from the 13th century to the present, both religious and secular. Most are from the UK but there are some examples from Europe and the US as well.
Lincoln is only an hour or so away from Nottingham so I decided to take a trip there recently and bought a joint ticket to both the Cathedral and Lincoln Castle which was well worth the price of £18. An easy-ish walk from the railway station (there is a steep hill involved though buses are also available) some of the Cathedral was under scaffolding when I visited but that didn’t detract from the impressiveness of the building.
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