Issue 42 summer 24 web - Flipbook - Page 118
shrine here draws further attention to the remarkable
colour and pattern of John Lawson’s papal window design
for Goddard & Gibbs.
There was a need to over-board the recess between
Craze’s stone skirting & dado courses up to the window
sill. The shrine has been built against the recess, by
forming a plywood cassette, hardwood battens scribed
over the limestone profiles, with mineral wool insulation
to buffer both moisture and temperature at the external
wall, fixed to support the reredos and edged with a narrow
stripe of lime plaster on expanded metal lathe, effecting a
match to the existing transept walls.10
The weight of the shrine is carried on the 1958 monument slab that spans over an original 19th Century foundation, below the ground-bearing floor slab of Craze’s
1958 North transept, in place of Archbishop Peter
Amigo’s table monument. Thus Craze’s original fabric
was neither removed nor degraded and the intervention
is ‘reversible’.
Commemoration
John Lawson’s other work for Goddard & Gibbs in
cathedral is the West window in the North aisle where
the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre [EOHS] had
sponsored a depiction of an historical, crusading entry into
Jerusalem, and their metaphorical protection of Palestine:
a locus where the cathedral has a tablet commemorating
Archbishop Cyril Cowderoy11, the Order’s first Grand
Prior at Southwark from 1954.
Above, The West window in the North aisle of Christ triumphant
protecting Jerusalem and the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre
is John Lawson’s second work for Goddard & Gibbs studio
In this place in 2015, I found a new site for “arrival”
through Archbishop Peter Smith’s12 wish for a new Holy
Door for the Jubilee Year of Mercy, which we inserted in
the West front leading into the sacramental aisle. Pilgrims
to this Mother Church ‘enter by the narrow door’13’ facing
the sacramental presence of Christ in the Blessed
Sacrament chapel and a Sacred Heart statue at the East
end of this aisle.
1925: he supplanted an earlier fixture of plainer design.
At this location in cathedral, I took the Walters’ altar off
its dais, emphasising the purpose of ‘shrine’ rather than
‘side altar’, with a free-standing prie-dieu for private devotions.8 The new shrine stands adjacent to a recumbent
effigy table monument for Provost Thomas Doyle, who
championed the original Pugin church.9 Placing St. John’s
Above, 4th July 2023, the Papal Nuncio blessed the icon and nameboards in the presence of Knights & Dames of the Equestrian Order”
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