Birmingham Cathedral, Birmingham City

A one-day pilgrimage walk to this cathedral starts eight miles to the west at the ruins of Sandwell Priory, taking in the city’s two other cathedrals and St John Newman’s shrine

Highlights

• The shrine chapel of St John Henry Newman is one of the highlights of a one-day pilgrimage walk through Birmingham’s many sacred sites

Sixteen years after Birmingham became a city in 1889, it gained a bishop and cathedral. The existing church of St Philip was converted in 1905 to serve the new Birmingham diocese. As it happened, the Roman Catholic Church had already created its own cathedral in 1852, and the city has since gained a third cathedral thanks to the Greek Orthodox community. All three are visited on the British Pilgrimage Trust’s one-day route in Birmingham. Yet St Philip’s has the oldest of the buildings, a grand baroque place of spiritual resort in the very centre of the city.

The chancel is dominated by the reds and blues of a huge stained glass window by master designer Edward Burne-Jones. His work is familiar across the country but he had particular reason to put energy into this commission since he was baptised in this very church. It is difficult to spot now, but the cathedral was actually bombed and burned out during the second world war, but this and several other windows by the same artist had been wisely removed and stored safely off-site by forward-thinking citizens.

The original church was built in 1715 to serve the growing town, an impressive work of English Baroque architecture in its own right, a style and a size that seem eminently suitable to serve as a cathedral. It is a wide and spacious building and the clear glass along both nave aisles add a lightness to the heavily ornamented baroque way of doing things.

It has two side altars at the end of each of these nave aisles, both with fine traditional icons as a focus for prayer, with candle stands alongside. It has a quiet dignity as a place of prayer, particularly for a church at the centre of such a busy city, no doubt aided by the fact that it is surrounded by its own green open space.

Unlike its Catholic counterpart, there is no shrine to be found in the Anglican building. But it does have an impressive array of monuments both inside and out, including the enormous Burnaby obelisk in memory of a colourful and somewhat buccaneering army officer Frederick Burnaby. Also found outside the building is a monument that pays respects to the victims of the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974, including the 21 names of those killed by the IRA attack.

Directions

St Philip’s Cathedral, Colmore Row, Birmingham B3 2QB

http://www.birminghamcathedral.com

W3W: sage.hosts.above

GPS: 52.4812N 1.8990W

The cathedral is entirely surrounded by its own green in the centre of the city. It is open Mon-Fri 7:30am-6:30pm (5pm in August), Sat-Sun 7:30am-5pm, and entry is free.