Westminster Cathedral

The Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales had been restored only in 1850, and the first substantial sum of money raised towards a cathedral for Westminster was collected in memory of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster from that year, who died in 1865. The land was acquired in 1884 by Wiseman's successor, Cardinal Manning; the ground had previously been occupied by the second Tothill Fields Bridewell prison.

Two attempts at a building came to nothing, one in 1867 under the architect Henry Clutton and another in 1892 under Baron von Herstel. Construction finally began in 1895 under Manning's successor, the third archbishop Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, to designs by John Francis Bentley in a style heavily influenced by Byzantine architecture and raised almost entirely in brick, without steel reinforcement. The cost was anticipated at £150,000 for an area of 54,000 sq ft, the church to run 350 ft long by 156 ft wide by 90 ft high. Sir John Betjeman later called it "a masterpiece in striped brick and stone" that shows "the good craftsman has no need of steel or concrete".

Cardinal Vaughan blessed the foundation stone on the morning of Saturday 29 June 1895, before a gathering recorded as "distinguished". After the recitation of the Litanies, Michael Cardinal Logue celebrated Low Mass coram Episcopo, and a procession of Benedictines, Franciscans, Jesuits, Passionists, Dominicans, Redemptorists and secular clergy made the circuit of the grounds; the choir, directed by the Rev. Charles Cox, sang Webbe's "O Roma Felix" and "O Salutaris". Vaughan, Logue, the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Acton, Henry Matthews MP, Lord Edmund Talbot and Sir Donald Macfarlane all spoke at the luncheon that followed. That same year the church was dedicated to the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a dedication carried in the Latin inscription above the portal tympanum - Domine Jesus Rex et Redemptor per Sanguinem tuum salva nos, Lord Jesus, King and Redeemer, save us through your blood.

Vaughan had intended the liturgy to be sung by a community of Benedictine monks, a plan that caused great resentment among the secular clergy of the diocese, who felt they were being snubbed. Negotiations with both the English Benedictines and the French Benedictine community at Farnborough failed, and a traditional choir of men and boys was set up instead. Despite great financial problems the Choir School opened on 5 October 1901 with eleven boy choristers, housed in the building originally intended for the monks; Vaughan received them with the words "You are the foundation stones". The Cathedral Choir was officially instituted three months later, in January 1902. The first choice as musical director had been the singer Sir Charles Santley, who had conducted the choir of the pro-cathedral in Kensington, but Santley knew his limitations and refused; the post went instead to Richard Runciman Terry, Director of Music at Downside Abbey School, who trained his choristers for a year before their first sung service in public.

On 3 May 1902 some 3,000 people attended a concert of sacred music in the unfinished building, organised to raise money for the Choir School and to test the acoustics: an orchestra of a hundred and a choir of two hundred under Terry performed Wagner, Purcell, Beethoven, Palestrina, Byrd and Tallis, and the acoustics proved to be excellent. The cathedral opened in 1903, a year after Bentley's death, and on 6 June 1903 gave the first performance in London of The Dream of Gerontius, Cardinal John Henry Newman's poem set to music by Edward Elgar, with the composer conducting and Terry at the organ and the proceeds again going to the Choir School. Cardinal Vaughan died on 19 June 1903, and his Requiem Mass was among the first public liturgies celebrated in the church he had begun.

Under the laws of the Catholic Church no place of worship could be consecrated unless free from debt, so the ceremony waited on the building fund: it took place on 28 June 1910. The decoration of the interior had hardly been started by then, decoration in Byzantine churches being applied rather than integral to the architecture, and finishing it was left to subsequent generations. Terry meanwhile pursued a revival of great quantities of Latin repertoire from the English Renaissance, most of which had lain unsung ever since the Reformation, and built the choir's reputation on performances of music by Byrd, Tallis, Taverner, Palestrina and Victoria that had not been heard since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, honing his boys' sight-reading to a then-unprecedented standard. Charles Villiers Stanford sent students from the Royal College of Music to the cathedral to hear "polyphony for a penny", the penny being the bus fare, and Mass there was soon attended by inquisitive musicians as well as by the lay faithful. Terry resigned in 1924 and was succeeded by Canon Lancelot Long, one of the original eleven choristers of 1901.

A chamber directly under the high altar holds the remains of the first two Archbishops of Westminster, Wiseman and Manning, both re-interred in the cathedral in 1907; the altar and relics of Saint Edmund of Canterbury occupy a recess on its south side, while the chapel of Saint Thomas of Canterbury off the north transept serves as a chantry for Cardinal Vaughan, whose body was re-interred here in 2005. Saint John Southworth was enshrined in the cathedral in 1930, and Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, re-interred in 1946. Archbishops Hinsley, Griffin, Godfrey, Heenan, Hume and Murphy-O'Connor are all buried here. Francis Bourne, archbishop from 1903 to 1935, is the only deceased Archbishop of Westminster not buried in the cathedral: his body lies at St Edmund's College, Ware, and his heart at St George's Cathedral, Southwark. The only lay person buried in the cathedral is Count Alexander von Benckendorff, Russian ambassador to the Court of St James's from 1903 until his death in 1917, who lies in the crypt.

Queen Elizabeth II came to the cathedral in 1977, during her Silver Jubilee celebrations, to view a flower show. Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass there on 28 May 1982, the first day of a six-day pastoral visit to the United Kingdom. On Saint Andrew's Day, 30 November 1995, at the invitation of Cardinal Basil Hume, the Queen returned for the cathedral's centenary and attended Choral Vespers - the first time a reigning monarch had attended a Catholic service since the Reformation. Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass on 18 September 2010, the third day of a four-day state visit. In January 2011 the cathedral was the setting for the reception and later the ordination of three former Anglican bishops into the newly formed Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.

The building was listed Grade I on 1 December 1987. It remains the seat of the Archbishop of Westminster and the largest Catholic church in England and Wales, seating up to 2,000 people, and its decoration is still unfinished. Oremus, the monthly magazine that succeeded the Westminster Cathedral Record, Chronicle and Bulletin in a line of cathedral titles, first appeared in 1996 and was made a free publication in 2013. In May 2021, during the pandemic ban on public Mass, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds were married in the cathedral. On 16 September 2025 it held the funeral of Katharine, Duchess of Kent, who had converted to Catholicism in 1994 - the first Catholic royal funeral in the United Kingdom in modern history - attended by the King, the Prince and Princess of Wales and other members of the royal family.

Bentley died with no mosaic completed and left behind very little in the way of sketches or designs, and the subjects and styles were in consequence influenced by donors as well as by designers, overseen by a cathedral committee established for the purpose; his own hand shows only in the chapel of the Holy Souls. Because he had left no real designs there was no real agreement as to how the mosaics should look, and in one case work already installed in the Sacred Heart shrine was removed after the death of the artist, George Bridge. Those of 1912-1916 were mostly by devotees of the Arts and Crafts Movement: the experienced mosaicist Gertrude Martin, who had worked with Bridge, laid the Lady Chapel mosaics in 1912-13 under the supervision of Anning Bell and Marshall, who later designed the mosaic of Christ enthroned above the entrance. The 4th Marquess of Bute paid for the mosaics of the chapel of Saint Andrew; the Lady Chapel itself had been funded by Baroness Weld in memory of her second husband.

A great deal of work was done between 1930 and 1935, in the Lady Chapel, in the alcoves above the confessionals, in the crypt dedicated to Saint Peter and on the sanctuary arch. Nothing new was installed after that until 1950, when a mosaic of St Therese of Lisieux, later replaced by a bronze, was placed in the south transept; another followed in 1952 in the chapel of Saint George, in memory of members of the Royal Army Medical Corps who died in the Second World War. Boris Anrep decorated the Blessed Sacrament Chapel between 1960 and 1962 in a traditional, early Christian style, choosing Eucharistic subjects - the sacrifice of Abel, the hospitality of Abraham, the gathering of the manna in the wilderness, the feeding of the multitude and the wedding feast at Cana - and in his old age acted as adviser and principal sketch artist for the chapel of Saint Paul (1964-1965).

The next mosaic was not installed until the year of Pope John Paul II's visit in 1982, above the north-west entrance, and it is an inscription rather than a scene. A Saint Patrick was installed at the entrance to his chapel in 1999, and in 2001 the designer Christopher Hobbs installed a Saint Alban strongly influenced by early Byzantine iconography. The very favourable reception of that work brought Hobbs further commissions: the chapel of Saint Joseph, with the Holy Family (2003) and men working on Westminster Cathedral (2006), and the chapel in honour of Saint Thomas Becket (2006). The Stations of the Cross along the outer aisles are by the sculptor Eric Gill. As of 2011 further mosaics were planned, among them Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Anthony in the narthex.

The Grand Organ in the west gallery, of four manuals and 81 stops, was built by Henry Willis III between 1922 and 1932; an apse organ of fifteen stops had been built in 1910 by Lewis & Co., and a console in the apse can play both instruments. Louis Vierne improvised what became his Carillon de Westminster, the final movement of the third suite of his Pieces de Fantaisie, on the Willis organ in 1924, and the published version of 1927 is dedicated to Willis. In the early twentieth century, when the lay clerks were represented by Equity, the trade union for actors and variety artists, the building was jokingly known in the profession as "The Westminster Hippodrome"; the nickname was later shortened to the "Drome", by which the cathedral is still frequently called.

At the beginning of the Second World War the choristers were evacuated to Uckfield in East Sussex, and the Choir School was then closed altogether for the remainder of the war, the music being sung by a reduced body of professional men. William Hyde, who had been sub-organist under Terry, was Master of Music from 1941 to 1947. He was succeeded by George Malcolm, who developed the continental sound of the choir and consolidated its reputation, not least through the recording of Victoria's Tenebrae responsories; later holders of the post have included Francis Cameron, Colin Mawby, Stephen Cleobury, David Hill, James O'Donnell and Martin Baker.

The choir has given many first performances of music written for it. Vaughan Williams's Mass in G minor received its liturgical performance at a Mass in the cathedral under Terry, who also premiered music by Gustav Holst, Herbert Howells and Charles Wood; Benjamin Britten wrote his Missa brevis for the choristers in 1959; and Masses by Roxanna Panufnik, James MacMillan, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Judith Bingham have since been first sung there, along with Sir John Tavener's Missa Brevis for boys' voices in June 2005. Tavener's The Beautiful Names, a setting of the 99 names of Allah found in the Qur'an, was premiered in the cathedral on 19 June 2007 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the presence of Charles, Prince of Wales. The choir won the 1998 Gramophone Awards for both Best Choral Recording of the Year and Record of the Year, for Martin's Mass for Double Choir and Pizzetti's Requiem conducted by O'Donnell, and is the only cathedral choir to have won in either of those categories. Sung Masses and Offices were established when the cathedral opened for worship in 1903 and, apart from a short hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic, have continued without interruption since. In September 2020 Cardinal Vincent Nichols, responding to a strategic review of sacred music at the cathedral, asked "all those who profess to be fervent supporters of this precious inheritance of sacred music to become regular contributors to its financial support". Simon Johnson was appointed Master of Music in May 2021.