Winchester Cathedral

The first Christian church here dates to c. 648, when King Cenwalh of Wessex built a small cross-shaped building. This Old Minster became the cathedral of the new Diocese of Winchester in 662, after Bishop Wine transferred the bishopric from Dorchester on Thames. Between 963 and 984 Bishop Æthelwold greatly enlarged it; the church rededicated in 993 was briefly the largest in Europe. The body of Swithun, buried at his own wish in the graveyard outside, was brought inside and housed in a magnificent shrine.

William the Conqueror installed his friend and relative Walkelin as the first Norman bishop of Winchester in 1070, and in 1079 Walkelin began a huge new cathedral just south of the minsters. The east end was consecrated in 1093 and the tombs of Saxon kings moved across; demolition of the Old and New Minsters began the following day and left virtually no remains. Transepts and central tower were complete by 1100, when William Rufus was buried beneath the crossing. Work on the nave was probably interrupted when the tower fell in 1107, and was finished before the death of Bishop William Giffard in 1129.

Bishop Godfrey de Luci began an Early English retroquire in 1202; he died in 1204, but his successors carried the work on to the demolition of the Norman apse. In 1346 Bishop Edington pulled down the Norman west front and began the Perpendicular Gothic facade and huge west window that still stand. The nave was remade by William of Wykeham and his master mason William Wynford, who encased the Norman stone in new ashlar and replaced the wooden ceiling with a stone vault; Wykeham died in 1404 and the work was completed c. 1420. From 1450 to 1528, under Bishops Waynflete, Courtenay, Langton and Foxe, the Norman east end gave way to a Perpendicular presbytery and Luci's retroquire was extended into a Lady Chapel. The building was not finished until 1532.

The Benedictine Priory of Saint Swithun surrendered to Henry VIII in 1539; Richard Pollard and Thomas Wriothesley came to dismantle the shrines and altar, and Swithun's shrine was destroyed. Mary I married Philip of Spain here in 1554, and the cloister and chapter house were demolished mostly during the 1560–1580 tenure of the reformist bishop Robert Horne.

In December 1642 Parliamentarian soldiers destroyed much of the medieval glass and imagery, including nearly all of the great west window; the townspeople reassembled it as a mosaic after the Restoration, but the damage was too great for it to regain its original appearance. Jane Austen, who died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, was buried in the north nave aisle; her tombstone makes no mention of her novels.

By the summer of 1905 the Dean, William Furneaux, was facing the imminent ruin of a building whose walls were cracked, bulging and shedding stone. The architect Thomas G. Jackson found the whole cathedral listing to the south-east and sinking, and brought in the engineer Francis Fox. A trench at the east end showed that the Normans had founded the church on a 15-inch raft of beech trunks; where the timber had rotted, the building had shifted and sunk into soft ground. Water from the River Itchen flooded the workings once the peat seal beneath them was broken. Fox summoned the diver William Walker, who arrived on 5 April 1906 and worked six- or seven-hour shifts almost every day for six years, in pitch-black septic water in a suit weighing 200 lb dry, laying bags of cement to plug the flow. He finished in 1911; a thanksgiving service on St Swithun's Day 1912 was attended by the King and Queen, and Walker, rewarded with the MVO, is credited with saving the cathedral.

Fundraising for a £19 million repair programme began in September 2012, and a £10.5 million Heritage Lottery Fund grant followed in July 2013. The project closed on 21 May 2019 with the opening of the Kings and Scribes exhibition, which displays the Winchester Bible.

The cathedral has been a Grade I listed building since 24 March 1950 and is run by a dean and chapter; an admission fee has been charged since March 2006, and 365,000 people visited in 2019. In 2024 the resignation of the long-serving director of music, Andrew Lumsden, proved not to have been willing, and the chapter's senior non-executive member, Mark Byford, resigned on 18 June. The Bishop of Winchester commissioned a review, whose March 2025 summary reported a "culture of secrecy"; Dean Catherine Ogle stepped down with immediate effect, and Christopher Palmer was appointed in her place.