Winchester Cathedral, showing the choir screen
Choir screen by Sir George Gilbert Scott
Installed in 1875
Oak
Winchester
Other Views and Related Material
Other Views and Related Material
Photograph, caption, and commentary by Jacqueline Banerjee, 2009.
Winchester Cathedral is regularly included among the twenty-nine cathedrals on which Scott worked, thanks to a list published in the The Builder after he died. But Scott himself explained that he did very little here. He was called in twice about the screen, at first declining the project for fear of "altering old work," but finally deciding it was safe to make some adjustments (he talks about the "opening out of the screen," 352). Scott also designed the monument to Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the south transept, with an effigy sculpted by H. H. Armstead. Although Scott based his designs on earlier ones, his work here was criticised at the end of the period — the screen partly just for "the pallor of its wood" (which must have darkened now), and the monument with its Gothic canopy for being "out of place in its Norman surroundings" (Sergeant 50, 68).
References
Scott, Sir George Gilbert. Personal and Professional Recollections, ed. G. Gilbert Scott. Ed. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879. See Chapter 8.
Sergeant, Philip W. The Cathedral Church of Winchester: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See. London: George Bell, 1903.
Last modified 30 November 2009.