The Chapel of the Holy Spirit in Ripon Cathedral represents a sadly stillborn Anglican Space Age tradition of church furnishing. Completed in 1970 in honour of the previous year’s Apollo 11 moon landing, it is very much of its time.
I have seen some horrified reaction on social media to my photos of it, complaining at such a supposedly jarring presence in one of the finest buildings of the Romanesque-Gothic transition anywhere in Europe. Let us not forget, however, that the places of worship on this site have been substantially altered many times, including by St Wilfrid himself in the 7th Century, and even destroyed and completely rebuilt once. Perhaps most obviously, the Victorian restoration was imaginative but also far more inappropriate than this: yet Ripon Cathedral would not be what it is today without that and without a few fine pieces of Edwardiana and post-Edwardiana that are hardly redolent of the High Middle Ages.
Having long since passed through its groovy phase, to my mind the Chapel of the Holy Spirit has also by now finished its naff phase, and is becoming established as the sort of quirky period piece that any great cathedral must have many of from many different eras.
Located at the east end of the south choir aisle the chapel represents the Holy Trinity in themes astronomical and astronautical themes.
The hanging pyx represents Christ, who is sacramentally present within it, as this is where the Cathedral reserves the Blessed Sacrament.
The design of the pyx is essentially copied from the reaction control thrusters for the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module. Really, I’m not making that up.
The pyx is suspended from an orbit-and-sun form, which represents God the Father.
The Holy Spirit is represented as a modulated waveform on the altar rail, I suppose a reasonable representation of the going out into the universe of information, of which wisdom could be argued to be a subset. I sort of think an opportunity was missed not to stay closer to the traditional tongues-of-flame representation while being au courant by representing the Paraclete as rocket exhaust jets. But there we are.
The more traditional representation of the Divine Counsellor is interspersed among the waveforms on the chapel gate.
These were all made by Leslie Durbin. Durbin also made the Sword of Stalingrad, which Churchill presented to Stalin in 1943 to congratulate him in victory in the megabattle for the city named for him. Beyond that, he designed the first £1 coins in the 1980s, the ones with different floral motifs for each of the four constituent countries of the UK which anyone much over 35 should still remember. Quite a character.
Ripon Cathedral, the Cathedral Church of St Peter and St Wilfrid, is notable architecturally for its gothic west front in the Early English style, considered one of the best of its type, as well as the Geometric east window. Needless to say, it is a Grade I listed building.
Founded as a monastery by Scottish monks in the 660s, it was re-founded as a Benedictine monastery by St Wilfrid in 672. The 7th Century crypt of Wilfrid’s Church still survives. The church became collegiate in the 10th Century, and acted as a mother church within the large Diocese of York for the remainder of the Middle Ages. The present church is the fourth, and was built between the 13th and 16th Centuries. In 1836 the church became the cathedral for the Diocese of Ripon, at that point the first new diocese created in the Church of England since the Reformation. Ripon was then in 2014 incorporated into the new Diocese of Leeds, and the church became one of three co-equal cathedrals of the Bishop of Leeds.
The West Front which was added what was then Ripon Minster around 1220, by Walter de Gray, Archbishop of York. Even this was altered by who else but Sir Gilbert Scott in 1862, principally by removing the tracery from the lancets of the west front, giving them their well-known but illusory effect of being slightly earlier than they actually are. As the official listing for the building says, “this conforming to advanced taste of the 1860s.”
This magnificent Edwardian art nouveau pulpit (executed by Henry Wilson in 1913) is also hardly in keeping with the Geometric Decorated style of de Gray and his successors… but we have learned to love it for what it is: a magnificent piece of art executed to the glory of God, representing a link in the unbroken chain of Christian faith that connects 21st Century Yorkshire to St Wilfrid.
So let us also learn to love to Durbin’s chapel also – a tiny flickering of the spirit that animated Niemeyer in designing Brasilia Cathedral that still burns in a Yorkshire market town. A spirit that calls to mind a now lost era of optimism where science would both open to humanity the mysteries of the universe and usher in a paradise on earth, and thereby bring humanity closer to God.
