Canterbury is a beautiful city, home to a host of international voices with an illustrious history at its core, and in the centre its most celebrated jewel; the Canterbury Cathedral. Set in the ground of the Cathedral Precincts and in the heart of the City of Canterbury, is The Cathedral Studios who are dedicated to the preservation and conservation of our Stained Glass Heritage.
The Studios work on a plethora of projects and services in the conservation, restoration and protection of stained glass from the 12th Century to the 20th Century. We caught up with Director of Stained Glass Conservation, Leonie Seliger, to find out more about the importance of conservation work, the role The Cathedral Studios has played in conservation efforts, and some of their recent projects.
Roughly 50% of the Studios’ time is spent on Canterbury Cathedral, carefully monitoring the condition of all of its windows and looking after the building day in day out, with its own team of conservation specialists, with a five-year, and 10-year conservation plan in mind.
The other half is spent working on commercial projects, either unique projects for individuals who might want to donate a window to a church, or working with many of the local churches in Kent, for example. Working on things like making a repair from storm damage or vandalism, or they can also be dealing with ancient medieval glass and the preservation of that, or making brand new windows.
The process is a fine art, from discussing the brief with clients, to visiting the church and measuring up the opening, getting a sense of what the lighting is like, what other windows in the church may look like, and drinking in the atmosphere as a whole.
With the chemistry of stained glass windows changing over time, from medieval to the 20th Century, a depth of scientific and historical research is needed to preserve as much as possible when repairing and producing stained glass windows.
Canterbury Cathedral is one of the key places where the research on preserving stained glassed windows has been happening and since the 1980s-90s, they have made huge advances in their knowledge in how protective glazing systems should be designed. This has resulted in a slowing of the ageing and degrading process of these windows to an incredibly slow pace with their protective glazing.
Quite recently Canterbury Cathedral carried out a fascinating project where they removed one of the Thomas Becket Miracle windows from the Trinity Chapel and loaned it to the British Museum. This allowed the Studios to improve the protective glazing which they now know how to do better, and at the same time were able to carry out some historical research on the people depicted in this window and discovered that some of the individual scenes were in the wrong place, enabling them to rectify and rearrange the misplaced scenes.
You don’t have to be of a certain faith to admire these incredible tales of our history; these are real people and real stories that still teach us things to this day.