The Garden Museum

Courtyard of The Garden Museum with view of east window. Interior view of east window with bottom half of the figures obscured by interior wall, glass by Francis Stephens (1953).

The Garden Museum in St Mary’s Church, Lambeth was the world’s first museum dedicated to the history of gardens and gardening. Due to changing population in the area the church was made redundant in 1972 and condemned for demolition, this was only fourteen years after the installation of a series of windows (made from 1953 - 58) by Francis Stephens that replaced the ones destroyed in the blitz.

The churchyard contains the tomb of John Tradescant and his son John who were gardeners, plant collectors and creators of their own public botanical garden in Lambeth in the 1620s. Building on this legacy, Rosemary and John Nicholson saved the building from demolition and established the Tradescant Trust, opening the church as The Museum of Gardening History in 1977. Since then it has undergone a complete transformation inside and outside, with new gardens by Christopher Bradley-Hole and Dan Pearson and an interior remodelled by the architects Dow Jones in 2008 and 2015.

Interior of The Garden Museum looking west. Exterior view of west window by Francis Stephens.

The remodelled interior keeps a central space for events (above left), with a separate exhibition gallery and a display space on a mezzanine level that wraps inside the outer walls without touching them. The clear glass windows are visible to let in daylight, but nearly all the stained glass is partly obscured. I went outside to see Francis Stephen’s west window from 1958 (above right), drawn by the top of two globes just visible above the gallery walls. These illustrate Stephen’s interest in missionary work but also hint at the world wide travels of the Tradescants.

The only stained glass that you can really see is in the baptistry at the museum’s entrance, although a carved stone has been put at its base (below left). Above is a scene showing the apostles at Pentecost, below are rituals of the church across different lands: the detail shows a confirmation and a baptism scene with the people drawn in a style that I remember from picture books of that period depicting ‘children around the world’.

Baptistry window by Francis Stephens (1957) and detail.

Stained glass windows often get blocked off or moved, particularly as tastes change or the subject matter is irrelevant to the new use of a building - so fair enough with the treatment of these 1950s Francis Stephens windows. But there was a window commissioned by Rosemary Nicholson in 1981 for the new museum - The Tradescant Window by the great stained glass artist Lawrence Lee - that nobody thought was worth highlighting in the latest remodelling of the Garden Museum. It is behind the wall of the exhibition gallery in the north west corner of the church, so when you get up on the mezzanine level you can look at the top tracery and down the length of the window - a hopeless view as you can see in the photo below left. There’s not even a sign acknowledging the window or its maker.

The Tradescant window by Lawrence Lee (1981). Left: looking down. Right: kneeling down in front of a display case and looking through a glass balustrade to the centre of the window.

I read that it was one of Lee’s favourite windows - it does look wonderful and it’s a treat to get up to the top tracery and see the plants close up including a red columbine (bottom right) and the three petalled flowers of the plant tradescantia around the initials JJT for father and son. Lee wrote about the window: The central circle is the world as seen from outer space – a symbol of a world-wide interest in plants promoted by the Tradescants …. The square area below is a symbol of order and may also be thought of as an enclosed garden …. Though these elements are the main subject matter of the window, the spectator should first see it as an evocation of nature through colour and design, and not be too concerned with literal explanations. This is something I always like to hear!

I was particularly interested in the way that Lee used the central mullion as a part of the design, with the tree stems growing alongside it, and the branches higher up organically crossing the tracery shapes. I’m amazed that this window wasn’t used as a centre piece of the museum, but it’s still there and I hope that the walls around it will come down one day.

Above and below: details in the tracery from The Tradescant window.

Sketching in the City

This was a day organised by Rachel Mulligan of The British Society of Master Glass Painters, based around five churches from Caroline Swash’s book (The 100 Best Stained Glass sites in London), all with post war glass that replaced windows damaged during the Blitz.

Gray’s Inn Chapel, Memorial window by Christopher Whall 1919.

The earliest work that we looked at was Christopher Whall’s memorial window in Gray’s inn Chapel. We sketched away peacefully as Rachel read the relevant section from the book, the lights were off and no one else was there other than the organ player - perfect. I was very comfortable drawing the setting and the light fittings, before zooming in on what was behind the light, some beautiful flames rising behind the head of St George. I am always less comfortable drawing heads and decided not to avoid them but to think of them as just another part of the picture, with lines and shading in vaguely the right places.

Why were we drawing? Was it to learn more about the stained glass artists, to get good at copying, to make a nice drawing or to capture the atmosphere of the church? There was hardly time for that, as after less than an hour we needed to pack up and walk to the next church.

Gray’s Inn Chapel, detail of St George by Christopher Whall.

St Ethelreda’s Church, Ely Place. Two of the nine nave windows by Charles Blakeman 1952-58.

The church of St Ethelreda’s in Ely Place was definitely my favourite of the day. All the windows in the nave are by Charles Blakeman and are filled with small scenes surrounded by a coherent pattern of irresistible dark blue zigzags, such as I have never seen before. Drawing the pattern helped me work it out and to see how The Annunciation scene fitted in to the spikiness of the framework above and below. There was so much to draw here, but this being a Catholic Church it was filling up with lunchtime worshippers so on we went.

St Ethelreda, Annunciation from north nave window by Charles Blakeman 1958.

St Nicholas Cole Abbey, 3 windows by Keith New including St Nicholas window 1962.

St Nicholas Cole Abbey is a Christopher Wren church refurbished in 1961-2 when the glass for three arched windows was commissioned from Keith New (above). There was another refurbishment in 2013 and now it’s basically a cafe. The windows looked much better once they’d removed the screen that is normally in front of the bottom of the middle window but were still hard to draw. There is a tangle of lead lines, painted lines and structural support bars with irregular circles meandering around them leaving me floundering in the lack of regular patterns and the right sort of lighting.

St Mary Aldermary is half church, half cafe. I settled down in front of the west window by John Crawford (below) and drew the bottom right corner, more flames and depictions of London’s buildings and more questioning of the purpose of this type of drawing when you’re just copying someone else’s work, only not very accurately.

St Mary Aldermary, west window by John Crawford 1950.

St Mary le Bow, Christ in Glory window by John Hayward 1963.

I suppose the key is to find something that you’re really interested in, and I would guess that our last church, St Mary le Bow, had something for everyone. John Hayward’s career is unlike most mid twentieth century stained glass artists as he joined a firm of church decorators rather than continuing with post graduate studies in glass. He received the commission to design all the windows and much of the furnishing in this church, designed by Christopher Wren ,when he was only 30 and the mix of old and new here is incredibly successful. I began to see the sort of drawing I could spend more time on with architectural volumes and splashes of colour (above left), and I also found a detail I really liked on the book in the hands of the risen Christ (above right) - blocks of muted colour and jumbled words bounded by Hayward’s criss cross leading.

So it probably took me all day to get me eye in. Not in order to make nice or accurate drawings, but to remind me of the things that interest me about stained glass in its architectural setting, things that may help me with my own work.

St Mary le Bow, east and west ends with windows and furnishings by John Hayward.

Postcard from the Past

Postcard from the Past.

I hadn’t made anything out of glass in 2026 until last weekend when I chopped and assembled pieces together to make a window of a window as seen on the lightbox above with a pen for scale. On top of the desire to make something was the need to cut parts out of a large unsuccessful panel and combine them with samples and old bits to remind me of what I want from my work. In the sandblasted window is a view of a landscape I painted in 1983, like a postcard from the past. In the centre are the blocks of colour chopped out of the unsuccessful panel, a lovely blue and a green that turns brown on the tin side of glass (below right).

Sample window, 475 × 510 mm. and detail of the unsuccessful panel.

And at the bottom is the grid reference of the cabin in the Adirondacks that Juliet Goodden drew originally in 1982 (below left). That became a painting (below right) on which I’m intending to base a window for her new bathroom.

Drawing and painting by Juliet Goodden.

Left: Through the blind. Right: bottom right corner with colour stripes.

As soon as I saw the panel in the kiln after its first firing I knew that it hadn’t worked - the colours were wrong, the enamelling was too thick, therefore bubbly, and the sandblast grit was too fine. I could only stand looking at it through the blind (above left) or in little sections (above right) and was delighted to chop it up.

Full size drawing for the panel, 881 × 786 mm and sample of intended colours.

The other technical problem was the fact that all my samples (of which a lovely pale example is shown above) were on a different thickness and manufacturer of glass, so for the new attempt I’ll do my colour samples on a glass match. The mini versions of the design (below), like the new sample window, look best against daylight where the play of transparency and opacity really works. A new version of the cabin interior is now in development having become part of a series in the ongoing and enjoyable dialogue with my friend and fellow artist.

Four little samples showing the development of the design.

Twentieth century glass in Dieppe

Left: Chapelle Notre Dame-de-bon-Secours. Right: View of Dieppe from the castle, the chapel is on the left horizon.

You see Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours as you come in to Dieppe on the ferry. Originally a chapel of pilgrimage for sailors who offered models of their boats to the Virgin Mary, it now also serves as a place for memorials to those lost at sea. It was suitably bleak outside on the rainy day that I visited, but inside all the windows were filled with the most lovely coloured stained glass from the 1950s - geometric patterns that fill every space. The symbols and figures are arranged seamlessly within this network, the female saints are on the left and the male saints are opposite them - everything is orderly and neat.

Interior of Notre Dame-de-Bon-Secours.

Notre Dame-de-Bon-Secours, interior with Joan of Arc window and wall memorial plaques.

Luckily there was a clear maker’s name and date on the window of the Virgin and child (below right) as I found no other information about the stained glass. The maker (maitre verrier) Francois Lorin is from the third generation of the famous family of stained glass makers in Chartres, where Maison Lorin was founded in 1869. These windows are dated 1951, they confirmed to me how interesting French post war glass is.

Notre Dame-de-Bon-Secours. Left: St Genevieve window. Right: Detail with maker’s name and date.

Left: The church of St Jacques, Dieppe by David Roberts 1826. Right: St Jacques Church by Walter Sickert c.1899.

This was the best type of unplanned stained glass trip, I had no idea what I would find inside the huge, much painted (examples above) Gothic church of St Jacques. In the fifteenth century its lower walls were opened up to accommodate chapels that were originally dedicated to the patron saints of their founders. There are nineteen altogether, with sculpture, paintings and stained glass made from the fifteenth to the twenty first century inside.

St Jacques Church, The Chapel of St Sepulcre with stained glass by Anne Le Chevallier 2000.

The first chapel on the right, dedicated to St Sepulcre, has a wonderful combination of gothic tracery, seventeenth century sculpture and modern stained glass. These fantastically light and subtle windows are the work of Anne Le Chevallier (born 1937) who joined the Le Chevallier studio founded by her father-in-law. They are dated 2000 but have the French post war sensitivity to grisaille painting and pure abstraction that complements this type of church architecture so well.

St Jacques Church, Detail of the Chapel of St Sepulcre with stained glass by Anne Le Chevallier 2000.

St Jacques Church, The Chapel of St Anthony of Padua.

The next chapel along, dedicated to St Anthony of Padua, contains a window that is a riot of colour, imagery and lettering with a strong blue background. In a different way this glass also perfectly complements the dark, gothic stonework. In it I can see boats, buildings and figures, but I’ve never seen anything similar to this obviously twentieth century work and the only information I can find about it is written on the bottom of the third opening - OFFERT PAR LE CLERGE, then a word on a piece of blue green flashed glass hidden by the stonework, then DES VERRIERE.

St Jacques Church, Detail of stained glass in The Chapel of St Anthony of Padua.

A more ornate chapel at the far end of the church is dedicated to St Yves. It contains the tomb of local hero and ship owner Jehan Ango (1480-1551), also a twentieth century painting and three windows which are attributed on the brief information board to Jacques Gruber (1870 - 1936). These are beautiful, delicate creations, with loose geometry and symbols in pastel colours surrounded by rich spiky borders that depict sea life. Quite unlike the stained glass that Gruber made for mansions and public buildings, they don’t fit in to either the art nouveau aesthetic or the post war revival of church stained glass.

St Jacques Church, The Chapel of St Yves with stained glass by Jacques Gruber.

Finally, my first visit to see some French hospital art - six windows that were moved from the hospital chapel when it was demolished and reinstalled in the new reception area in 2007. They were designed in 1949 by the artist Pierre Le Trividic, a painter from the school of nearby Rouen, and commissioned to replace ones destroyed during World War II when thousands of Canadians died during the unsuccessful Allied raid on Dieppe. Stained glass was a new medium for Le Trividic, and his windows are a mixture of huge figures, crests and landscapes as he tells the story of the connections between Dieppe and Canada. It’s a cafe, but its carefully designed to show off the stained glass which has been given a new lease of life.

Dieppe Hospital: windows by Pierre Le Trividic 1949.

In Manchester Cathedral

Left: View of Manchester Cathedral from the west. Right: Interior with windows by Antony Hollaway - Creation 1991 and St George 1973.

In the late medieval period Manchester Cathedral was a collegiate church dedicated to Saints Mary, George and Denys. The rebuilding of the tall west tower and the addition of chapels, galleries and a large annexe happened mostly after the building was given Cathedral status in 1847, then more changes came with destruction caused by the second world war and by the IRA bomb in 1996, so it is hard to identify anything from the medieval period. However all of the windows along the exceptionally wide east and west fronts were made between 1966 - 2016, chief among these being the five west windows designed and made by Antony Hollaway. I am writing ‘made’ with confidence as Tony Hollaway was head of three-dimensional design when I was a fine art student at Trent Polytechnic, and I went to his studio to see one of the windows being made on his workbench. So on my recent visit to Manchester I thought I would take another look, and make an assessment of these, his most celebrated works.

From left to right they are Creation 1991, St George 1973, St Mary 1980, St Denys 1976 and Revelation 1995. As you would expect from a series that spans 22 years, the styles are quite different with nothing obvious that links them all together other than the vision of one artist and his patron, the cathedral architect Harry M. Fairhurst.

Left : detail from bottom left of Creation window 1991. Right : detail from bottom right of St George window 1973.

The Creation window which fittingly starts the sequence has an angular, complicated composition evoking landscape and skyscape, with versions of circular gender symbols at the bottom (above left). The next in line is the earliest window and is dedicated to St George, there is a deconstructed red cross that spans most of the window and lurking behind is a dragon, whose abstracted body appears in green on the right hand side (above right). While the Creation window is smothered in the sort of messy paintwork that I never liked, the details in St George are more curvy, with period looking scaley patterns in the rich colours that are often used for stained glass dragons.

St Mary window 1980 and detail from bottom left.

The St Mary window is next and higher up as it’s in the tower. This is the one that you see on all the publicity for the cathedral, and it’s the one that I saw being made in 1979. I really remember the evening studio visit where I was allowed to join a group of not particularly interested 3D design students, glass wasn’t a material in favour at the college then. I remember the jumbled lettering - words from the Magnificat - letters being used for their look rather than their meaning as it seemed to me at the time, so another work with echoes from the past and a period of stained glass design that i was trying to get away from. I was never taught by Hollaway, but he was very rude about the work I was doing in the manner of a typical 1970s art school tutor.

Left : Interior with windows by Antony Hollaway - St Denys 1976 and Revelation 1995. Right : St Denys window.

The glass in the St Denys window returns to the predominantly red palette of the St George window, and like the Mary window, uses a large off centre circle to symbolise the saint. In addition to the crosses there are elements of buildings and foliage (below left) with painting and colour drifting in bands across the 15th century tracery.

Left : detail from bottom right of St Denys window. Right : detail from bottom right of Revelation window.

Finally the latest window and for me, easily the best. No jarring red circles, just stones to symbolise the heavenly city in a divine range of colours and although the close up (above right) shows you that every piece is indeed painted, the black/grey pigment doesn’t dominate. This work reminds me of the windows of Brigitte Simon in Tournus Abbey, France, where her aim was to '‘extend the impression of the stones’ in an ancient building.

Revelation window 1995.

Opposite Revelation, across the length of the cathedral, is Margaret Traherne’s Fire window from 1966 (below). This also looks fantastic in the space, the regimental chapel, and is the most simple, literal interpretation of the theme that was originally commissioned to commemorate the rebuilding of the cathedral by the architect Hubert Worthington after the 1940 Manchester blitz. When the window was damaged by the 1996 Manchester bomb, Traherne supervised its restoration using superb streaky glass and an eccentric leading panel that closely matches the original - I checked on the pre 1996 postcard I have of the work.

Regimental chapel at the north east end of the church with Fire window by Margaret Traherne 1966, remade in 1996.

And a quick mention for the paintings of Carel Weight in the recesses of the stonework above the entrance doors to the Chapter House. In the lower panels separate small paintings with titles of seven of the beatitudes (or blessings from Christ’s sermon on the mount), above them a painting that spreads across the compartments and shows Christ with the people in a rural, local setting. All are wonderful - it’s a pleasure to see the work of these distinguished twentieth century artists in such a magnificent setting.

Entrance to The Chapter House, with paintings of The Beatitudes by Carel Weight 1963.