History

Guildford had no cathedral of its own until the diocese was created in 1927, carved out of the diocese of Winchester to serve a growing part of Surrey. A competition for a new building drew 183 entries, and in 1932 the judges chose the scheme submitted by Edward Maufe, an architect who had until then built houses, university colleges and war memorials rather than churches. Archbishop Cosmo Lang laid the foundation stone on Stag Hill in 1936, on land bought specifically because the site could be seen from most of the town below.

Work stopped for the Second World War and resumed slowly afterward, funded largely through public subscription rather than any single patron. Guildford residents bought bricks for a shilling each to pay for the walls, a fundraising device that left the cathedral’s fabric quite literally built by the town it serves. The building was not finished until 1961: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attended the consecration on 17 May of that year, closing a twenty-nine-year project that had spanned a world war and a change of national mood about what a modern English cathedral should look like.

Because it belongs so plainly to the twentieth century, the cathedral later found a second life on screen. Its plain Gothic silhouette and empty hilltop setting made it a filming location for the 1976 horror film The Omen, and more recently for the television series The Sandman and The Witcher, a use its Victorian and medieval counterparts, cluttered with centuries of monuments, could not have offered.