St. Paul’s Cathedral, Kolkata: not quite the world record it’s often claimed to be, but a remarkable church all the same

At 1A Cathedral Road, in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, the cathedral of Saint Paul is the seat of the Anglican diocese of Calcutta. The first stone was laid on 8 October 1839 by Bishop Daniel Wilson, fifth bishop of Calcutta, and the building was completed and consecrated exactly eight years later, on 8 October 1847. The design was by Major William Nairn Forbes, of the Bengal Engineers, in an Indo-Gothic style drawn from English Perpendicular Gothic, with a load-bearing iron structure unusually modern for the time, local brick, facings of Chunar sandstone and a finish of polished chunam stucco. The sources differ as to which English cathedral, Norwich, Canterbury or York, actually inspired the original spire. Bishop Wilson wrote personally to Queen Victoria on the occasion of the consecration, receiving as a gift ten pieces of gilded communion plate, according to a source not fully corroborated elsewhere. An earthquake on 12 June 1897 damaged the upper part of the original bell tower, later restored, but it was the earthquake of 1934 that brought the tower down completely. It was rebuilt afterwards, according to some sources between 1934 and 1938, a figure not fully confirmed, after the Bell Harry Tower of Canterbury cathedral. Inside is the great west window, designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and made by the firm Morris & Co., dated by the sources variously between 1873-75 and 1880, dedicated to the memory of Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth Earl of Mayo, viceroy of India, murdered on 8 February 1872 in the Andaman Islands. There is also a reredos of alabaster and mosaic of 1879, the work of the architect Arthur Blomfield, showing the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi and the Flight into Egypt, and wall panels of 1886 on the life of Saint Paul, which the sources describe interchangeably as frescoes or mosaics. The cathedral is often described as the first Anglican cathedral in Asia built as such from the start, a claim widely repeated but not independently verified, and it should in any case be kept distinct from the nearby church of Saint John in Calcutta, built in 1784-87 as a simple parish church and a bishop’s seat only from 1815 to 1847. It is not correct, contrary to what is sometimes claimed, to call it the first Anglican cathedral built outside the British Isles altogether: that distinction belongs to the cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Quebec, in Canada, consecrated as early as 1804, more than forty years earlier. The cathedral stands about four hundred and fifty metres, a walk of nine minutes, from the Victoria Memorial, with which it has, however, no direct administrative or architectural link.