Chichester Cathedral

Chichester Cathedral is among the least studied of all English medieval great churches. Memorably described by Ian Nairn as ‘a well-worn, well-loved comfortable fireside chair of a cathedral’, Chichester cathedral is essentially a series of rather quirky set pieces woven around an Anglo-Norman core. Chief among these is a superb retrochoir, but there is much else to be teased out – in the laying out of the delightful north transept chapels, the eccentric cloister, the celebrated Romanesque relief carvings, the striking collection of late medieval tombs, the freestanding bell tower and, perhaps most compellingly, the substantial evidence for the cathedral’s late medieval liturgical arrangements. The core remains very much Romanesque, however, and much survives of the building created after the old Sussex see was moved from Selsey to Chichester in 1075.