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I created this image from all the glass at St Edmund, Rochdale. The eye of the beholder…
"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, ... and through me, like wine through water and altered the colour of my mind.."
- Emily Bronte
An Illuminated Journey
It is a rare circumstance to travel in a short span of time and, through photography and art, become immersed in a single, resounding theme. This spring, in service of Janet Gough’s forthcoming book Divine Light: The Stained Glass of England’s Cathedrals, I found myself bathing in coloured light during an intense period of photography, capturing the stained glass of seven cathedrals and one royal peculiar across the length and breadth of the country.
After weeks of it, I felt altered, as if my whole being had been steeped in a new spectrum. The journey demanded much - early risings, cold nights in the van - yet it gathered me into a kind of wheel of experience, each cathedral offering its own hue: reflection, friendship, community - all refracted into a single arc of emotion through the prism of the cathedral.
It brought to mind those moments when the sheer force of light overwhelmed even the greatest of souls. Turner, on his deathbed, is said to have whispered “the sun is God.” Charles II, when his reign and body were failing, did not summon riches to his side, but begged instead to see one last sunrise. At the end of their lives, they turned instinctively to moments of nature — to colour, to a particular quality of light: how the first warmth of dawn, the burgeoning reds, the golden yellows, stirs a primal hope, reminding us that we are still part of the turning world.
Perhaps this is what I felt at the end of my journey - where I travelled over 1000 miles and took in every chroma, every hue on the spectrum - a kind of accumulative reservoir of light, a distillation of each place I captured with the lens - hovering inside.
One morning on the road to Carlisle, I felt that power at full force. I woke in the van, switched it to day mode, and rolled along the lanes at first light. After weeks of dry days, the rain had returned, sweetening the earth. Colours were saturated, everything felt replenished. The mix of place, time, season and light conspired to create an atmosphere that immersed me in a living canvas, the land itself awash with shifting tones.
The road gleamed like a ribbon of silver halide, guiding me through the half-light. Valleys and fields dissolved into a white haze. I drank it in and thought how this curated spectrum of colour impacted my mood, as surely as glass does within a cathedral.
And having spent so much time absorbed in the optics of photography, it was on my journey to Carlisle, in my encounter with the window there, that I realised how unique this medium is to our isles — in its design, its colour and tint, its interwoven patterns and stories.
Across Europe, especially in France and the Low Countries, stained glass often leans toward lighter, pastel tones, with a more stylised, almost cartoon-like approach to figures and scenes. By contrast, the stained glass of these isles — particularly in the Victorian and Arts and Crafts periods — tends to be more illustrative, with richer, saturated colours and a painterly quality. A sense of narrative depth arises through techniques that bridge artisan craft and figurative art, drawing on a strong tradition of illuminated manuscripts.
For me, it isn’t just the engagement with glass - the subject matter, the narratives woven into tracery - it is also its impact upon the fabric of a place. Stained glass softens the mood, loosens the geometry, provides moments of magic.
In some cathedrals I tried to catch its influence upon the honeycombed complexity: those sudden glimpses of colour that break through stone and create a chiaroscuro. At St George’s, Windsor, I captured the side-aisle window bursting into the vaulting and bathing the quire in a radiance both ordered and otherworldly.
I have known that same intensity in other exalted places where colour is held captive within traceried bounds. Watching Tom Denny at work in his studio, I saw how an artist can transfer mood onto glass: how ochres and blues, when placed with intention, can summon sorrow or consolation. I wrote then that Denny’s work was “a place where poetry meets pigment, where memory is made radiant” - and I felt it again on this journey.
At Lichfield, photographing the Herkenrode glass, Albinoni’s Adagio drifted from the organ. As the music deepened, I realised that colour, like sound, has its registers. We call a hue loud or muted, shrill or soft. In that moment, the glass and the organ seemed joined in a single composition - tones and tints mingling into something more than sight or sound alone.
Later, at Birmingham, this mingling of hue and cry found a different voice within the sombre narrative of the Last Judgement. Burne-Jones, with his artist’s grasp of how colour shapes emotion, created a work that, despite its solemn theme, left me overwhelmingly uplifted. It was not only the artistry - the sheer joy in the craft - that carried me, but also the deft use of line, colour and perspective, drawing the onlooker into a drama of loss and hope.
Standing there, I felt myself not only observing, but participating - woven into the story. Beneath the glass, I sensed both the tension and the crisis it conveyed, and at the same time an overwhelming impression of people bound together - a community gathered in care and compassion.
Stained glass lifts me. It is a record of our nation’s story - imbued with myth, drama and memory. It holds the laughter and laments of communities who marked their time with it. Yet it is also playful, joyous, a human reaching towards the divine. Most of all, it is transformative. For whether in the softened glow that settles across a nave, or in the spectral colour that lifts a darkened arcade, I am reminded that light is both gift and guide: a spectrum working not only upon stone and glass, but upon the soul itself.
I think this luminescent world, caught somewhere between tangible and intangible, is shackled by the name we’ve given it - stained glass. The phrase cannot bear the weight of what it truly is.
Divine Light: The Stained Glass of England's Cathedrals.
This is my kind of book - a beautifully pocketable book – one to slip into a bag or jacket pocket, to take with you on your journey. Through its pages, the world is revealed in microcosm: a window into another realm of colour, a prism through which buildings, glass, and light can be experienced.
Each page has been shaped and curated by people who live with, work in, and care deeply for these spaces. Beautifully brought together with the insight and vision of Janet Gough, it becomes not just a guide but an invitation.
Cathedrals can seem vast, intricate, even overwhelming. This book offers a way in – a way to interact with them through a singular, focused theme. Beginning with light and colour, it draws the eye in, allowing the richness and complexity to unfold step by step rather than all at once.
The book is now available at:
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Words for Digest Subscribers from Janet Gough:
For eight years I was director of cathedrals and church buildings for the Church of England and I remain passionate about them and their importance spiritually, as part of our heritage (they represent 45% of England's Grade one buildings - and my last book was on their treasures) and as centres for the whole community.
About two years ago the head of collections at Canterbury Cathedral told me I must write about English cathedral stained glass - as a single collection - which collectively and over 900 years constitutes one of England’s greatest but least considered art collections.
So I asked every cathedral to select a window to feature.Even knowing the cathedrals, it’s been such a voyage of discovery for me - from the mind-boggling sophistication of England’s first architectural stained glass - in Canterbury Cathedral - when’re our panel of the Sower (1180s) shows his head lifted over the frame, and in contrapposto and walking across a clever suggestion of a deep landscape, with the ploughed fields drawn on the diagonal - through the Middle Ages to and in spite of the disruptions of the Reformation.
I’ve loved learning that 2/3 of the output of William Morris's studio was stained glass and properly looking at the masterpieces of Edward Burne-Jones with William Morris in Birmingham cathedral, which even manage to squeeze in socialist messages among all their sumptuousness.
We have witnessed a creative explosion of stained glass in the 20th century, much encouraged by the new Coventry Cathedral, with its exciting walls of contemporary glass, built and finished in just six years; and I’ve been surprised how this ancient art form remains popular today with exciting new commissions continuing.
Membership really does help. Thank you.
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I'm giving to the next person to sign up for membership a copy of Janet Gough's new book Divine Light..
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Woody has his own little piece of stained glass from Saint Mary's, Warwick.
Andy Marshall
Whenever I take on a project, it’s never just about the photographs. The road there, the nights spent close to the sites, the chance encounters along the way — they all become part of the story. With this project, the journey itself shone just as brightly as the glass I went to capture.
For Members - An Illuminated Journey
Behind the scenes of my 1000 mile journey and moments that shaped this shoot — including new art from my sketchbook.
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Kind words from a subscriber:
Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be....
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Andy Marshall
A Talk by Janet Gough
Divine Light will be officially launched with a talk by Janet Gough at the V&A at 7pm on Thursday 2 October - which I'll be giving in person. It will be also available online. The book will also be available in V&A shops. See below for more information.
Thank You!
Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 16 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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