The 19th century has been described as one of the Golden Ages of the art of Stained Glass.
Thousands of new churches were built, particularly in areas which the Anglican Church had not previously reached. This effort by the Victorians was largely motivated by the spiritual enthusiasm and drive of the Oxford Movement and the Evangelical Movement.
One of the side-effects was that most of these new churches were generously endowed with stained glass windows of a high standard by significant artists working individually or in teams in well organised workshops. The list of individual artists includes Edward Burne-Jones, Henry Holiday, Christopher Whall, Ford Madox Brown and Hugh Arnold and the workshops employing them and others include Clayton & Bell, Morris & Co, Charles Eamer Kempe, Ward & Hughes, Heaton, Butler & Bayne, Lavers, Barraud & Westlake and James Powell & Co of Whitefriars.
After the Second World War, however, there began a steep and steady decline in church attendance, particularly those of the Anglican denomination and in the areas in which the new churches had been built. Coincidentally, the art and architecture of the Victorians had fallen out of fashion and was considerably less valued than it is today.
Between 1969 and 1982 (the year of the establishment of the London Stained Glass Repository) almost 1000 Anglican churches were declared redundant. A quarter of them were demolished, the rest repurposed. Some of the huge quantity of stained glass was relocated into other churches and a small amount was donated for display in museums. But much of it was either destroyed completely during the demolition process or by vandals or it was broken up into small panels for sale in the UK and often abroad.
It was this destruction which prompted The Glaziers Company to establish the Repository in 1982, originally in the cellars of their modern livery hall abutting London Bridge, as a charitable trust to rescue good quality stained glass and find new homes for it. George Gee (1921 - 2008), Master of the Glaziers 1979/80 was a major player in the establishment of the Repository and Malcolm Hord was the first Secretary. He was succeeded by Peter London, Master 1983/84. Together, they helped to establish the Repository as a charity in 1989.
The first glass brought to the Repository was from the redundant St Mark's, Southampton, and was mostly the work of Henry Holiday from about 1910. Coincidentally, the Catholic priest-in-charge of St Mary's, Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands (or Islas Malvinas) which had been damaged during the Falklands War, was visiting the UK. Two of the Holiday windows from St Mark's were later installed in St Mary's. Other windows from St Mark's were subsequently acquired for churches in distant places like Pinjarra, Western Australia and Calvert County, Maryland, USA as well as locations in the UK.
The Stained Glass Repository's work continues, of course, and there have been many similar success stories which you can investigate below.
The Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. 2021
Christchurch, Hampstead, London. 2021.
Our Lady and St Wilfrid, Blyth, Northumberland. 2012.
THe American School in London.
The Covenant Church of Jesus the Good Shepherd, Maryland, USA. 1984.