He was deluged with entries but abandoned the competition and appointed Bentley

He was deluged with entries, but abandoned the competition and appointed Bentley, the leading Catholic architect of the day (who had been converted to the faith in 1862).Born in Doncaster, Bentley began work as an engineer before finding a place in the office of Henry Clutton, a church architect and Catholic convert At 23 Bentley established his own practice in London. He was a devotee of the Gothic Revival (finding St Peter’s, Rome “absolutely brutal”) but, because of his religious affiliations, won little work, and what he did build had to be cheap. Before Westminster Cathedral, only the powerful Church of the Holy Rood (Watford, 1900) was anything like a vehicle for his talent.Cardinal Vaughan was adamant that the cathedral should not be Gothic. In 1892, when Herbert Vaughan became Archbishop of Westminster, the putative cathedral was still in limbo. Vaughan’s immediate predecessor, Cardinal Manning, had been sceptical, questioning the need for a costly building. “Could I leave 20,000 children without education”, he asked, “and drain my friends to pile up stones and bricks?” None the less, in 1884 Manning acquired the site on land close to Victoria Station that had been occupied by the old Middlesex County Prison.When Vaughan made the decision to build the cathedral, he chose his architect through a competition.

For all its monumental magnificence, it is often ignored by tourists.The need for a great Roman Catholic cathedral in London had been recognised since 1850, when Pius IX restored the hierarchy of bishops in England. Generations of modern architects, attuned to Brutalism and Le Corbusier of Chandigarh and the Maisons Jaoul, have delighted in the noble austerity of the interior, grateful (as so many people have been) that Bentley’s own decorative intentions were thwarted.
Yet perhaps it is the unique character of the building – that it is hard to place in terms of period and style – which has made it one of the least generally appreciated of all the world’s great religious buildings. The building was immediately recognised as a masterpiece Today, the magnitude of Bentley’s achievement is clear. He created a religious building which, though clearly rooted in the architectural concerns of the 19th century, has timeless qualities. He had been in poor health – a rare cancer of the tongue had been diagnosed – even before work on the cathedral began, but his passionate commitment gave him the strength to complete the project.

“Beyond doubt”, wrote Richard Norman Shaw, the most influential architect of that era, “it is the finest church that has been built for centuries.” Shaw had been shown around the new cathedral by its architect, John Francis Bentley, shortly before Christmas 1901 (the foundation stone of the Church of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord had been laid on 29 June 1895) Less than three months later, Bentley died, aged 63. “Ooh, you may well ooh me,” Dale cooed, as the audience put their vocal cords through a Mexican wave, “They’re barmy!” Look on, anybody over the age of five, and despair.. Westminster Cathedral, the magnificent Byzantine basilica that broods a few hundred yards from the better-known Westminster Abbey, is 100 years old. What will they make, I wonder, of Pets Win Prizes (BBC1, Sat), once it has been deciphered at the British Museum’s Department of Televisual Reconstruction? Chief celebrant of these bizarre rites: Dale Winton, trying to redeem the unredeemable with a form of camp as inoffensively bland as an air-freshener. A cross had been carved into the stone, a triumphant piece of graffiti which now itself looked rather forlorn.Two thousand years from now, our residues will probably be electronic rather than monolithic.