William Burges

Cork's grandest building was designed by a short-sighted Englishman who treated it as the work of his life. William Burges won the competition to build St Fin Barre's Cathedral in 1862, a little-known architect of thirty-five with a design far grander than the budget allowed. He talked the committee round, then spent the rest of his career seeing it built.

The Victorian dreamer

Burges was born in London in 1827, the son of a wealthy engineer. He fell for the Middle Ages and spent his life trying to build his way back into them. Where other Victorians chased industry and progress, he wanted carved stone, gold leaf, beasts and saints, a vanished world rebuilt in miniature. He worked with a loyal team of craftsmen who could realise the dense, strange detail he drew, and on few buildings did he get a freer hand than on Cork.

One mind, every detail

He designed almost everything in St Fin Barre's himself, from the three spires down to the floor tiles, the metalwork, the pulpit, the furniture and the door handles. More than a thousand pieces of sculpture cover the cathedral inside and out: angels, prophets, beasts and scenes from scripture. High on the eastern end he placed a Resurrection Angel sheathed in gold, which local belief says will sound its trumpets when the end of the world is near, giving Cork the warning first. Few cathedrals of its size carry the stamp of a single imagination so fully.

Cork and beyond

St Fin Barre's was Burges's first great commission, and it made his name. He went on to remake Cardiff Castle and to build the fairytale Castell Coch in Wales for the immensely rich Marquess of Bute, work as theatrical as anything in Victorian architecture. He died in 1881 at his own gothic house in London, aged fifty-three, with much of his wider dream unbuilt. The cathedral on the Lee remains his masterpiece, and it stands on the oldest holy ground in the city.

He was as strange as his buildings. Short, near-sighted and fond of medieval dress, Burges filled his own London house with painted furniture, gilded ceilings and a menagerie of carved animals, living inside the dream he sold to his patrons. He worked slowly and built little, but what he built he finished to the last detail, and his small body of work is prized today exactly because no one else thought the way he did. In Cork his hand is everywhere in the cathedral, and the building rewards a slow look. The further in you go and the higher you raise your eyes, the more of his invention you find, carved into stone that most visitors walk straight past.

On the walk

We stop below the three spires of St Fin Barre's and tell the story of the man who designed every inch of it, and the golden angel he set on the roof to warn Cork first.