Padiham company lights up Manchester church 80 years after 'Christmas Blitz' shatters historic window

A stained glass church window, shattered during the Blitz, is shining radiantly once again, thanks to a Padiham company.
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Eighty years after the devastating Blitz of 1940, a radiant new stained glass window is lighting up St Chad’s, Manchester’s Catholic mother church, in Cheetham Hill.

Stained glass artist Deborah Lowe of Padiham company, Pendle Stained Glass, painstakingly designed the stained glass in the west window which had shattered as Luftwaffe bombs rained down on Manchester during the night of December 22nd, known as the Christmas Blitz.

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The company, based in Burnley Road, has worked on major commissions for nearly 30 years, including the restoration of windows in the John Rylands Library and the Holy Name Church in Manchester.

Deborah Lowe at work on the windowDeborah Lowe at work on the window
Deborah Lowe at work on the window

Bombing raids ravaged the northern and eastern parts of the city, with neighbourhoods in Cheetham Hill and Strangeways the hardest hit. Nearly 700 people were killed and over 8,000 homes destroyed.

St Chad’s was re-glazed with coloured diamond shaped glass pieces - a sort of emergency repair in the hard times after the war, but a major two-year restoration project, funded by English Heritage for the Grade II listed church, created the perfect opportunity for a new window.

Shafts of ochre and violet, lilac and gold, azure, lemon, pink, purple, mauve and blue radiate from the central Christ figure in the stunning window which is over five and a half metres tall.

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Deborah, a member of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers which dates back to the early 1300s, used the same techniques as medieval glaziers to create the window.

The new stained glass windowThe new stained glass window
The new stained glass window

She said: “The window is entirely handmade using traditional techniques. Each piece of glass was cut, hand painted and kiln fired before being leaded into panels and fitted into the stonework.

"I chose each individual sheet of spectacular coloured glass from the only manufacturer of mouth blown flat glass left in Britain, the English Antique Glass company in the Midlands.”

She then spent several weeks cutting the chosen glass, working with Leon Conway, a craftsman at Pendle Stained Glass.

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Deborah’s trademark is the beautiful details in her windows of birds, flowers, butterflies and trees of the British countryside, delicately recreated in glass.

One of her recent commissions was a small glass panel gift for HRH Prince Charles featuring a red squirrel and hedgerows on the Balmoral estate.

She said: “It’s a rare and wonderful opportunity for a contemporary artist to design a west window in a historic building, so this has been a dream commission.

“The east and west windows are usually already filled, being the principal windows in a church. West windows get the full afternoon and evening sun, which can be surprisingly strong in the spring even in Manchester.”

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Deborah’s naturalistic glass painting in the St Chad's window includes the ravens said to have fed the prophet Elijah in the wilderness, although these are in glorious technicolor purple among amber thorns.

The driving force has been Father Ray Matus, leader of the Oratorian Community at St Chad’s.

He argued that, as a large part of the cost stonework repairs involved removing and replacing the plain glass, a new stained glass window could be designed and fitted in its place.

He said: “Stained glass windows were first created to teach stories in the Bible and I was keen for our new window to follow that tradition. We chose the miraculous moment when Jesus and three of his apostles - Peter, James and John - go to the top of a mountain to pray.

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“The new window has perfectly captured the transfiguration of Jesus - a miraculous moment in a burst of light where Jesus links heaven and earth. I pictured golden colours to represent a sunburst and the setting sun as light pours through the west window of our church, but the palette Deborah chose was far more dazzling."

Deborah added: "I’ve had the pleasure of working with Father Ray before and the whole process has been a pure joy, which is just as well, the glass-painting alone took over 600 hours."

Future commissions in Manchester for Pendle Stained Glass Ltd and Deborah Lowe include the manufacture and re-instating of a rare and long lost stained glass sundial window in Didsbury Parsonage.

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