What's On At Winchester Cathedral

Jane Austen: Her Life & Times – Special Tour 2021

This tour offers visitors an intimate and often amusing insight into Jane Austen's life and connections with the Cathedral.

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Anglo Saxon – Special Tour 2021

The Anglo-Saxon Minster and its role in the birth of the English Nation, the personalities who inhabited it and the traces which are still visible today. Part of the tour is outside on slightly uneven ground and suitable clothing and footwear should be worn.

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Art in the Cathedral – Special Tour 2021

Winchester Cathedral is rich in art objects, some from hundreds of years ago. This tour enables visitors to enjoy a close-up interaction with a number of these works, within the context of this very special, time-honoured place.

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Face the Music – Special Tour 2021

‘Face the Music’ is a tour that includes background musical history and examines aspects of music within the Cathedral. There are three types of visual clues: firstly, images in stone, wood, glass and embroidery reflecting ‘heavenly harmony’; secondly memorials and graffiti referring to specific musical personalities; and thirdly, place and objects with musical functions such as the organ or the Treasury.  

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Literary Links – Special Tour 2021

On this tour you will discover some of the many literary links we have in the Cathedral, including ‘literary legends’ who are buried here and other writers with memorials. The building itself has inspired novelists such as Thomas Hardy and most recently Tracy Chevalier. Medieval conflict, Tudor intrigue and Victorian scandal have provided writers with some great material. Come and learn about these literary connections and listen to extracts spanning over four hundred years of Literature from Shakespeare to Hilary Mantel. 

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Wood Glorious Wood – Special Tour 2021

This tour explores the exceptional riches of the Cathedral’s woodwork, ancient and modern. It considers the indispensable role of wood in the construction and preservation of the building and we discover wood furnishings and decoration as far back as the 12th century. 

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Flower Festival 2021

The Winchester Cathedral Flower Festival returns from the 15th - 19th September 2021. The Cathedral will be transformed by spectacular floral displays designed by Pip Bensley, award winning floral designer.

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Architecture – Special Tour 2021

Follow the evolution of the monumental Norman cathedral through the subsequent development of the medieval period to the Reformation and early Renaissance. The interesting relationship between building materials, construction techniques and design will be explored.

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Friends Annual Lecture – History through the eye of a needle

Tracy Chevalier is the best-selling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her latest novel, A Single Thread, is set in Winchester and stitches together fact and fiction surrounding our Cathedral broderers, all connected with the formation of the Friends of Winchester Cathedral.

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Biblical Scholarship in England before the Norman Conquest

Join Professor Sarah Foot, Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of Oxford, for this fascinating lecture, taking online and in the cathedral.

Study of the Bible lay at the centre of religious life in the Anglo-Saxon period and underpinned the whole written culture of early medieval England.  Professor Foot leads us through the times of Bede, Alfred and Æthelwold to reveal a tradition interrupted but not destroyed by the Norman Conquest.

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Pestilence, Penitence and Putrefaction – Special Tour 2021

For nearly 1400 years, those associated with the Cathedrals in Winchester have played an important part in the care of the sick and management of disease. This tour recounts the history of medicine in relation to the structure of the present Cathedral and the people commemorated within it.

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Curious & Mysterious – Special Tour 2021

Mystifying Cathedral puzzles or secrets, ancient and modern, will be revealed on this tour. The tour covers mysteries spanning some 700 years, often obscured by the mists of time. 

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