When I was an architecture student in the early 1960s, the new Cathedral by Basil Spence was greeted with disappointment, that an unprecedented opportunity for true modernism hadn't been taken. Although I have lived within day-trip distance of it for 40 years, I have only just made the trip, once for a service in which my son was involved and, on the strength of that, deliberately with camera in hand.

There are actually 2 cathedrals, the ruins of the late medieval one as well as the new. They are linked by a canopy, but more forcefully by the spirit of reconciliation in reaction to the twin atrocities of the air-raids on Coventry and Dresden of the 1940s