Several of the most striking contemporary pieces in Chelmsford Cathedral were made by Beryl Dean, one of the most important church embroiderers of the twentieth century.
We’re lucky to have so much of her work here. The two best known are the Cathedral Banner, presented in 1960, and The Glory, the silk patchwork that has hung beneath the East Window for forty years. We also have a striking altar frontal and a set of vestments by her, which are still used in worship today.
We are celebrating the fantastic work of Beryl Dean at the Cathedral with a special exhibition in 2027, opening with a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the presentation of the Glory in November 2026.
Beryl Dean was born in Bromley in 1911. She trained at the Royal School of Needlework and then at Bromley School of Art. For a time, she ran a couture studio, designing costumes for ballet companies, before turning to teaching.
In the early 1950s she noticed fashion, furniture and graphic design had all changed beyond recognition since the war, but church embroidery was still stuck in the Victorian era. She decided to do something about it. In 1955 she set up a course in ecclesiastical embroidery at Hammersmith School of Art, and she taught the course for more than twenty years. Her 1958 book, Ecclesiastical Embroidery, showed how post-war modern design could sit comfortably in a church. In 1968 she helped put on an exhibition of contemporary church embroidery in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, which led to embroidery groups forming in parishes all over the country.
Her work can be seen at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, at St Paul’s and at Canterbury, where she made the cope worn at the enthronement of the Archbishop in 1980. She was appointed MBE in 1975 for services to church embroidery and died in 2001.
The Glory is usually one of the first things people notice when they walk into the Cathedral. Look straight down the nave and you are met with a great wall of abstract colour on the east wall, directly beneath the East Window.
The East window was given to the Cathedral in 1878 by Archdeacon St John Mildmay, and the glass at the top depicts the Virgin Mary and eleven of the disciples.
When Beryl Dean was commissioned to design a hanging for the wall below it, she didn’t try to compete with its figurative beauty. Instead, she observed every colour from the stained glass, sourced her component fabrics in the same shades and drew down the colours of glass into an abstract of silk squares. The result is that window and hanging read as one piece – the figurative distilled to the abstract simplicity of the patchwork. Light streams down through the glass above onto the answering colours carrying on down onto the silk.
The Glory is made from 2,220 small squares of silk. Five squares of each colour are sewn together to form a cross, and those crosses repeat across the whole hanging. From the back of the nave, the effect is one of intense colour, bright and almost shimmering. As you walk towards it, and the eastern end of the cathedral church, the crosses seem to move out of the pattern and the Christian resonance of the repeated cross begins to draw the viewer in. Most people only notice the effect once they’re quite close, and it’s worth making the walk to see it happen.
Beryl designed The Glory in 1986, when she was in her mid-seventies, and her students helped her make it. Every square had to be cut, matched to its colour in the window and stitched into place, so it was very much a collegiate work reflecting past practices of quilt and patchwork making. It’s quite different from the gold thread work that she was best known for, and a wonderful piece showing her interest in responding to architecture in her work, with her often controversial artistic approach evolving even late into her career.
Forty years of light and dust take their toll on silk though. This summer, The Glory was cleaned by Sophie Jemma, Archivist at the Warner Textile Archive, part of Braintree District Museum Trust. Thanks to her careful work, The Glory is ready for further phases of conservation work to enable it to hang for another forty years.
The hanging sits behind the cathedra, the bishop’s chair, which is the seat that makes this building a cathedral. That puts the Glory at the heart of the Cathedral’s life. It arrests visitors and worshippers as they view the eastern view through the cathedral in its vibrancy and modernity.
For forty years it has been the backdrop to daily services, ordinations, great festivals and the welcome of new bishops and deans.
The Cathedral banner hangs in the Mildmay Chapel and includes the last piece of synthetic gold braid made for Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation robe. It took Beryl more than 800 hours to make and was presented to the Cathedral in 1960. It shows the Blessed Virgin Mary in a Byzantine style, worked on a background of Indian cloth of gold.
Around her are symbols of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit and the Star of Bethlehem, linked by the interlacing wings of angels.
Beryl was known above all for her gold thread work, and the banner shows why. It is rich and ornate, but the drawing is modern and confident. It is a prime piece that demonstrates her intention to draw on the past but respond to the present in her approach.
Beryl also made an altar frontal for the Cathedral, which currently resides in the Cathedral’s Chapter House, along with a set of vestments worn by our clergy.
