Talk:Wells Cathedral

TFA October 23 (2)

I'm not sure if this article should have been made a TFA, as it isn't in as good a state as it may appear to be at first glance. The dispute over the copyediting in August could possibly have been taken as a warning, but to be clear I don't think this is the fault of any editor in particular.

I've just given the lead an overhaul and given it a sourced paragraph on the building history taken from Pevsner's Buildings of England and the Historic England listing. I'm happy to discuss any of these changes, of course.

While doing this, I noticed that despite the very welcome efforts of @JennyOz earlier today the information on the bishop and dean was out-of-date further down the article. There area also issues with the sources. Some are old enough for their reliability to be dubious, for example Charles Cockerell's Iconography of the West Front of Wells Cathedral, which may be accurate in the essentials but was published in 1851 and therefore pre-dates several major restorations. The article also relies on some fairly flimsy webpages, such as "World's oldest clock? Doubtful" and this page from "Britannia" (not theEncyclopedia Britannica), which again may not be inaccurate per se but which are difficult to verify. The edition of Pevsner used in the body is also the 1958 first edition rather than the 2011 second edition. The version I've used in the lead is revised 1985 account, so still not perfect but at least a little more recent.

The article isn't in terrible shape, I don't think, but it needs a really thorough checking of its sources and for outdated information. It probably isn't at FA standard as it stands. A.D.Hope (talk) 22:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

@A.D.Hope: WP:FAR is one place where an article's FA status can be discussed. The first step in an FAR is to notify the article on its talk page. Z1720 (talk) 22:27, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

I may well open a review, but wanted to see what other editors thought first. A.D.Hope (talk) 22:47, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

I haven’t read through it in sufficient detail to have a view on FAR, but I think something more is needed on the 21st century history. We don’t want a Controversies section, but its modern history is pretty turbulent, / and needs some coverage. I shall try to work something up. KJP1 (talk) 10:13, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

There had been some changes to the lead, including an added word that suggested that the architecture might be derivative.

At this point the discussion becomes a little difficult unless you are extremely knowledgable about Gothic architecture.

The lead now has a very tidy potted history of the buildingt, which tells you nothing important about the building. If you want a string of dates... well, they are all there in the more detailed description of the building .

What is missing from the lead?

This is a groundbreaking piece of architecture. This is the Sydney Opera House of Gothic architecture.

Yes, there are important buildings in France, like the east end of the Abbey of Saint Denis , but they only get halfway there. The builder of Wells saw the potential of Gothic, as it had never been seen before, and flew with it.

Gothic had been attempted in England, prior to Wells, but this marks the invention of the style that we call "Early English Gothic".

The only visionary equivalent is the unprecedented and never repeated west front of Peterborough Cathedral.

Amazingly, the second building stage, although giving more elaborate windows to the clerestory, maintained the scheme of arcades and gallery of the first phase. I cannot emphasise sufficiently just how singularly important this is. To say that the second phase was in the Decorated Style of Gothic, is only partly true, and misses the most significant point.

So, what else? That is a neat quotation from Pevsner, through an intermediary source, I think. But what else did Pevsner say?

While I am not going to contradict Uncle Nick entirely over the scaffold-like balance of vertical and horizontal, there is just one thing the he, and those people who find the front too wide for its height, need to take into account. That is this: That west front was always intended to have spires.

The huge buttresses tell us that. And the subtle rotation of the features of the upper towers make the visual supports for octagonal spires. So any quotation of what Pevsner wrote needs to take this into account.

Amandajm (talk) 17:59, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

There are five quotations in the third paragraph, three from Harvey and two from Pevsner. Those from Harvey praise Wells as "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and "most poetic" of English cathedrals and describe the west front as the "supreme triumph of the combined plastic arts in England". This balances the negative opinion from Pevsner.

The Pevsner quotation is taken from the Folio Society's English Cathedrals, which compiles the entries on the cathedrals from the various volumes of The Buildings of England. The same words are used in the 1958 edition of Somerset (p.284), of which Pevsner is the sole author. A.D.Hope (talk) 07:42, 13 July 2025 (UTC)