Chelmsford – Chelmsford Cathedral (Then and Now)

This is one of my random then and now photos, comparing what Chelmsford Cathedral (then St. Mary’s Church as it didn’t become a cathedral until the twentieth century) looks like now, compared to what it looked like in 1892. The Francis Frith photo is towards the end of this post (if for some reason it doesn’t load, it’s 31510 in their collection) and as can be seen I haven’t done a great job here of taking a comparable photo.

The area has all been reset, so the path which once led to the church door on the right (the priest’s door) has been removed and there’s a war memorial there now. Well, mostly removed. There’s a section still left of the old paving in front of the door, although it just leads to the grass now.

There were once iron railings separating the path from the graves, which were likely removed during the Second World War for the war effort. The tombs are all still there in the same place, or at least, they seem to be, but there are graves missing from the right hand side of the older image. What is interesting (to me anyway) is that they have numerous stones lying flat and I had thought that this was done more recently.