Who doesn't appreciate the beauty of stained glass? Tiffany helped popularize the art form and raised it to new levels. It now appears as a fashionable accent in homes the world over. Of course, stained glass windows seem almost an inseparable part of church architecture. Those intricate glass mosaics and painted designs have graced Christian churches and cathedrals for a thousand years.

     Surely, everyone loves stained glass, right? Well, everyone except perhaps Christopher Wren. When he rebuilt St. Paul's Cathedral in London (after the Great Fire of 1666), he specified plain glass windows. He wanted its magnificent interior to be well lit by daylight...and stained glass simply would have made it too dark. Church officials were horrified at such a radical idea. St. Paul's was the cathedral of London. For such a grand edifice not to be adorned with equally splendid windows was unthinkable.

     So it was that beautiful stained glass windows were installed over the master architect's objections. And there they remained...until 1940, when the German Luftwaffe inadvertently did Christopher Wren homage during the Battle of Britain. When London was bombed, loyal Brits managed to save the main structure, but every window in St. Paul's Cathedral was destroyed.

     When it was finally repaired, stained glass proved too costly, so plain glass was substituted. Today, the only stained glass in St. Paul's is in the "American Chapel" which honors America's World War II dead. It took almost 300 years, but Christopher Wren finally got his way. It is said that his ghost must be smiling just a bit.

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© Russ Brown, 1997