The stained glass in the new church of St Barnabas is the work of Caroline Swash,
now head of stained glass at London's Central School of Art and Design, who has
been a worshipping member of the congregation for many years. She was
responsible for the memorial window to Herbert Howells in Gloucester Cathedral
and before the fire had been in dialogue with the Parish Church Council of
St Barnabas about a new window for the entrance area of the old church which in
the event was never commissioned.

The full story of how the stained glass for the east windows of the new church and
for the Barnabas Chapel was conceived and executed is told in the book Building
for the Future, available by mail order from St Barnabas.

Briefly, the east end glass has been created to frame and complement the organ
besides adding colour and verve to the interior. A ladder of shifting red, gold and
blue glass ripples upwards towards the curved ceiling, gradually fading to pure
light. Floating above the instrument there is a circle of glass containing cruciform
iconography within a central open rose and broken by a shaft of patterned and
gilded light. The windows on either side have been edged with glittering panels
which stretch the colour across the vaulted space.

The west window, in the Barnabas Chapel, contains shafts of colour similar in
colour and rhythm to those at the east end. The narrative here, however, is more
tightly focused. Text and image combine to suggest the history of the church in
England and include pages of musical scores used in current worship. Molten glass
has been used to focus attention on precise symbolic images.

 

The South Windows
The most recent additions to the church's stained glass are the panels for the
clerestory on the south side of the church, which have been generously given to
St Barnabas by Dagmar Paton in memory of her beloved husband Jim, on behalf
of his four daughters Jane, Kerry, Bonne and Imogen. They were dedicated on
29 November 1998 by the Reverend Richard Cattley.

The theme of the windows is the conversion of England by two missionaries of the Celtic and Roman churches, Saints Columba and Augustine. Columba died at Iona and Augustine arrived in Kent in the course of the same year, 507. The celebration of this anniversary in 1997 was the reason for the choice of subject.

Neither saint particularly wished to come to our country. Columba had been expelled from Ireland for reasons that remain obscure. the community that he founded in Iona grew to have considerable influence in continental Europe as well as northern England. Augustine was sent to England by Pope Gregory to convert the Saxons. With the support of Bertha, the Christian wife of King Aethelbert, Augustine was able to set up a centre of worship at Canterbury, the foundation of the great cathedral and archiepiscopate.

Subjects selected from these events have been featured in the 'oeil de verre' which, as elsewhere, contain the story-telling elements of the windows.

Portraits of both saints can be seen in the centre of the outer panels - each based on contemporary iconographic representations. The other four panels in the Columba sequence include a low relief representation of the island of Iona, his dove and the Celtic Cross, all bound in green glass decorated with a plait work pattern (symbolising Eternity) and the digs and geese which feature so frequently in the illuminated manuscripts.

The Augustine series features a bishop's crozier, a low relief of Ebbsfleet in Kent (then an island) where he landed and a Latin cross. These have been surrounded by the colour purple decorated with motifs taken from a contemporary Italian Gospel.

The central panel behind the chandelier contains a setting out of the idea of the merging of both traditions. Here the names and dates can be seen along with texts presented in an appropriate typeface to indicate the different slant each man gave to the interpretation of Christianity in Britain.

Columba's prayer - a poem really - suggests complete personal trust in God in the face of hostility:
Alone with none but Thee, my God
I journey on my way
What need I fear, when Thou art near,
O King of night and day?
More safe than I within thy hand
Than if a host did round me stand.

The letter from Pope Gregory to Augustine counsels good organisational practice:

In the upper part of this panel, words from the First Letter of John remind us of Christ himself:
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is from God
God's love was revealed among us in this way;
God sent his only Son into the world
So that we might live through him.

The glass pomegranate above symbolises the fruitfulness of the two missions.

The theme of a journey by water has its least ambivalent expression in the brush-marked sea blue glass and in the glass roundels at the base which show the two men leaving Ireland and France and arriving in England. The arrows at the head of each panel encourage in the viewer a sense of momentum towards the central panel.

The designing, cartooning and all the working of the glass was done by Caroline Swash at Goddard and Gibbs Studios in Shoreditch. The glass itself was cut and the finished work glazed by David Williams. Framing was sorted out by Philip Broome and the frames were made by John Deacon. Valerie Olleon made the glass oeil de verre.

This article has been adapted by Clare Stevens from articles by Caroline Swash