“It really does touch your heart”: inside the restored Lady Chapel
As the restorers prepare to leave Nottingham Cathedral, project manager Jane Hellings walks us through its transformed east end, and what she hopes it will do for the city.
Jane Hellings knew exactly what the frieze in the Lady Chapel would look like. It was in the designs for the Lottery bid, and enough of it had been uncovered for the team to know its pattern. What she hadn’t known was that it would be gilded.
“When I first saw that gilded, I just thought, ‘Oh my goodness. That is amazing,’” she says. “The way the light catches it is just absolutely beautiful.”
Jane is project manager of Restoring Pugin, the work to bring back the original decoration at the east end of Nottingham Cathedral. The cathedral was designed by Augustus Welby Pugin, the leading architect of the Victorian Gothic Revival, best known for his work on the Houses of Parliament.
What she has loved most is the way the space draws you in. In the ambulatories, the walkways that curve behind the high altar, small stars sit far apart on the ceilings. In the ante-chapel they grow closer together. Inside the east end chapels they are larger, and in the Lady Chapel they become gilded stars carrying the emblem of Mary.
“It looks so conscious, so designed with just the glorification of Our Lady,” Jane says. “It really does touch your heart, I think.”
Look closely and the detail multiplies. In one small corner of the Lady Chapel you can count 11 different stencil patterns on the beams and rafters. “It’s just such a riot of beautiful patterns and floral motifs and heraldic symbols,” she says.
The colours are strong but disciplined: red, yellow, blue and green, mostly in deep shades, with the occasional lighter tone for emphasis. Jane describes them as “bright but not loud”.
None of it came with instructions. Pugin left no drawings for the cathedral, only a few letters and receipts, and he changed his mind often. Over the years, most of his decoration had been hidden under layers of grey paint. “We were just going blind, by tapping away to uncover what we could see of what was left,” Jane says.
The team rebuilt the painted inscriptions using the Gothic alphabet Pugin left for other projects. They followed it down to the letter spacing and the small motifs he used to fill a gap. Some late discoveries meant going back to correct early work, because everyone wanted it exactly right.
Jane calls the research by Ana Longreira, the project’s Lead Conservator, “like a PhD on Pugin”. Everyone involved has learned about his importance to the Catholic revival in England, and to the Gothic streets of so many British cities. Jane hopes visitors will pick up some of that story simply through the beauty of the work.
She is just as struck by the people doing the painting. Some are trainees on their first proper job, working on their backs with their hands above their faces. They use traditional techniques, authentic pigments and gold leaf, and anything that isn’t right gets redone. “It’s a huge labour of love.”
The project has kept its promises. The National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £1.69 million towards the £2.3 million project in spring 2025. Cliveden Conservation began on site that August with a 66-week programme. At one point the work looked set to run on towards Christmas, but the team pulled the time back. The project will also come in on budget.
Three chapels and three ambulatories have been redecorated, ceilings, walls and reredos (the painted screens behind the altars) included. Floor tiles and statues have been restored, the radiators refurbished and the lighting realigned. The contractors leave in early December. Interpretation panels and a variety of events follow before the project closes in April 2027.
The project matters beyond Nottingham, too. Sophie Andreae CBE has been Vice Chair of the Bishops’ Conference Patrimony Committee, which looks after Catholic heritage in England and Wales, since 2002. When the grant was announced, she said: “This is the first major National Lottery Heritage Fund award for a Catholic Cathedral in recent years.” For Jane, finishing on time and on budget shows the Church “deserves the money, and can deliver”.
The legacy she hopes for is a cathedral the city knows. Jane wants visitors to seek it out. Locals, she hopes, will stop seeing “that building on the Derby Road that I walk past that I don’t think I’m allowed in because it’s Catholic and they’re a bit strange.”
The other hope is closer to home. Jane wants the regular congregation to be prouder of their cathedral and readier to bring friends in. People from parishes across the diocese come for special occasions, and she hopes they will go home encouraged. She thinks the beauty can shape “faith in action as well as faith in contemplation”.
Above all, she believes the building itself will do the inviting. “It just becomes somewhere people are more drawn to.”
Two-thirds of the cathedral is still to be restored. But the hardest, most elaborate part is done, and in the Lady Chapel the gold is catching the light.
If you have walked past on Derby Road and wondered, the doors are open every day from 7am to 7pm. Come in, walk east and look up.
Restoring Pugin is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery players.
