Wakefield Cathedral, West Yorkshire

Above: Wakefield Cathedral, formally the Church of All Saints Wakefield, is the cathedral of the Church of England's Diocese of Wakefield.  Located in West Yorkshire, it is not far from Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield.  One may find a Wikimapia overview of the cathedral grounds here.

The Wakefield Cathedral Home Page, here, provides a slide show and video of the interior.

For a 360-degree panorama: Please see the BBC's Bradford and West Yorkshire Site here.  It requires a browser plug-in.

The Wakefield 366 Page at Flickr also provides more than 250 interior views, including beautiful shots of some of the cathedral's best-known features: its medieval stained glass, the furniture of the St. Mark chapel, the high altar, a 17th-century rood-screen, the rererdos of John Oldrid Scott, and many carvings of strange figures, including mythical beasts and a green man.  

Wikipedia says the cathedral tower has a ring of 14 bells and "no more than 12 bells are usually rung at any one time."  The Wakefield cathedral choir has been featured on BBC radio's Songs of Praise and Choral Evensong programs.

From Wikipedia: The Vicar of Wakefield "is a novel by Irish author Oliver Goldsmith. It was written in 1761 and 1762, and published in 1766, and was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians. The novel is mentioned in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit."

Free and downloadable copies of The Vicar of Wakefield, including audio book copies, may be found at the Internet Archive website here.

From Wikipedia:

Wakefield Cathedral, or the Cathedral Church of All Saints in Wakefield, West Yorkshire is the Anglican Cathedral for the Diocese of Wakefield and seat of the Bishop of Wakefield.

Originally the parish church, it has Anglo Saxon origins and after enlargement and rebuilding has the tallest spire in Yorkshire. It is the tallest building in the City of Wakefield.

The cathedral is built on the ruins of an ancient Saxon church  A church in Wakefield is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. In 1090 William II gave the church and land in Wakefield to Lewes Priory in Sussex and shortly after that a Norman church was built.

The cathedral is situated on a hill on Kirkgate in the centre of the city. The Norman church was rebuilt in 1329, and apart from the tower and spire, rebuilt and enlarged in 1469. The church was reconstructed and altered at various times and its spire, damaged in a violent gale, was renewed in 1823. Up to the 16th century the church was known by the Anglo Saxon All Hallows and after the Reformation changed to All Saints.

The cathedral was largely rebuilt in the Perpendicular Gothic style in the early 15th century and, after years of neglect in the 18th century, owes its current late mediaeval appearance to a Victorian restoration by Sir George Gilbert Scott and his son John Oldrid Scott between 1858 and 1874

The cathedral walls are clad in ashlar sandstone. On the south wall is a porch, with a wrought iron gate and a sundial over the door arch. The wall of the north aisle is the oldest part of the church dating from about 1150. The nave piers date from the 12th and 13th centuries and the arcade and chancel arches date from the 14th century. The late 15th-century chancel now serves as the choir. The nave's original stone vaulted roof has been replaced with wood. The 15th-century wooden ceilings over the nave and aisles have carved bosses

Above: A 19th-century view of Wakefield Cathedral, during the times of Jane Austen (1815)