Photographing all 42 of England’s Anglican cathedrals made the late Magnum photographer Peter Marlow re-examine his homeland, says Tracy Calder. His partner Fiona Naylor talks to AP about Peter’s project
Most of us have played a variant of the classic Top Trumps game, launched in the 1970s. In the Anglican Cathedrals of Britain version, players ‘trump’ each other with statistics related to height, external length and number of bells. (Wells Cathedral has the heaviest ring of ten bells, Canterbury Cathedral is the oldest cathedral in England and Salisbury Cathedral has the tallest church spire in the UK – just in case you were wondering.) Now a children’s card game might not seem the most obvious catalyst for a photographic project, but the late Peter Marlow (member and two-time president of Magnum Photos) was an original thinker and liked to draw inspiration from unusual sources.
In 2008 Peter was commissioned by Royal Mail to produce six images of cathedrals to be used on a set of commemorative stamps. Once the project was complete, he took his Top Trumps cards (along with a copy of the 1989 book English Cathedrals by Edwin Smith and Olive Cook) and set himself the challenge of photographing all 42 of England’s cathedrals.
‘Peter was fascinated by history, and even at a young age he understood that cathedrals are part of what this country is,’ says Fiona Naylor (Peter’s partner and chair of the Peter Marlow Foundation). ‘It’s not just about religion, it’s also about society, crafts, architecture and the evolution of a building – he was fascinated by all of that.’
The timing of the Royal Mail commission was serendipitous: Peter wasn’t working on a longform project at the time and the structure and taxonomy of the ‘42 cathedrals’ idea really appealed to him. Also, having travelled to more than 80 countries during the course of his career, he was eager to explore his homeland with new vigour. ‘He talked about it being a bit of a pilgrimage …a way of re-examining what England was,’ recalls Fiona. ‘You spend your whole life travelling around the world and then you suddenly realise you’ve never been to Chester!’
Much of Peter’s early work could be classed as shortform photojournalism, but the personal longform projects he embarked on were hugely important to him. In the late 1970s, for example, he worked alongside fellow Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins to document the rise of the far-right, even covering the infamous anti-immigration riots of Lewisham in 1977, where members of the National Front clashed with demonstrators. What’s more, in the 1980s and 1990s he spent eight years photographing the declining conditions in in
