St Nicholas's is home to several distinguished individual artworks, some known to have been created by artists whose stories are of considerable interest.
The west end window, a narrow light in a round-headed frame, depicts the Baptism of Christ in a small central panel; the draughtmanship of this double portrait and the colours of the glass in the rest of the window are reminiscent of much larger medieval windows in Canterbury Cathedral. Our window is the work of Carl Johannes Edwards, a very distinguished glass artist who designed, amongst other works, some of the major windows in Liverpool Cathedral. For more information about him, please follow this link:
About Carl Edwards | artists and craftsmen in stained glass | Benyon Stained Glass
The pdf file below contains a list of Edwards' work, in which our west window appears under 1953. At this time, Edwards was working in partnership with Hugh Bentley Powell, also primarily a stained glass artist, who created the St Nicholas mural on our east wall. (A link to an image of the mural is given below; photograph by John Salmon, reproduced under the creative commons licence ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).) The decisions taken about the church's decoration, providing a narrow but very high quality window at the west and a painting instead of a stained glass window at the east, probably reflect the need for strict economy in the period of post-war reconstruction; however, as the image below shows, the west window provides a focus of brilliant colour and light which faces us as we turn away from the altar rail after receiving communion, and is placed immediately above the font, which symbolises the beginning of our Christian journey whether or not we were actually baptised here. The idea of replacing the east window with another form of image and placing a striking window at the west was developed on a grand scale in the new Coventry Cathedral.
St Nicholas's has other stained glass windows, of very different characters. One is pictorial, a circular window on the north side of the chancel based on the story of Ruth; a link to an image is given below, subject to the same limited copyright restriction as the image of the mural. The east end windows are more recent, and here is an account from Apollo Stained Glass, who made and installed them.
Apollo Stained Glass: St Nicholas Church Kidbrooke
