A Brief History

In 1853, Christ Church was a small parish church at its original location in Oko-Faji. It wasn’t until 1867 that it was moved to its present site at the Marina (Ehingbeti), to become the first brick and mortar church building in Lagos.

Our beloved Cathedral is now 144 years old this year and is the oldest in the Church of Nigeria Anglican Communion. The Church has a rich and peculiar history that is of interest not only to its own congregation, but also to the public as well.For example, in the transept beside the Lady Chapel there is a stone taken from the steeple of the Canterbury Cathedral in England and this stone is 876 years old today.

In May 1922 the new Vicar (the second African Vicar of Christ Church Pro-Cathedral, as it was then called), the Revd. M.S. Cole sailed to England to raise funds for the proposed Cathedral building. He returned to Lagos six months later and continued to raise funds in the old Western Region of Nigeria. Having raised the princely sum of £6,000, the foundation stone of phase 1 (the first of three phases) was finally laid on April 21, 1925, by His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. A lot of fund raising still remained as the total cost of construction was estimated at £46,000. By the time the third, and final phase of the Cathedral was dedicated on May 1, 1946, a dream that had lasted 25 years finally became a reality.

On December 19, 1929 work commenced on the installation of the first of the stained glass windows. The Altar (East) windows were installed at a cost of £1,000 with donations from other Anglican churches in Nigeria and dedicated to the memory of Rt. Revd. Bishop Samuel AjayiCrowther, the first African Bishop.We are awaiting confirmationthat the works on the windows at the Altar and Lady Chapel were made by either Edward Burne-Jones or William Morris, because these two gentlemen were world-class designers and manufacturers of stained glass who were commissioned to do stained glass windows in Cathedrals all around the world in the late 19th/early 20th century. If this proves to be the case, then it means that our stained glass windows have a value beyond our imagination.The glass used on the transept windows was hand-blown and made by a company founded in 1895 called Hartley Woods in Sunderland, UK.

The total area of stained glass in the Cathedral is about 1,000 ft² with over 2,500individual pieces of glass in the designs. The stained glass of the Cathedral is highly sought after by collectors of religious antiquities and is extremely rare. In the last 82 years no major work has been carried-out on these windows.