Cathedral Deanery

We see here Christ Church Cathedral, Ottawa, as photographed from the southwest by William James Topley in 1899. So inferior was the design reputation of Anglican churches in Ottawa in the Confederation generation that the oldest parish in the city commissioned King Arnoldi in 1872 to design this much larger, robust High Victorian Gothic Revival church to replace the Regency Gothic structure originally put up 40 years earlier.

The embarrassment of Christ Church parishioners with their small outmoded house of worship was evident in their instructions to Arnoldi to design a structure “harmonizing with the improvements taking place in the architecture of the city”—an obvious allusion to the high Victorian Gothic Revival design of the parliament buildings.

It was no secret that Bishop Lewis from 1871 sought to create a new diocese based at Ottawa out of the eastern and northern half of the Diocese of Ontario. What Christ Church parishioners were about in building a large new church was to ensure their church would be made a cathedral. The city’s oldest parish was determined not to allow that honour to go either to Saint Alban’s in Sandy Hill or to encourage through its own inaction Lewis’s original plan of building a national cathedral at the corner of Sussex and George Streets in Lower Town.  

The new enlarged Christ Church featured a soaring tower and spire, with the eaves on the tower roof imitating fourteenth century English Gothic architecture so faithfully as to reproduce the three-petal ballflowers in the cornice as an allusion to the Trinity.

The ballflowers were matched inside by the flowers and ferns carved into the capitals of the slender marble columns holding up the stone clerestory walls we see here.  Those columns in themselves were an engineering marvel copied from those in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill, with the emphasis on the capitals making punning allusion to the ambition of parishioners to make Christ Church into a cathedral worthy of the capital. The stone clerestory walls contrasted with comparable walls constructed less durably of metal and tile on Notre Dame Basilica, Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic and Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian churches.  

The rock-faced stone, the large buttresses, the stone finials, iron crosses atop gables, and the use of step-gables gave Christ Church a definite presence in the late Victorian capital, helping to ensure it became a cathedral when the Diocese of Ottawa was created in 1896.

Lauder Hall had not yet been envisioned. When Lauder Hall was put up in 1902, it served both as a Sunday School for the cathedral, as well as for hosting meetings of the annual synod.  The steps shown in the foreground led up into the original sacristy of the 1872 church, with a comparable size space across the width of the chancel serving as a choir vestry.  

The only failure in realizing Arnoldi’s plan was to build the chancel one quarter the size he proposed—a failure leading to a much larger chancel needing to be constructed in 1932.    

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