Juliette MacDonald, Helen Whittaker and Keith Barley, Illuminating Stained Glass: Creativity, Conservation and Craft at Barley Studio, Lund Humphries, 2025, 96 pp, 79 colour illustrations. ISBN 9781848226722. £25.
Reviewed by Dr Joseph Spooner
Founded by Keith Barley in 1973, Barley Studio celebrated 50 years of success in the conservation and creation of stained glass in 2023. The studio has achieved international renown, and the list of Keith Barley’s achievements is impressive; among other things, he is a former Master of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers, an ICON-accredited conservator, conservation adviser to the Corpus Vitrearum (Great Britain), Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters (FMGP), and Master Glazier for Ely Cathedral. Artist Helen Whittaker, who joined the studio in 1998, is now a fellow director with Keith Barley. The list of Helen’s accolades is also long – among them Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters, Renter Warden of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers, and the Hancock Medal. Both Keith and Helen are recipients of the MBE, Keith in 2015 for ‘for services to cultural restoration and conservation’ and Helen in 2025 for ‘for services to the creation and conservation of stained and architectural glass art’. The studio runs with the support of expert glaziers, fabricators, and administrators.
After a warm foreword from Loyd Grossman, there is a short introduction. This notes that stained glass was added to the Heritage Craft Association’s Red List of endangered crafts in 2023 and mentions very briefly John Piper’s thinking on the ‘balance between tradition and change’ evidenced in stained-glass design throughout the centuries. There follows a chapter on ‘Conservation and Restoration’ that opens with an overview of Keith Barley’s experience and notes his desire to make ‘neglected works of art’ more legible. Four sites are chosen as illustrations: St Nicholas, Warndon (Figs. 1 & 2), and Southwell Minster are covered very briefly, and St Nicholas, Stanford on Avon, and St Mary, Fairford in more detail. These sites are significant examples of rearrangements and restorations carried out in consultation with scholars and in collaboration with artists. For such a broad and important subject, this chapter is short. The examples are salient, but more detailed coverage would have been appreciated, both of the sites themselves and of the evolving discussions that must have informed the restoration processes. For example, St Nicholas, Warndon, an early project carried out in collaboration with Peter Newton of the University of York, is described simply as: ‘A forlorn figure of St Peter set against diamond quarries was rearranged to a comprehensible pose and set within a canopy niche typical of the fourteenth century.’ The before and after poses are indeed strikingly different, but how the change of pose, and indeed introduction of a canopy, came about remains a mystery. While restoration work at Fairford spanned the change of century, it is surprising that little mention of the Studio’s more recent work, including their extraordinary conservation of the world’s largest ensemble of sixteenth-century Flemish glass, in Lichfield Cathedral. A wider selection of projects is featured on the Barley Studio website.
The following four chapters focus on the work of Barley Studio’s Creative Director Helen Whittaker, approaching it from different angles. Chapter 2, ‘Creativity and Craft’, outlines some of Whittaker’s background and offers some of her own reflections on the creation of stained glass, as well as an explanation for the diversity of approach in her work: ‘every commission brings its own possibilities and demands its own individual approach, in design style and execution.’ There are examples here of stained glass executed in traditional style (Worksop Priory); conceived alongside Whittaker’s own sculpture and liturgical furnishings (Beverley Minster); and interacting with the outside world (Brancepeth, Fig. 2). The brevity of the chapter does not allow for any reflection on stained glass as a craft or an art.
Chapter 3, ‘Concept to Creation’, is the longest. It covers the process of execution from idea to completed artefact, but there is also emphasis on Whittaker’s aims in general. Here may be found nods to the demands of architectural, historical, and topographical contexts: windows for a new passageway at Ely Cathedral leading from the body of the church to the Lady Chapel; St Ethelburga’s in London (Fig. 3); and the series of windows of the four seasons in St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are also further examples of the interaction between Whittaker’s glass and her sculpture (St Mary’s Church, Community and Conference Centre, Sheffield). Several e(xamples of Whittaker’s work are illustrated, to a variety of scales, with some useful indications of the decisions taken in achieving the final design.
Chapter 4, ‘Change and Continuity’, harks back to Piper’s ‘balance of tradition and change’. There are some particularly interesting projects here, highlighting Barley Studio’s ‘belief in combining old and new approaches’. They range from a new window for a disused priory, which references the building’s past and present, to the Celebrating Women in the RAF window at the Royal Air Force Club in London, which features glass ‘lenses’ focused on historical photographs of women serving in the RAF (Fig. 4). There is coverage of Whittaker’s collaboration in the production of David Hockney’s window in Westminster Abbey celebrating the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. This project, in which Whittaker’s role was very different from that in her other projects featured in the book, could have been discussed in more detail: it would have been interesting to know Hockney’s views on the different types of glass he explored at Barley Studio; and the window is also in one of the country’s most important buildings, yet there is no mention of where it is sited or how it sits in its context.
Chapter 5, ‘Contemporary Contexts’, focuses on Whittaker’s work for twentieth- and twenty-first-century buildings, both sacred and secular. Whittaker’s artistic language is described here as ‘broad-ranging’, and that is abundantly evident in the work illustrated. I was struck by the windows for the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in York – which feature the attached sculptural element of a needle and thread, effectively sewn into the leadwork of the window – and a private commission called Falling Water consisting only of clear and opalescent glasses of various textures (Fig. 5), which elegantly echoes the simplified designs that feature such glasses from the earlier twentieth century. As with the other chapters, illustrations predominate, and the unifying impression is one of diversity. The book closes with an eclectic bibliography and a useful index.
The restoration projects and creative work of a major international studio such as Barley Studio could not be covered exhaustively or in depth in a volume of this size. The Studio’s website has information on additional projects, as well as more detailed information on some of the projects featured here. The book does celebrate the work of Barley Studio, though not explicitly its fiftieth anniversary, and the focus is very much on Whittaker’s work, coinciding (intentionally or otherwise) with the recent conferral of her MBE. The illustrations are all of excellent quality, and the layout is attractive. The book should pique the interest of those who are new to stained glass, but its most valuable aspect are perhaps the records of conversations with Barley and Whittaker. For those already familiar with the medium, these conversations will soon throw up further questions – such as the theology informing the designs – but it is useful to have these thoughts as a starting point, as such records are easily lost or overlooked.