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St Martins in the Bull Ring

From the official website St Martin in the Bull Ring.. click here..
This is one of the most ancient and contemporary buildings in Birmingham. Most of this Grade II listed church is from the nineteenth century. It was built in 1873 and is an example of gothic Victorian architecture, designed by Alfred Chatwin, from Birmingham, who also worked on the Houses of Parliament. But St Martin’s is much older than that. There has been a church on this site since 1290 and there may well have been a simple place of worship here even in Saxon times.

 

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Who Was St Martin?
Continued from the official website St Martin in the Bull Ring.. click here..
St Martin was a soldier. He was born in Hungary in 316 and never wanted to join the army but was obliged to by law. At the age of 18, he was posted to Amiens in France. One bitterly cold winter’s night he was riding through the city when he saw a half-naked beggar huddled against a wall. Martin was so moved by the sight that he cut his cloak with his sword and gave one half to the beggar. That night he had a dream in which Christ appeared to him as the beggar and thanked Martin for clothing him. In response, the young soldier got baptised. Later he was to leave the army to become a soldier of Christ, eventually becoming Bishop of Tours in France. St Martin is remembered today for his service to the poor.

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The East Window – The window was made after the Second World War. St Martin’s church was bombed in 1941, shattering the original Victorian stained glass. The theme of the window is healing. The window itself is a kind of healing – a restoration – and depicts eight of Christ’s miracles.

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The South Transept has a Burne-Jones window, made by William Morris in 1875. This window was taken down for safe keeping the day before a World War II bomb dropped beside the church on 10 April 1941, destroying all remaining windows.

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From website..
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet ARA (28 August 1833 – 17 June 1898) was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company. Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in Britain; his stained glass works include the windows of St. Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Martin’s Church in Brampton, Cumbria (the church designed by Philip Webb), St Michael’s Church, Brighton, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, Christ Church, Oxford and in St. Anne’s Church, Brown Edge, Staffordshire Moorlands. Burne-Jones’s early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic “voice”. In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement

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