Illuminating Stained Glass: creativity, conservation and craft at Barley Studio

Illuminating Stained Glass: creativity, conservation and craft at Barley Studio, Juliette MacDonald, Helen Whittaker and Keith Barley, Lund Humphries, 2025, 96 pages, 79 colour illustrations.

The conservation of historic stained glass has increasingly assumed a greater proportion of the work of British stained-glass studios over the last 30 years. With fewer commissions for traditional architectural stained glass, artists in the medium have increasingly channelled their skills into the repair of damaged windows and the protection of stained glass from deterioration. In the context of the limited funds to pay for this necessary work and few new commissions, Heritage Crafts recently added historic stained glass to the red list of endangered crafts.

Given these concerns, the colourful and arresting new stained glass made by Barley Studio in Illuminating Stained Glass is an impressive reminder that exciting new work in the medium continues to be made, and books on contemporary stained-glass practice are very rare. Barley Studios, one of several larger stained-glass studios in Britain, was founded in York by Keith Barley in 1973.

The book opens with his conservation of outstanding collections of medieval stained glass in the final decades of the last century. At Ashton-under- Lyne, Barley was a pioneer of environmental protective glazing in the 1970s, a technique that has become the foremost method for retaining important historic window glass in situ. Conservation at Fairford took place over two decades. His work there and at Stanford-on-Avon set the standards for well-documented, reversible intervention, effecting transformational restoration of medieval stained glass with the careful addition of sensitive and scholarly replacement faces where necessary.

New windows featured in the book include the west window of Southwell Minster, a collaboration with Patrick Reyntiens in 1996. Soon after, the artist Helen Whittaker joined the studio. From this point, at the end of chapter one, the book unexpectedly metamorphoses into one entirely based around her diverse creative work. This includes abstract geometric designs at Beverley Minster (2004) and Ely Cathedral (2010), and the inclusion of figurative elements in abstract compositions.

The expressionist depiction of St Ethelburga at her church in Bishopsgate, London (2002), contrasts sharply with the graphic pop-art style of a window celebrating women in the RAF at the Royal Air Force Club in Piccadilly (2018). Whittaker came closer still to pop art in the collaboration with David Hockney and the creation of his window for Westminster Abbey in the same year.

It is difficult to write an easy narrative for work so restlessly and innovatively diverse, as designs, imagery and techniques in each window were specifically chosen to respond to different kinds of buildings and clients. The short descriptions of Helen Whittaker’s varied commissions read rather like a catalogue and leave us with no clear focus, philosophy or revealing insights into the work of the studio – apart from the ever-present connections and conscious departures from traditional stained glass common to all artists working with stained glass.

The importance of collaboration is frequently cited, but apart from the names of the artists who provided the lettering for certain windows, we learn nothing of the glass painters, glaziers and technicians who must have been involved in the creation of the windows. The many large and mostly good illustrations nonetheless make a case for Barley Studios’ impressive ability to work in widely contrasting styles for different commissions.

This article originally appeared as ‘Silent collaboration’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 184, published in September 2025. It was written by Martin Crampin, an artist, designer and photographer who has published widely on stained glass, particularly in Wales, based at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation