Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral

Burges was thirty-five and largely unbuilt when the Church of Ireland's competition came his way. He disregarded the £15,000 budget outright, submitting a design he reckoned would cost twice as much, and won anyway in February 1863; his diary records the reaction — 'Got Cork!' The foundation stone was laid in January 1865, the unfinished cathedral was consecrated in 1870 and the spires topped out in 1879, by which point the bill had passed £100,000. The style is thirteenth-century French, used as a working grammar rather than a quotation: deeply recessed portals, a wheel window over the west door, and a bristle of gables, pinnacles and thirty-two gargoyles. What makes it exceptional is that Burges designed the whole interior too — sculpture, mosaic, glass, metalwork, furniture — some twelve hundred sculptures in all, modelled by Thomas Nicholls and carved on site. The plan is only 180 feet long, and the three spires exist largely to make a parish-sized church read as a cathedral.