Aldershot Cathedral

The church was designed in 1892 in the Early English Gothic Revival style by Ingers Bell and Aston Webb. Because the building was originally intended as the principal church for the Anglican chaplaincies of the British Army, the foundation stone was laid by Queen Victoria on 27 June 1892. The trowel and mallet she used in the ceremony are exhibited in the west porch.

St Georges was consecrated on 7 October 1893 by Revd Anthony Thorold, the Bishop of Winchester in the presence of Queen Victoria and other members of the Royal Family. Roman Catholics, in the meantime, were worshipping in the Church of St Michael & St Sebastian which had been erected in 1855 opposite the Louise Margaret Hospital. By the early 1970s St Georges was not required by the Anglican chaplaincies because the Church of England had two underused churches in the area while the number of Catholic soldiers was increasing; so, in 1973 it became the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Forces instead and was dedicated to St Michael & St George.

The yellow brick interior has broad aisles and a wide nave of five bays of Early English style arches and a debased Romanesque clerestory of two windows above each arch. On the south aisle are a series of red marble tablets set in a carved Portland stone frieze commemorating members of the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) who died on active service 1882-1920. The cathedral has many fine stained glass windows of saints and Biblical scenes by Heaton, Butler and Bayne.

One window in the south wall of the Royal Army Service Corps Memorial Chapel is dedicated to the memory of Julia Horatia Ewing, the wife of Colonel Alexander Ewing who wrote the hymn Jerusalem the Golden. Mrs Ewing was an author who chronicled and illustrated the everyday life of the ordinary soldier in Aldershot. The reason some of the stained glass windows do not fill their niches is because these were moved to the cathedral following the closure of the Church of St Michael & St Sebastian in 1973.