Christ's Church Cathedral, the cathedral church of the Anglican Diocese of Niagara, is located at 252 James Street North, in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Built in 1835 (but see further below), it predates the existing Anglican cathedrals of Toronto, Kingston, London, Halifax, Fredericton and St. John's, and as such is the oldest extant Anglican cathedral in anglophone Canada and the second oldest in all of Canada. Only Holy Trinity Cathedral in Québec City predates it.Construction historyThe building has an unusual construction history. Originally a stuccoed wooden Palladian-Baroque structure designed by Robert Charles Wetherall, it was incrementally transformed into stone Decorated Gothic, initially to an 1848 design by William Thomas, with Thomas’s chancel and the first two bays of his nave being added to Wetherall's existing wooden church, the resulting hybrid being dubbed “the humpback church.” The stone gothic nave was completed to a further design by Henry Langley (the architect of some 70 Ontario churches, including Metropolitan United Church in Toronto and the bell tower and spire of the Roman Catholic St. Michael's Cathedral, Toronto) in 1876, the original wooden portion having been demolished in 1872 to clear room for it and, inter alia, the chancel extended in 1924–25. Meanwhile, Thomas, in a state of indignation over the perverse use to which the Anglicans had put his design, took it to the Presbyterians, who built the still-standing St Paul’s Church to Thomas’s plan for Christ’s Church.
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