At evensong on 20 September 1966, sharp-eyed worshippers at Chichester Cathedral noticed that one of the canons was wearing dark glasses. Charitable observers might have attributed this to conjunctivitis, had it not been for a glaringly obvious explanation. Above the High Altar, between the medieval choir stalls where the canons sat, a vibrant 26-foot tapestry by John Piper had just been installed, and this was its service of consecration.

Like the bespectacled protestor, many members of the congregation were shocked at this intrusion of modernity into a medieval building. It was not as if anyone could miss it: even from the far end of the nave its nine woven panels of dazzling yellows, reds, purples, blues and greens, with their abstracted symbols of the four Evangelists and the four Elements framing a central Tau cross, shimmering sun and flaming triangle, appeared to set the sanctuary on fire. One outraged worshipper told the dean he had abstained from Communion as he “felt it a mockery among these flamboyant surrounds”.

Flamboyance and Protestantism are not natural bedfellows, but flamboyance was precisely the effect Dean Walter Hussey intended when he commissioned Piper’s reredos to lift a “rather gloomy and not at all distinguished” part of the church.