People Who Pray in Glass Churches… (10/29/25)

It has been quite the rainy Wednesday here, but with a feels-like temp in the high 40s F and little wind, it still made for an okay day for a walk. One of the sites in Jersey that they stop at on the bus tour that we hadn’t seen yet was the Glass Church. It is free to visit, so after a breakfast at the local pub (Wednesday is discount day, so we thought we’d treat ourselves.), we headed out to see the church.

I didn’t take many photos on the walk as one, it was raining, and two, we had done most of the same walk on the day that we went to the Artisan Market in St Brelade. But, a couple of things caught my eye. The first one was a park near a church that we had seen on our bus ride yesterday.

Now for the Glass Church, which is not made of glass but does have a lot of glass features. It is St Matthew’s Church was built as a modest chapel in the 1840s at the foot of Mount Felard to keep parishioners from having to walk up the steep hill to the parish church. In 1934, Lady Trent (widow of Jesse Boot of the Boot Pharmacy chain) commissioned Rene Lalique to decorate the renovated church with glass features, including an illuminated cross, a glass font, and glass screens adorned with the Jersey lily motif. The Glass Church is the only surviving Lalique commission of its kind, making it a unique and globally significant work of art.

Rene Lalique (1860-1945) was a French jeweler, medalist, and glass designer known for his creations of glass art, perfume bottles (notably in collaboration with Francois Coty), vases, jewelry, chandeliers, clocks, and automobile hood ornaments.

Louise Ramsay was born and educated in England but now lives and works in Jersey.

We haven’t included photos of the cats recently. They are both sweet cats with perhaps the strongest interest in food of any cats we have cared for. Although you can see, they can also be sweet snugglers as well.