The year 1770 may seem an arbitrary date to take as a starting point for this list of architects, sculptors, designers and craftsmen whose work is still to be seen in Chester Cathedral. It might be thought that 1541 would be the more natural date to begin the list, the year in which the former Benedictine Abbey of St Werburgh, dissolved in 1540, became the cathedral of the new diocese of Chester. But much of the work in the cathedral between 1541 and the early nineteenth century disappeared in the restorations of R. C. Hussey (q.v.) and Sir George Gilbert Scott (q.v.). Apart from monuments, the surviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work in the cathedral and its precincts belongs chiefly to the time of John Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester 1619–44, and to the years round 1760. In neither case is evidence in existence as to who designed or executed the work, but it is important in the architectural history of the cathedral and the precincts and therefore listed here in the foreword.
