The organ was built for the former Parish Church by William Hill and Son of Islington, at a cost of £1600. Hills had recently built several large organs including those at Peterborough, Lichfield and Chester Cathedrals. It was a large three manual organ with 40 speaking stops, tightly packed into what is now the North Ambulatory. It was dedicated at Evensong on Wednesday 10 February 1904.

In the 1950’s and ‘60’s the Cathedral East end was enlarged and the organ rebuilt by the successors of the original firm – now called Hill, Norman and Beard. It was raised some 20 feet above the Ambulatory, from where it speaks into the new and resonant Chancel. The instrument was enlarged and a new Nave Organ provided to produce adequate tonal projection down the Nave. A new four manual console was positioned in the loft opposite the main organ.The Nave Organ was playable from either the Great or Solo Manuals and Pedals.

In 1977, the main organ was dismantled for cleaning by J W Walker and Son. An opportunity was taken to remedy some of the defects of the 1961 scheme that had become apparent over the intervening 16 years. The projection of tone from the main organ down the Nave was still unsatisfactory. The Great Organ was therefore moved to the front of the chamber and the Positif organ relocated in a new case of its own on a lower level. The Swell organ was provided with additional shutters on the South side of the box. These open vertically and aid in the projection of sound into the nave.

All the mixtures on the organ were redesigned to provide higher harmonics and most of the pipework was re-voiced to give a brighter tone.The Solo Trumpet was moved to the centre of the organ, just above the Positif case. The result of the improvements was that the Cathedral gained an instrument of great versatility, able to produce the right sounds for music of many different styles and periods. Above all the tone is tremendously exciting and full of character.

In 1987, during the Cathedral's extensive re-ordering, the Nave Organ was dismantled. The Purcell Trumpet (En-Chamade) was stored and eventually incorporated into the main case. The Nave section was replaced by the Bradford Computer Organ, built in Bradford by Ahlborn UK and designed by Bradford University. The stop list is similar to that of the original Nave Organ, but it is not a copy of the sound of the pipes. The sound is encoded as data in a computer memory which contains information as to the volume of the various harmonics in the sound, starting transients and pitch information.

These are controlled by two microprocessors and a third microprocessor scans the keyboards waiting for a key or stop knob to be operated. This Section was installed in 1990. The microprocessors are capable of performing 11 million multiplications and divisions per second and jointly the threemicroprocessors execute 5 million instructions per second.The full organ sound is overwhelming and an Organ recital in the Cathedral is an event of considerable interest and importance.

Click here for some images of the organ