Beryl Dean’s Festal frontal for King’s Lynn Minster is a joyous and rhythmic assembly of symbolic motifs on an off-white silk background. The photographs showing details of the embroidery reveal crosses of silver, red, gold, brown and white, encrusted in beads of sequins, sometimes encircled by gold braid.

Mary Adshead’s dynamic mural, To the End of Time, takes up the entire east wall of the parish church of St Francis, Luton. At its apex is Christ’s bowed head, with the symbols of the four evangelists surrounding the cross, and, at the base, scenes of the modern world.

Intended to resemble the Hagia Sophia, with a monumental concrete dome, the neo-Byzantine St John the Baptist church was built in 1927. The interior is dominated by a magnificent mosaic scheme which covers the sanctuary apse, designed by the art critic and artist Eric Newton for Ludwig Oppenheimer Ltd., a mosaic firm set up by his grandfather. The scheme, which took a year to build, draws on Newton’s considerable knowledge of art history and his study of early Christian mosaics, although there are echoes too of more recent religious art, such as the prints of William Blake.

Elisabeth Frink’s bronze lectern for Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral was her first major commission. She was known at the time for her sculptures and drawings of birds – one made while she was a student was exhibited in 1952 and bought immediately by the Tate Gallery – and the lectern was to take the traditional form of an eagle.

Hans Feibusch, a Jewish artist who fled Germany in 1933, became the most prolific muralist in the history of the Church of England. Through his relationship with George Bell, the Bishop of Chicester, he created murals for many churches, often those built or restored after the war. His murals combine the palettes, techniques and forms of European Modernism – Expressionism and Cubism – with those of the early Italian Renaissance, while speaking to the spiritual concerns of the post-war church. Feibusch saw his work as essentially collaborative – not only with his assistant, Phyllis Bray, and the architect, but also with the worshipping congregation. ‘A work of art in church is there to help the worshipper, to lead their thoughts from the tumultuous outer world towards an inner spiritual one.’ (Hans Feibusch, ‘Mural Painting in Churches’, Studio, 1954)