The main features were a shiny stainless steel spire and a modern glass structure in front of the Gothic brick cathedral on its Church Street frontage.

One of the Hunter's most prominent heritage architects, Barney Collins, a director of Newcastle firm EJE, was behind the plans.

Michael Parris reports cathedral latest: Heritage Council wants more changes

Mr Collins had also played a central role in restoring the cathedral after the 1989 earthquake, and knows the building intimately.

But immediate opposition to the strikingly modern additions did not fall away with time, and so the diocese withdrew its plans, returning at the start of this year with a moderated version that took much of the new space underground, and changed the spire's finish to a terracotta-tiled red.

Despite these changes, the Heritage Council of NSW wants more changes to the modified proposal, asking the diocese to split it into halves, meaning the spire and the buildings would each require separate approvals.

The heritage council's concerns - and the "significant community opposition" the council says has greeted the project - are easily enough understood.

But as the Newcastle Herald reported in 2015, the ground rules of heritage architecture in Australia are laid down in the Burra Charter, a planning instrument named after the South Australian town where the subsequently evolving document was drawn up in 1979.

The obvious answer might be to build the spire exactly as architect Horbury Hunt envisaged when he drew the cathedral plans in the 1860s, well before two decades of building started in the 1880s.

That, by all accounts, is what happened when work began in the mid-1970s on the all-important bell tower, finishing the same year the Burra Charter began.

Mr Collins says both versions of the spire are based on Hunt's original design, "modifying the construction, but not the form or the height".

The Burra Charter says changes should be "easily identifiable", and so the 2020 version, with its stainless steel structure and "contemporary terracotta cladding", accords with the charter, while fitting more easily with what a 19^th century spire would look like.

The big problem, of course, is that even though we've all become used to the cathedral's skyline silhouette, it's not the shape we were meant to see.

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