Lambeth Palace Library & Archive

Luke Hughes words
Member of The Architecture Club

Rowena Ellims photos

Archbishop Welby may be forgiven if, given recent Covid-era comments, he may have felt a little under siege. At least the defences of the new Lambeth Palace Library, designed by Wright and Wright (and the destination of the Architecture Club tour on 10 September 2021), can certainly withstand any further onslaughts: of public opinion, threats of dis-establishment, global warming, fire or even another Noah’s Flood.

The main purpose of the library, however, was not to augment the palace (the official residence of Archbishops since 1190) but to house and preserve its collection - the most important religious archive in the UK and the largest (after the Vatican) in Europe. The initial collection was bequeathed to the nation by Archbishop Richard Bancroft in 1610 when Calvinist ardour and anti-Catholic sentiment were at fever pitch (think Gunpowder Plot in 1605). The collection grew to fill every nook and damp corner not only of Lambeth Palace but of dozens of scattered storerooms all over London. Now, the new ramparts confidently proclaim their purpose - providing high-security storage with every kind of sensible, practical means of storing, accessing, referencing and retrieving. One detects the mind of a formidable client champion who really understood what was required to preserve the collection for immortality. ‘It makes a dramatic difference to what we had before’, the archivist and librarian Giles Mandelbrote is quoted as saying. ‘Precious items from the collection had to be wrapped in plastic bags and carried across the courtyard through the rain to the reading room’.

The building now houses 4,600 manuscripts and more than 200,000 printed materials in conditions that can, hopefully, withstand fire, brimstone and a once-in-a-thousand-year flood. It can also accommodate a 20% increase in its holdings and is made up of a nine-storey tower, overlooking St Thomas’s Hospital, with extensions built following the perimeter wall alongside the busy road, and is sited to preserve most of the extensive palace grounds. It is set into a sylvan landscape designed by Dan Pearson, planted around a new ecology pond. On this September evening, just as Sandy Wright was showing us around, a rainbow appeared over the pond from tree to tree, a magic moment during a very special and personal tour.

From the street entrance under the tower, there are ground and first floors for visitors and staff (following an elongated plan that follows the boundary wall), a double height reading room for up to twenty-four visitors, who can now enjoy views on to trees, with borrowed and reflected natural light - all in the best tradition of Sir John Soane albeit with more workmanlike, muscular joinery details than might be found in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. These floors also include the meeting rooms, offices and a sumptuously equipped conservation studio. The next six floors are the real guts of the building, dedicated to housing the archives in closed-access rolling stacks in secure, window-less conditions, worthy of a Bond movie. These long-term defences against fire, flood and brimstone and required the construction of a concrete bunker within a concrete bunker, which must, in structural terms, be on a par with the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia.

The eighth and ninth floors include a comfortable 70-seat seminar room and an open colonnade with spectacular views over the Palace of Westminster, the Abbey, Whitehall and the Thames.

One of the many triumphs is the quality of the brick skin in Swanage hand-made red bricks, with occasional dark grey kiln-burnt headers. The articulation, texture, colour and spacing are a joy and the varied effects respond admirably to the Lambeth Palace’s Tudor gatehouse, to the remnants of the 19^th century buildings of St Thomas’s Hospital (by Henry Currey in 1860s) and even, a few hundred yards upstream, to Giles Gilbert Scott’s Battersea Power Station.

From the Belvedere, this group was now able to assemble and admire not only these three buildings but many more old favourites on London’s skyline, and raise our glasses both to a riveting evening and the impressive accomplishment of the architectural team.