A new extension to Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey wants to build an extension. It will be between the 13th-century nave and the road. This sounds alarming, for it will block the view from the direction of Parliament Square of the abbey’s windows and buttresses.
But it was not long ago – until 1740 in fact – that a two-storey house stood on the site, now called the North Green. (This is where 19,240 poppies were planted in 2016 on the anniversary of the Somme.) The house looked rather pleasant to my eyes, with nine bays of Georgian windows.
A disadvantage of living in the house, as generations of prebendaries had, was that bits of the abbey fell off unpredictably, crashing through the roof. At a dinner party there in 1689, Christopher Wren (soon to be Surveyor of the Fabric) told Prebendary Robert South that the abbey was in “so crazy a condition that it was hard to tell which part to go about repairing first”.
When repairs began, Wren found that “the houses on the North side are so close that there is no room left for the raising of scaffolds and ladders.”
The last tenant of the house was the extraordinary Edward Willes, a codebreaker working for the Government. He exposed correspondence with Jacobites by Bishop Francis Atterbury of Rochester, who was tried and exiled. As a reward, Willes was given a plurality of ecclesiastical livings and ended up as Bishop of Bath and Wells.
In 1740, Willes’s house by the abbey was pulled down, along with its neighbours nearer the west door. Plenty of cathedrals in England and abroad had domestic houses encroaching upon them. (A funny little grocer’s shop, for example, nestles against Bilbao Cathedral.) But why was a rather grand house tucked between the abbey’s north transept and nave?
It was built on the medieval remains of two ranges of a sacristy forming an elbow, with one arm 83ft long and the other 66ft. They could be entered by a door now blocked from the north transept (near today’s tourist entrance to the abbey) and from the nave, by what is now called the Pilgrim’s Door. In the yard behind the two arms, a laundry with washing lines dealt with albs, amices, towels, purificators and suchlike sacred linen. After the Reformation and the abbey’s suppression, the sacristy was turned into a domestic house.
The new plan for a useful building on the same spot is explained by Oswin Treves in that admirable quarterly the Westminster Abbey Review. At present the ticketing desks, at which thousand of tourists pay considerable fees to look about the abbey, are dark, crowded and forbidding. Rope-stands to corral tourists are brought in by night and leave rusty stains on the floor. The pièce de résistance of clutter is a covered wagon-train of trolleys loaded with 2,000 stacking chairs. This swaddled caravan blocks the south choir aisle, putting it out of bounds for visitors.
In future, they’ll buy tickets in the new stonebuilt sacristy (or utility block), then potter round to enter the abbey by the great west door, experiencing the impressive view down the nave. I shouldn’t be surprised if lavatories came into it somehow, too.
If Ptolemy Dean, the architect who built the lift-tower to the abbey’s new triforium museum, designs the block, it might look all right. Some think that the blotches of Bath stone and Portland stone in the nave’s north wall make it look ghastly at present.
Will tourists learn to love the glorious new chairstore? They might like it more by a recondite name. The Greeks called a temple store house a thesaurus. The Abbey Thesaurus might do.