Lambeth Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  Lambeth Palace sits on the south bank of the Thames, just 400 yards from the Palace of Westminster, close enough to see Parliament's towers from across the water. For over eight centuries, this cluster of medieval towers, Gothic halls, and walled gardens has been the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. How did a marshy river landing place become the headquarters of the Church of England? And what survives inside those walls that most visitors will never see?

• 2. A Marshy Beginning

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  The name Lambeth traces back to 1062, when the place was recorded as Lambehitha, meaning 'landing place for lambs.' The 'hithe' or 'hitha' part referred to a specific kind of river landing, and this stretch of the Thames was not yet part of historic London. The south bank along this reach developed slowly precisely because the land was low and waterlogged. It was known as Lambeth Marsh, stretching as far downriver as what is now Blackfriars Road.

  Archbishop Anselm had a house here a century before the diocese formally acquired the site around AD 1200. The choice of location was deliberate. The archbishops needed a foothold close to the royal court and the seat of government at Westminster, directly across the Thames. Archbishops came and went by water, as did John Wycliffe, the theologian who was brought here and tried for heresy in 1378.

  The palace grounds are bounded by Lambeth Palace Road to the west and Lambeth Road to the south. Notably, the site is excluded from the parish of North Lambeth, which covers all the surrounding land. The former parish church right outside the gatehouse, St Mary-at-Lambeth, eventually became the Garden Museum, and the orchard that once belonged to the palace grounds became Archbishop's Park, a public park now managed by the local authority.

• 3. Towers, Halls, and Stone

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  Morton's Tower, the massive five-storey brick gatehouse that forms the main entry to the palace today, was built by Cardinal John Morton and completed in 1495. It originally housed eight lodgings for the Archbishop's household. Behind it, the complex is built around a cloister, an unusual feature whose origins may trace to Archbishop Hubert Walter's early intention to found a Premonstratensian abbey on the site, before he settled on a palace instead.

  The oldest surviving structure is the 13th-century chapel, built in the Early English Gothic style and dating from around 1230. World War Two bombing left only its walls standing. The chapel was restored in 1954-55 on a limited budget, and again between 1986 and 1988. During that second restoration, paintings by Leonard Rosoman were added to the reconstructed vault, and an elaborate screen made in 1633 by master carpenter Adam Brown, in a classical manner, was taken out of storage and re-erected across the west end.

  The Water or Lollards' Tower, built of Kentish Ragstone with ashlar quoins, was added at the north-west corner in 1434-35. At the top of its stair was the Archbishop's prison, a room that also appears at Winchester Palace in Southwark. Archbishop Cranmer added a brick tower north-east of the chapel in the 16th century to house his study. One 14th-century room of the original apartments, now called the Guard Chamber, still stands, heavily restored, with its original elaborate roof.

• 4. Upheaval and Reconstruction

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  In the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the palace was attacked. Three centuries later, in May 1640, it was attacked again during a period of popular discontent with the Arminianist theology of Archbishop William Laud, when rioters arrived hoping to capture him. The Parliamentarians went further in the 1640s, ransacking and partially demolishing the palace during the English Civil War. The most significant loss was the medieval great hall, which was demolished and its materials sold off.

  After the Restoration, Archbishop William Juxon completely rebuilt the great hall, with a dated inscription of 1663. He chose a late Gothic hammerbeam roof, a deliberate and loaded choice. The hammerbeam style evoked High-Church Anglican continuity with the old faith, particularly pointed given that Charles II's brother was an avowed Catholic. The choice served as a visual statement that the Interregnum was over. The diarist Samuel Pepys visited and described it as 'a new old-fashioned hall,' noting that it combined classical details alongside its Gothic ones.

  Architectural historians still debate whether Juxon's hall represents 'Gothic survival' or an early work of the Gothic Revival, the same question that hangs over similar Gothic details on university buildings of the same period. Cardinal Pole had died in the palace in 1558 and lay in state there for 40 days. The palace Blore extended in 1829-1834 incorporated much of what Juxon rebuilt.

• 5. Blore's Neo-Gothic Wing

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  Edward Blore, who was born in 1787 and died in 1879, carried out major work on the palace between 1829 and 1834, adding extensive new buildings in neo-Gothic style that front a spacious quadrangle. Blore's large extensions gave the archbishop more room to live and work. His additions meant that the original medieval buildings could be repurposed as the archdiocese's library, record office, and secretariat.

  Blore later rebuilt much of Buckingham Palace. His touch at Lambeth is visible in the East wing additions. The palace was damaged again in the Blitz of 1941, continuing a pattern of trauma and repair that stretches from the Peasants' Revolt through two world wars. Among the portraits of the archbishops that hang in the palace are works by Hans Holbein, Anthony van Dyck, William Hogarth, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The cluster of buildings as a whole is listed Grade I, the highest category, for its architecture.

• 6. The Oldest Garden in London

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  Lambeth Palace garden is the oldest continually cultivated garden in London. Most of what visitors can see today dates from the 19th and 20th centuries, but the fig tree in the palace courtyard may descend from a slip taken from trees that have been here for centuries. A description from 1786 recorded three ancient fig trees on the site, two of them nailed against a wall and still bearing fruit in 1826. Those trees were traditionally reported to have been planted by Cardinal Pole, whose tomb was in the palace, and they were identified as White Marseille figs. By 1882, their place had been taken by massive offshoots.

  The palace gardens are listed Grade II, a designation they received in October 1987.

• 7. Lambeth Palace Library

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  Archbishop Richard Bancroft founded Lambeth Palace Library in 1610. It describes itself as 'the largest religious collection outside the Vatican.' For most of its history it was stored in various rooms of the palace itself, but in 2021 a new purpose-built reading room, repository, and conservation centre designed by Wright and Wright opened, with a dedicated public entrance on Lambeth Palace Road.

  The library's holdings span manuscripts dating back to the 9th century, archives of the archbishops going back to the 12th century, and more than 120,000 printed books. When Sion College closed in 1996, the library acquired its important collections of manuscripts, pamphlets, and pre-1850 printed books. In 2021, the library also absorbed the archival collections of Church of England institutions formerly held at the Church of England Record Centre, which had opened in Bermondsey in 1989.

  Among the highlights of the collection are the Mac Durnan Gospels from the late 9th or early 10th centuries, the Lambeth Apocalypse and the Romanesque Lambeth Bible, both from the 12th century, a rare copy of the Gutenberg Bible from the 1450s, and the Book of Hours of King Richard III. Archives in the collection include those of the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, which ran from 1711 to 1759, and the Incorporated Church Building Society, whose records stretch from 1818 to 1982.

• 8. Hidden Crypts and Living Community

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  St Mary-at-Lambeth, the former parish church immediately outside Morton's Tower, has a tower dating from 1377, repaired in 1834. The body of the church was rebuilt in 1851 to designs by Philip Hardwick. The church was deconsecrated in 1972 when its parish was absorbed into the surrounding parish of North Lambeth. The Garden Museum opened in the building in 1977, taking advantage of its connection to John Tradescant the elder and his son of the same name, both notable gardeners and plantsmen whose tombs were preserved here, along with the tomb of Admiral William Bligh.

  During renovation works in 2016, workers discovered a previously unknown crypt containing 30 coffins. Among them were the remains of five archbishops of Canterbury: Richard Bancroft, Thomas Tenison, Matthew Hutton, Frederick Cornwallis, and John Moore, as well as John Bettesworth, Dean of the Arches.

  Today, Lambeth Palace is home to the Community of Saint Anselm, an Anglican religious order under the patronage of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop himself is regarded as first among equals in the Anglican Communion and sits ex officio as a member of the House of Lords, which meets less than half a mile away across the Thames, in the same Parliament that the palace has neighboured since around the year 1200.