After 20 years and $48 million of restoration, Britain’s greatest church is emerging from its cocoon of scaffolding with a dazzling new appearance.
No longer black with the soot of centuries, historic Westminster Abbey now presents a gleaming exterior to the millions of visitors it gets each year.
The familiar west facade, surmounted by two towers, glows white in the afternoon sun. Its multicolored clock gleams under a coat of fresh paint. A new stone ball and cross top the peaked roof between the two towers and six new statues grace the niches around the main portal.
The sides, too, are clean, but here the effect is less homogenous. The most seriously eroded blocks of soft yellow stone have been replaced by the harder, whiter Portland variety, so the exterior of the 511-foot-long nave has an odd, patchwork look, as if its stone had fallen prey to checkerboard jaundice.
Now only a small portion of the exterior’s west facade and the intricate Henry VII chapel, a 16th Century Tudor addition, remain to be restored. Those jobs should be completed by 1995, putting an end to the most thorough cleaning and restoration the 900-year-old structure has undergone. Renovation of the interior of this great Gothic church was completed before work on the exterior began in 1973.
“That should hold it for another 100 years or so,” said Donald Buttress, the bearded, plain-spoken architect in charge of the project. Buttress is Westminster’s 17th Surveyor of the Fabric, as his position is titled; the first was Christopher Wren.
Under great chandeliers-each made of 500 pieces of hand-blown Waterford crystal-visitors walk up the same central aisle where so much history has been made. Kings and queens strode there to be crowned, princes and princesses to be married. And in almost every aisle and corner, visitors stand in silence over the graves of famous people.
Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Noel Coward, Sybil Thorndike, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, David Lloyd George, Clement Attlee. These are just some of 3,300 people buried here.
Every English sovereign since 1066 has been crowned in Westminster Abbey save two, Edward V and Edward VIII. Traditionally, the British monarch, who is head of the Church of England, is crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Westminster Abbey is not a cathedral and does not fall under the purview of the archbishop, who conducts ceremonies here only by royal invitation. It is a “royal peculiar,” responsible directly to the monarch.
Wedding bells
Marriages also take place here, but fewer than one might think. Only 200 have been held in the abbey’s 900-year history, and only 14 of those were royal marriages. The last was that of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986. (Prince Charles and Diana Spencer were married in St. Paul’s Cathedral.)
Buried here in elaborate tombs are several of England’s best-known monarchs, including Henry VII, Edward VI, James VI, Queen Elizabeth I and her half-sister Mary I. The tomb of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth I had executed, lies nearby. Oliver Cromwell, who had Charles I executed, was buried in the abbey for 2 1/2 years. When Charles II gained the throne, however, he ordered Cromwell’s body dug up, dragged behind a horse and beheaded.
George II was the last king to be buried in Westminster, in 1760. All royals since have been buried at Windsor.
A sight that surprises many visitors is the coronation chair, in the chapel of Edward the Confessor. The seat of the British Empire is a plain, rather battered oak chair.
Beneath it sits the Stone of Scone, on which the Scottish kings were once crowned. Placed under the chair by Edward I in 1296, it was stolen in 1950 by Scottish nationalists but recovered some weeks later.
Also in this part of the abbey are the shrine of Edward the Confessor, the king who became a saint, and the tomb of Henry III.
Directly behind is the Henry VII chapel, known for its magnificent vaulted ceiling and the colorful banners hanging over the carved oaken stalls of the Knights of Bath. Tombs of the Tudor monarchs are in this chapel.
The light that streams through the stained glass of the Henry VII chapel will become much brighter when Buttress’ men clean the gunk that has accumulated on the windows. But this, along with the work of cleaning the blackened stone, will be a painstaking and expensive job. The bill for cleaning the chapel: $7.6 million.
Acid atmosphere
Over time, London’s notorious acid rain and fog wreaked havoc on the stone of the abbey, particularly in the 150 years since the industrial revolution.
One problem is that several kinds of stone have been used for the abbey. Wren, who conducted the first restoration of the abbey in the late 17th Century, refaced it in Burford stone. His successors used the softer Caen and Chilmark stone, which did not hold up well in the polluted atmosphere. Where necessary, Buttress has replaced damaged soft stone with the harder white Portland stone, the same material used for St. Paul’s Cathedral.
But much more is involved in restoration than simply cleaning or replacing walls. Often, Buttress has had new figures carved and has shorn up eroded structural elements.
Two of the Henry VII chapel’s turrets will be completely replaced, for example, and parts of the pinnacles, buttresses, parapet and frieze also will be rebuilt. On some of the stone, the deposits of pollution are 2 to 3 inches thick, Buttress noted.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Buttress is making few changes in the architecture. He has added a globe and cross over the central portal, as well as several statues. But those changes are minor compared to earlier renovations. Wren, for instance, designed the 225-foot towers, the tallest in Britain and certainly a major addition, in the early 18th Century, 500 years after Henry III had the apse, transepts (the arms of a church perpendicular to the main nave) and choir of the present abbey constructed. But it was a later surveyor, Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had the towers built-after incorporating a few of his own ideas.
Buttress sees nothing wrong with making additions. “If we just patch up, the work would never appear as the designer intended. The main thing is to maintain integrity,” he said. But getting permission to make changes is more difficult these days, and money for them also is hard to come by.
Though the abbey’s exterior profile is world famous, most visitor attention today is directed inside to the Poet’s Corner, where some of England’s most famous authors are memorialized. Some are actually buried here; for others, there’s a plaque or statue.
William Shakespeare, for example, has a statue here, but is buried in Stratford-upon-Avon. Other plaques memorialize John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, T.S. Eliott, Jane Austen, Henry James and the Bronte sisters. Poet’s Corner also honors several others who are neither poets nor writers, among them composer George Frideric Handel and actor David Garrick.
Elsewhere in the abbey, as in various aisles and in the passages around the cloister, are other graves and memorials. Some names, like prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and Winston Churchill, are easily recognized. Others are those of people buried at Westminster because they worked there, among them Philip Clark, an abbey plumber, and Edward Tufnell, master mason.
But even this tradition is being broken. Now, because of the restoration, anybody with a giving heart and enough sterling can be immortalized in Westminster. Names of donors who come up with $150,000 for the restoration will be etched on panels of stained glass. Brass nameplates will honor $50,000 donors and initials of $10,000 donors will be carved into stone shields on the outside walls.
That’s the price of fame these days in Westminster Abbey.
Abbey tours and hours
Entry to the nave of Westminster Abbey is free. There is a charge for admission to the Royal Chapels, which are open 9 a.m.-4:45 p.m. Monday through Friday; 9 a.m.-2:45 p.m. Saturday; and 6 p.m.-7:45 p.m. Wednesdays, when admission is free.
Tours: Verger-guided Super Tours, which last about 1 1/2 hours, are conducted at 10 and 11 a.m., 2 and 3 p.m. Monday-Friday; 10 and 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Saturdays. Cost is about $9.30 and includes admission to the Royal Chapels and the Pyx Chamber and the Abbey Museum.
