The Archives

The Architectural Archive contains the papers and drawings created by the Surveyor to the Fabric and related drawings by consultants, contractors, artists and designers.

St Paul’s Cathedral is an exceptionally well-documented building and the architectural archive charts the history of the design, construction, decoration and maintenance of the present cathedral designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

The original drawings by Wren and his draughtsmen as well as the building accounts, contracts and records of the Rebuilding Commission are held in the Cathedral’s deposited collections at London Metropolitan Archives.

The Surveyors' Papers held in the on-site architectural archive at St Paul’s date primarily from the surveyorship of Francis Cranmer Penrose (Surveyor, 1852–1897) to the present day and record the structural changes and decorative embellishments to the Cathedral during this period. 

The archive also includes designs by some very famous names, such as the eighteenth-century English history painter, Sir James Thornhill, the nineteenth-century architectural partnership of Bodley and Garner, Nazarene illustrator Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, architect and Surveyor to Westminster Abbey Stephen Dykes Bower, twentieth-century sculptors William Reid Dick and John Skelton, and stained glass designer Brian Thomas.

The records demonstrate the working relationships between St Paul's and the artists commissioned to embellish the historic interior and are complemented by the Cathedral's larger hanging collections and models, which include designs by Alfred Stevens, William Burges, FC Penrose, William Blake Richmond and Mervyn Macartney.

 

Vanessa Bell, Archivist and Records Manager

vbell@stpaulscathedral.org.uk ​0207 246 8307

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