Lambeth Palace Library

My maternal grandfather read Theology at St John’s College, Durham and was ordained. He was appointed junior chaplain to the Bishop of Bombay in 1906. Much later he became vicar for West Malling in Kent. 

Today we take a look at another John’s man, Canon Basil Fulford Lowther Clarke who did something remarkable. I have a friend who has visited every church in the City of London and now is polishing off all the cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales. Canon Clarke visited and wrote notes about 11,479 churches, mostly in England and Wales. Aged fifteen when his contemporaries were on pub crawls he started this great church crawl that continued for fifty-five years. Unlike architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner he was a working cleric with little spare time for this stupendous project.

The Canon Clarke Notebook Collection is now searchable at the Church of England Record Centre. I found out about this at an exhibition about Canon Clarke in the Great Hall at Lambeth Palace.

The Lambeth Palace website gives a good potted history of the hall.

The Great Hall at Lambeth Palace, which has been built and rebuilt many times over the centuries, currently houses much of the Lambeth Palace Library.

It was in the first Great Hall that Erasmus and Holbein were welcomed by Archbishop Warham, and where Henry VIII was entertained by Thomas Cranmer.

The Parliamentarian Colonel Scot ordered the demolition of the building following the English Civil War and the more valuable materials were sold off at auction. The Civil War also saw much alteration to the remains of the Palace as the main buildings were divided into two for the use of two Parliamentarian leaders.

Many other buildings in addition to the Hall were destroyed.

It was not until the Restoration that Archbishop Juxon rebuilt the Great Hall. He used much of his own money to complete the works, and attempted as much as possible to replicate the original medieval style. Writing in his diary in 1665, Samuel Pepys described a visit to see “Bishop Juxon’s new old-fashioned hall”.

In spite of Juxon’s splendid restoration, the Great Hall was rarely used until the early 19th Century, when, as part of Blore’s renovations, the Hall first became a home for the Lambeth Palace Library.

The hammer beam roof of the Great Hall was completely destroyed during the Blitz. While Archbishop Juxon’s original design was replicated exactly during restorations, many of the books and furniture damaged in the blast could not be restored or replaced.