The land hereabouts has belonged to Canterbury since the twelfth century. The considerable complex that is the Archbishop's palace here is, in parts, dated to the late 12th or early 13th century. In March 2000 arrangements have been made for tours by members of the public. The most obvious feature to passers-by is the gatehouse at the south end of the palace, which is cheek-by-jowl with the tower of Saint Mary's church (now the Tradescant Trust Museum of Garden History) which was Lambeth's parish church. The red brick gatehouse, with the detail of patterning in black brick and a stone vaulting to the entrance archway, was built for Archbishop Morton in about 1495. To either side of it are wings, each of five storeys, and on passing through it the main hall of the palace extends down the west side. This had to be rebuilt, also in red brick, after its destruction during the Commonwealth interregnum by Archbishop Juxon sometime between 1660 and 1663 (possibly the puritans had been incensed by the inclusion by Archbishop Laud (1573-1645) of his coat of arms in the refurbishment that he effected in the chapel). Repairs to war damage also had to be made in the 1950's. Apparently a particularly fine feature of the interior is the hammerbeam roof. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) considered the style in which the hall was rebuilt was old-fashioned which, some modern critics feel, does not do justice to the elements of contemporary classical style that are incorporated in it. To the north of the hall is a cloisters and chapel which was entirely destroyed in the 1940's but the undercroft is probably still the original stonework of about 1200 to 1230. At the west end of the chapel is a water tower which was completed in 1435 by Archbishop Chichele to a cost of £291 19s and 4 1/4d and alongside which Laud added a lower block. In etchings by Wenceslaus Hollar, firmly dated 1647, and by Cornelius Bol from a set completed about 1650 the towers at the north and south ends of the complex are shown quite clearly with the Hall between which has a lantern on the roof as on the present one. The hall must be the one destroyed by the puritans. Cranmer's Tower, dated to about the middle of the 16th century, is to the east of the cloisters and east of that is a range of residential and office accommodation which was rebuilt under the direction of the architect Edward Blore. He was responsible for a considerable amount of refurbishment of the palace in the 19th century. The archbishop's flat looks out on gardens to the north in which, reportedly, a tortoise was released by Archbishop Laud in the 1630's and met its death on a gardener's fork in 1750. A feature of the Hollar and Bol etchings is that they show quite a narrow riverside walk separating the western walls of the palace from the bank of the river. The walk is certainly only a fraction of the width of the present Lambeth Palace Road. The wall of this palace is one of the few 13th to 17th century structures on the riverside in central London. So, the difference between the width of that walkway and of the sum of the present road, pavements, riverside walk, etc., indicate the extent by which the river was narrowed, on this shore, by the Victorian embankment works of 1866-9. The embankment accommodated a sewer, that runs from Putney, in place of the stinking, tidal flats. The building of the Victorian sewer system represented the victory of the knowledge that many diseases were water born rather than by a miasma.

O/S Co-ords:3061.7905
Source(s):

The Buildings of England - London 2: South