Westminster Abbey has won planning permission to add its first new tower in almost 300 years, which would create public access to a museum of treasures and curiosities housed in the triforium, the church’s attic gallery.
At present, the public can only get a distant glimpse of the spectacular and shadowy space through the stone arches 21.34m up at the top of the walls above the high altar.
The only way in is a perilous journey up narrow, spiral staircases and along ledge-like passages high above the nave. The spectacular but vertigo-inducing view down to the altar and nave has mostly been enjoyed by maintenance staff and camera crews covering major state events.
From the exterior, the new tower — designed by Ptolemy Dean, the abbey’s surveyor of the fabric, a role previously held by Nicholas Hawksmoor and Christopher Wren — would lurk modestly in an angle of the building just outside Poet’s Corner, barely visible between the 16th-century lady chapel and the buttresses supporting the 13th-century chapter house.
Designed to harmonize with the gothic style of the abbey, it would be clad in lead and feature leaded windows in metal frames.
The tower would be the first added to the abbey — which is now a world heritage site — since Hawksmoor gave the building its distinctive profile by completing the twin west towers flanking the great main door in 1745.
The tower would house a new staircase and an elevator to take visitors to the museum, and would give spectacular views of the Palace of Westminster across the road.
The dean, John Hall, described the news as the most exciting development in the building in more than 250 years.
“We are delighted that our proposals for the new tower and for opening the eastern triforium to the public have the support of Westminster city council, reflecting that of our local community and of other bodies concerned for the preservation of the local and national heritage,” Hall said.
The new space would be named the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries, and should be complete by 2018. The abbey abandoned its ambitious original plan to mark the queen’s jubilee in 2013 by adding a corona — a £10 million (US$15.43 million) crown-shaped roof — over the altar where she was crowned in 1953.
The triforium already houses a charming but eccentric museum, consisting mainly of architectural fragments, that is visited only occasionally — by academics and specially invited guests — because of the access problems.
There are plans to use the renovated space to exhibit many of the abbey’s stored treasures, including the Liber Regalis, a 14th-century book that sets out the ritual for coronation ceremonies, and the crimson velvet cope worn by the dean at the coronation of King Charles II in 1661, when all the regalia and robes had to be remade on the restoration of the monarchy.
The tower and galleries are estimated to cost £18.9 million, of which almost £11 million has been raised.
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