Amid a heritage skills crisis, St Paul’s wants to bring its craftspeople into the light

Every year, countless numbers will pause at the top of Ludgate Hill and marvel at St Paul’s. Once they have finished admiring Christopher Wren’s great sculpture of Portland stone, some - more than a million a year in fact - will pass through its colossal oak doors to wonder at the intricate decorations of its interior, climb its grand staircases to peer over the famous whispering gallery, and dodge gaggles of schoolchildren to explore of its echoing crypt.

At this point, relatively few will, as I do, turn down a modest corridor away from this undercroft and through a set of heavy, unremarkable fire doors. If they did, they would likely not be immediately impressed by the awkward, loud and busy space they were confronted with here. Originally a car park under Paternoster Square, this place now serves simultaneously as delivery entrance, security control room and storage space. 

But it’s here that the grandeur of St Paul’s is maintained, reproduced and sustained. Following the sound of a flute concertino playing from a radio, I find myself in the workshop where the cathedral’s stonemasons, carpenters and metalworkers ply their trade in the same way so many others doing similar work across the country do - out of sight and out of the public’s mind.

The UK’s heritage skills crisis

It’s perhaps not a surprise, given the sophistication of this work and its lack of public profile, that there is a dire dearth of heritage skills in Britain today. A lack of skilled heritage craftspeople is a concern for 47% of the heritage industry, with only 18% of heritage companies employing staff aged under 25, according to the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Delivery Authority. That’s a big concern for that project - the UK’s largest ever restoration job - which the National Lottery Heritage Fund estimates will require around 3,000 craftspeople on site a year, around a third of all such workers in the UK. That would not leave much supply for the rest of the sector. According to a recent report in The Times, there are 604 “at-risk” heritage sites across London alone that are in need of restoration.

Our heritage is in poor condition. We don’t have enough craftspeople and we don’t have enough money

Rebecca Thompson, director of property at St Paul’s Cathedral 

“Our heritage is in poor condition,” admits Rebecca Thompson, director of property at St Paul’s Cathedral as we sit down in Chapter House, the elegant Wren-designed building opposite the cathedral which serves as its office space. “We don’t have enough craftspeople and we don’t have enough money”.

Thompson had more than a decade of experience stewarding the UK’s built environment heritage when she became the cathedral’s first female director of property in August 2023. Upon taking the job, she “realised very quickly” that St Paul’s was facing many of the same problems as the rest of the heritage sector, with several of its craftspeople planning to retire imminently with “no succession planning [and] no apprentices”. 

Centre of Excellence for heritage crafts 

Thompson’s first act was to develop a 15-year plan of work setting out what needed to be done and what skills were needed to align with this work. It was a good start, but not enough to satisfy her. The workshops were still “clunky” and hidden away, and there was still no comprehensive vision for bringing new, young talents into the sector. It was on her wedding anniversary in 2023 that the idea came to her for a project that would try to address these problems together. “I apologised to my husband, said ‘I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to write it’, and I wrote the vision for the Centre of Excellence”.

The idea was to transform workshop-cum-delivery space into a swish new centre, which would offer craftspeople improved working space, become a learning hub for apprentices, and invite the public in for a peek behind the scenes. Thompson started workshopping the idea with staff, conversations which formed the basis of a scope given to architect Scott Whitby. The practice then “absorbed themselves within the team”, watching how it was used. 

“All the things that were jarring to me but which I couldn’t evidence, they sat and watched and said ‘this is why that irritates you, this is why that doesn’t work’,” she tells me. The workshops had been put there in the 1970s “just for convenience” and with “no design or thought about it”. In their CAD software, architect practice Scott Whitby stripped the space back to its structural bones and started from scratch. 

The result was a design in which a number of workshops laid out around a central point of access, giving everyone visibility of one another. “Now there’ll be a cross reference of skills, much less risk if there’s just two people working in the area, because they can actually see each other, probably a cross use of tools as well, and conversation about things that use more than one material,” says Thompson. “So if there’s a metal worker that needs to work with the stone masons or the carpenters they can see each other and you’re more likely to talk and collaborate more”. 

She is hoping that this greater visibility and use of transparent materials could enable them to bring public tours through for a look at what is happening. They also want to include a space that schools, including St Paul’s own, can use for learning, or which could be used as an income-generating space for small events. Another part of the plan is to transform the adjacent North Yard, currently a “not pleasant” space packed with old ventilation and extraction systems, into a more useful space, lit by “north lights”. These will be designed so that children can see through the railings at street level down into the subterranean workshops.

These are viable careers, so please think about heritage in the built environment as a career option

Rebecca Thompson

This detailed effort to bring crafts out of the shadows is not being done for its own sake. Thompson and her team are betting that greater visibility will bring greater interest in these jobs. “Children don’t know of those opportunities,” she says. “These are great jobs […] We want to encourage this conversation. These are viable careers, so please think about heritage in the built environment as a career option.”

I’m told by the cathedral staff member who shows me around the building that one of their stone masons, a 16-year-old apprentice, was inspired to take up the practice after seeing stone carving being done. And Thompson too has her story of being seduced by heritage.

From commercial construction to heritage conservation

Thompson started her career in commercial construction, employed variously as a building surveyor, quantity surveyor, site manager and commercial team manager, and working mainly on hospitals and schools. By chance, she ended up leading a team of archaeologists for a commercial scheme and found that they were “the best, wackiest group of people I think that I’ve met and led and worked on a project with”. Thompson says the experience transformed her life: “I thought, I want to do that”. It was “the craft and the design” of historic buildings that attracted her, the “time and effort that went into the design of buildings that still stand now”. By contrast, the buildings she had been working on might not make it out of the century. 

Inspired, she wrote herself a description of her “perfect job” and when her husband spotted a job as superintendent of works at York Minster, he told her “this is the job you’ve written about”. She oversaw a major conservation job in that role before being promoted to chapter steward to cover a colleague on maternity leave. She then set up her own heritage company, advising cathedrals and country homes across the country, before becoming senior estate manager for the north of England at English Heritage, covering everything from 5,000 year old stone circles to 200 year old estates.

The second phase will actually be an academy for apprentices to come through

These roles gave her a strong synoptic view of heritage in the UK, including its mounting recruitment crisis. The Wren International Centre of Excellence is meant to address this not just by increasing visibility, but also by serving as a hub for apprenticeships. “The second phase will actually be an academy for apprentices to come through, and can actually then go out into the wider built environment and heritage sector,” she says. Thompson sees the centre as becoming one node in a mutually supportive network to develop craft skills throughout the country. York Minster has their own centre for excellence, which uses CNC stone cutting technology that St Paul’s centre won’t have space for. Thompson says they would look to partner with York to get their apprentices trained up in those skills too. 

As it stands, though, it’s difficult for Thompson to give me numbers about how many apprentices they want to take on. Currently, they employ an apprentice mason and an apprentice carpenter, but as far as the centre is concerned, they are limited by uncertainty around funding and their current staffing numbers. She says it will “have to be a programme that’s built up” because their current craftspeople can only take on so many apprentices.

The ball and cross restoration project 

This is where another project the cathedral is looking to fund comes in. The ball and cross is a “once in a lifetime” opportunity, says Thompson. The ball and cross is the pinnacle of the cathedral, rising 365ft above the city and contributing to its iconic silhouette. It’s 23-foot high, weighs seven tonnes, and is covered in gold. But recent quinquennial surveys suggest that it is not in a good way. Exposed to the elements, iron rods running through the structure have rusted and deformed, with parts of them expanding and coming into contact with copper. Iron and copper “don’t like each other” and the chemical reaction between them has created corrosion.

While they still need confirmation from the engineers, Thompson expects that the structure will have to be replaced rather than repaired - the first time this has happened in two centuries. This will be a like for like replacement - “we can’t put a pineapple or a unicorn up there” - although possibly crafted from different materials. “It won’t look different to the public eye as you’re walking around, it’ll just look beautiful and shiny,” says Thompson.

Getting the scaffolding up to that level of the cathedral will be a “complex, expensive and difficult” job and so they’ve approached the project “with a philosophy that we do not want to put a scaffold up there again for another 75 years”. This means making other repairs and improvements while they are up there, which could include new staircases to the top of the building. The current staircases, says Thompson, are “clunky”, not easy to clean and tell you little about the architecture. “It’s an amazing journey in one respect, but we can do better as a visitor experience and [for] accessibility,” she says. Thompson expects to complete the scope and specification for the project by the end of the year. 

Funding heritage: the £15m challenge

Funding for the job, which is estimated to cost around £15m, will mean they can hire more stonemasons and carpenters, enabling them to bring more apprentices through the Centre of Excellence. 

Raising that kind of money for heritage projects is easier said than done, even for an institution like St Paul’s. “There aren’t many places you can go to for big funding amounts,” says Thompson. “On the continent it’s funded by the government […] our government does not fund historic buildings”.

The funding for the Centre for Excellence and the ball and cross restoration will have to come on top of the £17m a year that the cathedral has to raise to cover its operations. It has a mixed income model, with around £1m a year coming from commercial activities like corporate events and use of the building for films like Harry Potter and Paddington 2. Around 10% of running costs are raised by the fundraising team, but the rest - the vast bulk - comes from tourist visits. 

With the increasing cost of travel and the general cost of living affecting the UK’s tourist income, it’s going to be a big challenge for the cathedral’s fundraisers to bring in enough money to support its plans on top of its operating costs. But it is hopeful that a combination of support from trusts, foundations, individuals, heritage funds and corporations, including the financial service firms that surround it in the city, will be generous in their support.

They’re also trying to find creative ways to raise money, for example with a ticketed event they put on last October in which sculptor Lady Petchey did a live sculpt of Sir Christopher Wren from his death mask, creating a bust in a matter of hours. “She loves things to be happening while she’s doing this, so we had singers, we had stalls out with our carpenters and stonemasons, we had embroiderers,” recalls Thompson. “People were milling around looking at the different craft skills and we were telling them about the Center of Excellence all while she’s sculpting and doing this wonderful thing”.

If the cathedral’s team can find the funds, Thompson’s plans would be a big step in the right direction for the UK’s heritage sector. But at the end of the day, it’s going to take more than just one Centre for Excellence to train up a generation of craftspeople - and she knows this. ”We want to be a hub linked with the other people that are doing the same sort of wonderful work,” she says. ”We’re never going to solve it on our own”.