St Andrew Undershaft
St Alfege Church
We were asked to advise on the potential to reorder the interior of this church to meet the needs of today’s users. We supported the idea of a similarly bold contrast within the Grade I listed building: inserting a new gallery of modern design at the west end.
The location on St Mary Axe of St Andrew Undershaft makes an irresistible juxtaposition of the thirteenth-century church - a rare survivor of the Great Fire - with the gleaming glass curves of the ‘Gherkin’.
The church only occasionally hosts formal worship but is intensively used on a daily basis to provide practical, social and spiritual support to the local community, especially students and City workers. It serves around 2,000 meals a week during academic terms. Despite its large footprint, the church had inadequate kitchens, meeting spaces, storage and toilets. Important monuments and furnishings were at risk of damage from the piles of catering supplies that were building up against the medieval walls because there was nowhere else to put them.
Our work included detailed research, using the resources of the Parish and the Guildhall Library, to trace the sequence of changes made to the church. We assigned different grades of significance to the various elements of the building, and identified areas that could sustain change with minimal impact on significance, and others where changes would have a positive effect. This enabled us to provide a robust justification for the re-ordering of the interior and insertion of the gallery to designs by Sheppard Architects.
Client: Parish of St Helen Bishopsgate with St Andrew Undershaft