St Andrew's Cathedral and the Chapter House – George Street, Sydney – Macquarie's Stone, Blacket's Towers and Australia's Oldest Cathedral – 1819 to Today

If you've ever waited on the Town Hall steps for a mate, you've had St Andrew's Cathedral right next to you. It's the honey-coloured sandstone church with the twin towers, half hidden behind the trees on George Street. Most people walk past it without a second look. It's the oldest cathedral in Australia, though, and it took the best part of fifty years, three architects and a couple of false starts to get it built.

St Andrew's Cathedral on George Street, next to Sydney Town Hall. Photo: Maksym Kozlenko, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Macquarie's grand plan, 1819

Governor Lachlan Macquarie wanted a cathedral in the middle of a big square, surrounded by the colony's main public buildings. He and the convict architect Francis Greenway planned a church 200 feet square. The State Heritage Register says the foundation stone was laid with full ceremony on 31 August 1819. Hardly anything was built. Work stopped in 1820, and after Commissioner Bigge arrived to investigate Macquarie's spending, St James' in King Street was put up as Sydney's main church instead. The square was later dropped too, when Governor Bourke had George Street run straight through.

Broughton and Hume, 1837

Bishop William Grant Broughton revived the idea. A new foundation stone was laid in 1837 on the present site, and the heritage listing names Governor Bourke as the man who laid it. James Hume drew up much more modest plans for a cross-shaped Gothic church. The heritage listing says the Church Act of 1836 helped with £1,000 from the government. The foundations went in and some walls went up to about 15 feet, but in 1842 drought and depression stopped work again.

Edmund Blacket takes over

That same year, 1842, a young English architect called Edmund Blacket turned up in Sydney with a letter of recommendation from the Archbishop of Canterbury. The heritage listing says he became "Church Architect" on his arrival in 1842 and was made architect for finishing St Andrew's in 1846. He went on to design dozens of churches, the University of Sydney's main building, and Christ Church St Laurence down at Railway Square.

Blacket's problem was making a proper cathedral out of foundations the size of a big English parish church. His answer was the Perpendicular Gothic style of Canterbury, Winchester and York. He added two bays to the length, put in a central tower, and gave it twin towers on the west front based loosely on York Minster. In October 1850 six Australasian bishops met in Sydney and each of the six nave pillars was named after one of them.

Detail of Blacket's Perpendicular Gothic stonework. Photo: Sardaka, 2008, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Broughton never saw it finished. He died on a trip to England in 1853 and is buried in Canterbury Cathedral. His successor, Bishop Frederic Barker, consecrated St Andrew's on St Andrew's Day, 30 November 1868. A report in the Sydney Mail of 5 December 1868 describes the day. The heritage listing says seven of the nine Australian bishops came. The towers and pinnacles weren't finished until 1874.

St Andrew's around 1880. Australian National Maritime Museum collection, via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions).

St Andrew's and the Town Hall around 1900. Henry King, Powerhouse Museum collection, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

Glass, organ and bells

The best thing inside is the stained glass. The heritage listing says a set of windows was ordered from John Hardman and Co. of Birmingham between 1861 and 1867, and calls it "one of the finest collections of Hardman glass in Australia". The lower windows tell the life and parables of Jesus. The great east window shows scenes from the life of Christ where St Andrew was there, such as the Feeding of the Five Thousand. The clerestory windows high in the nave were designed by Norman Carter in 1953–54.

A pipe organ by William Hill and Son went into the south transept in 1866. The heritage listing says it was the first of about 40 organs that Hill supplied to NSW. In 1998 the Canadian firm Orgues Létourneau rebuilt it into a four-manual instrument using the best pipes from a later John Whitely organ. The cathedral has held lunchtime organ recitals on Thursdays for more than 40 years.

The bells came later. There's a ring of 12 bells cast by John Taylor and Co. of Loughborough and installed in 1965 in memory of Ernest Samuel Trigg. Ringers from the Australian and New Zealand Association of Bellringers ring them on Sunday mornings.

Inside St Andrew's. Photo: sv1ambo, 2012, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Stained glass at St Andrew's. Photo: sv1ambo, 2012, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The alabaster reredos behind the altar caused a row. It was carved by Thomas Earp under the architect J. L. Pearson, and the heritage listing says it was completed in November 1888. Its centre panel was originally a Crucifixion. In 1887 some members of the synod objected that it might be seen as idolatrous, and it was swapped, at the objectors' expense, for the Transfiguration you see today.

The reredos around 1900. Powerhouse Museum collection, via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions).

Turning the cathedral around

Cathedrals are normally laid out with the main door at the west and the altar at the east. St Andrew's was built that way too, but the busy road was George Street on the east side. Once electric trams started running down George Street, the noise often drowned out the services. The heritage listing says that by the 1930s fewer people lived west of Kent Street, so most worshippers were coming from the east anyway.

In 1941 the cathedral was turned around. A new chancel went in at the west end, the west door was closed, and the reredos was moved against it. People came in through a new east entrance off George Street. You'll sometimes see this dated to the 1970s, but the heritage listing and the cathedral's own conservation plan put it in 1941. The 1970s were when the big restoration of the stonework began, after a report by Ancher Mortlock and Woolley in 1972. The cathedral was turned back to its original layout in 1999–2000, under Dean Boak Jobbins, and the heritage listing says the surviving Blacket fittings were put back.

The George Street end of the cathedral. Photo: Maksym Kozlenko, 2013, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Chapter House

Next door, on the corner, is the Chapter House. In 1883 the cathedral decided to build a synod hall as a memorial to Bishop Barker, who had died the year before. Barker was a great believer in church government by synod. Edmund Blacket had died in 1883 too, so the job went to his son Cyril Blacket. The heritage listing says the foundation stone was laid on 30 November 1885 and the building was finished in 1886. Lord Carrington opened it, and it was first used for the General Synod in October 1886. Wiltshire and Day enlarged it in 1916. The site was cramped, and there are notes in the listing about later changes, such as the cloister being filled in with coloured glass in 1895.

The Chapter House was built as a hall, and it has been used for big gatherings as well as church business. One example turns up in photographs on Wikimedia Commons. In June 1953 Sydney's Ukrainian Orthodox community held a memorial service there for the millions who died in the Holodomor famine in Soviet Ukraine. You'll often read that the hall was a popular spot for public meetings in the 19th century. I haven't yet found that in the newspapers, so treat it with some caution.

The Chapter House beside the cathedral. Photo: Sardaka, 2008, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The stairs in the Chapter House. Photo: TTaylor, 2000, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).

The choir and the school

The cathedral choir of men and boys goes back to the 1820s, before even the temporary wooden cathedral, and it's said to be the oldest continuous musical group in Australia. St Andrew's Cathedral School was founded in 1885 to supply the boy choristers. Two of its best-known old boys from the choir were Edmund Barton, Australia's first prime minister, and the aviator Charles Kingsford Smith.

Heritage

St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral and Chapter House was listed on the State Heritage Register on 3 September 2004, as item 01708. It had been on the old Register of the National Estate since 21 March 1978. The heritage listing calls it "a perfect example of the colonial desire to reproduce England in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century", a phrase it takes from the architectural historian Joan Kerr.

St Andrew's from George Street. Photo: Bernard Spragg, 2015, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

Next time you're waiting on the Town Hall steps, wander next door and have a look at the Hardman windows. It was 49 years from Macquarie's first stone in 1819 to the day the cathedral was consecrated in 1868.

Where this came from

• NSW State Heritage Register: St Andrew's Anglican Cathedral and Chapter House (SHR 01708), as reproduced in the Wikipedia article on the cathedral (CC BY 4.0 text from Heritage NSW).
• Paul Davies, St Andrew's Cathedral Church Conservation Plan, 1999 (cited in the heritage listing).
• Sydney Mail, 5 December 1868, p. 10 (Trove), on the consecration.
• Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect, Edmund Thomas Blacket, National Trust, 1983 (quoted in the listing).
• Wikimedia Commons: Ukrainian Orthodox Church service to commemorate the Holodomor in Sydney, 1953 (file description).