Square-on, looking up at the west front in bright sun under a clear blue sky: two square towers with crocketed corner pinnacles and pierced parapets, louvred belfry windows, and between them a gable with a large traceried window and carved hood. Plane trees at both edges, office towers just visible at the corners. Symmetrical upward convergence.

St Andrew’s Cathedral

George Street at Sydney Square

Edmund Blacket, on foundations by James Hume. 1837 to 1868, towers 1874. Victorian and Federation, Sydney Sandstone.

Material
Sydney sandstone throughout, slate roof, hammerbeam timber roof
Status
State Heritage Register, 2004. A working Anglican cathedral

This is Sydney’s third attempt at a cathedral on one block. Governor Macquarie laid a stone in 1819 for a vast church planned with Francis Greenway, but Commissioner Bigge’s inquiry killed the scheme. A second stone in 1837 started a modest Gothic church by James Hume, whose walls had reached about five metres when drought and depression stopped work in 1842.

That year Edmund Blacket arrived in the colony, carrying a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Appointed in 1846, he faced an awkward brief: make something imposing on foundations the size of a large English parish church, with Hume’s window tracery already in place. He chose Perpendicular Gothic and twin western towers, with a front loosely based on York Minster. It was consecrated on St Andrew’s Day 1868.

It has since been caught up in arguments about what a cathedral is for. In 1887 the synod objected to a Crucifixion in the alabaster reredos as idolatrous, and the objectors paid for a Transfiguration to replace it. Trams on George Street drowned out services, so in 1941 the whole interior was turned around to face the other way. A restoration in 1999 to 2000 turned it back, and the masons added a joke of their own, carving a likeness of the Rev. Boak Jobbins into the roof stonework.

The stone

The stone has been a worry almost from the start. Decay and water damage had set in by the 1890s. Roofs, pinnacles and the south transept were rebuilt between 1942 and 1960, about $1.2 million went on a restoration begun in 1968, and the stonework still needs a long-term programme of repair. The stone is from Pyrmont.

Read about Sydney Sandstone

Sources

  1. St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, Wikipedia
  2. St Andrew's Cathedral, Dictionary of Sydney (archived by State Library of NSW)
  3. Industry > Sandstone, Pyrmont History Group