About Lambeth Palace Library

Lambeth Palace Library is the historic library of the archbishops of Canterbury and the principal library and record office for the history of the Church of England. The Library focuses on ecclesiastical history, but its rich collections are important for an immense variety of topics from the history of art and architecture to colonial and Commonwealth history, and for innumerable aspects of English social, political and economic history. It is also a significant resource for local history and genealogy.

The Library was founded as a public library by Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, and its collections have been freely available for research ever since. Access to the Library is free. You can support the library by becoming a member of the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library. Since 1964 the Friends have been a focus of public goodwill, helping in the acquisition of manuscripts and rare books. See the Lambeth Palace Library homepage for more information.

Among our holdings, the Incorporated Church Building Society archive spans the period 1818-1982, and covers the whole of England and Wales. It is of national importance as a record of the most significant period in church building since the middle ages and the single largest source for plans of new and existing churches in the country. Where a church has since been restored, converted or demolished, the often-unique records in the archive preserve a vital part of the shared cultural heritage of the people of England and Wales.

The Church Plans Online digitisation project is the culmination of a decade of research and work to make the ICBS archive more widely accessible. The project gives online access to the catalogue database and digitised images of the 13,000 plans in the archive. It was generously funded by the New Opportunities Fund digitisation of learning materials programme in 2001, and the Leverhulme Trust (1990-1996) who funded the cataloguing and conservation work of the archive.

The project has been undertaken in close collaboration with our partners at the University of Newcastle's SINE (Structural Images of the North East) Project. After the plans were photographed at Lambeth Palace they were forwarded to SINE where the images were processed and made available on the web. The SINE Project have been responsible for much of the technical side, from advice on digitisation processes to the final production of the Church Plans Online website.

Further (technical) details of the digitisation project can be see in our FAQs page.