St John's Cathedral (Brisbane) - History of Construction

History of Construction

William Webber – the third Bishop of Brisbane and previously a vicar in London – was instrumental in initiating the Brisbane cathedral project. In 1885-86, he commissioned John Loughborough Pearson to make sketch plans for Brisbane cathedral. The Brisbane cathedral movement began in earnest in 1887 as a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee – St John’s was to be paid for by public subscription but the construction of the cathedral in one campaign was found to be financially impossible. As a result, the building has been executed in three stages over two centuries between 1906 and 2009.

In April 1889, Pearson’s plans for the cathedral were approved for the original site bounded by George, Elizabeth and William Streets.

It was a cruciform church with a wide nave, double aisles, apse and ambulatory, short transepts about halfway along the length of the building and an apsidal side chapel on the north. The west front had towers close to the end of the nave. The upper part of the west wall was supported by a relieving arch, which continued the line of the interior cross arches. The towers had massive buttresses. Their strong vertical lines carried on into corner turrets set before pyramidal spires.

John Pearson died in November 1897, two weeks before Webber presented fresh plans to the cathedral chapter. In 1898, Frank Loughborough Pearson (John Pearson's son and partner) was entrusted to carry out his father's design. In 1899, the cathedral chapter approved Pearson’s revised plans only to be forced to reconsider the entire cathedral when the state government bought the original intended site. The present Ann Street site was purchased in late 1899 because it was “…central, commodious and had the natural advantage of being able to make the building erected on it a landmark for miles around.” Frank Loughborough Pearson spent a year reworking his father’s design and, on 22 May 1901, the Duke of Cornwall and York (later King George V) laid the foundation stone of the cathedral. In 1903, Bishop William Webber died and in 1904 Frank Pearson submitted his final plans to the cathedral chapter.

The first stage of construction began in 1906 and took four years to complete. This included the chancel, sanctuary and ambulatory, the quire and its aisles, the transepts and crossing, the Lady Chapel to the liturgical north of the quire, the double aisles and the first bay of the nave. This stage was consecrated in October 1910, but consecration of the full building (like construction) has been achieved in stages. After the Second World War money was raised in the hope of completing the cathedral as a war memorial. In 1947, Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein laid a foundation stone for a further two bays of the nave, but construction ceased after the laying of the foundations until 1965 when the second stage was commenced. Work on the second stage proceeded for a further four years and consisted of the laying of foundations for the extensions, a two bay extension to the nave and demolition and removal of the temporary west wall.

The third stage of construction commenced in 1989 and was completed in 2009 (with the exception of 29 life sized statues on the west front and a set of cloisters on the north side of the cathedral which have yet to be commissioned). The third stage of construction has comprised the erection of the south west porch, the final bay of the nave, the west front, the north and south towers and the central tower. The third stage of construction was overseen by Peter Dare, Master Mason of Exeter Cathedral in England. To ensure enough supply of sandstone for the project, the cathedral authorities purchased a sandstone quarry at Helidon, 100 km from Brisbane where each piece of stone was cut and finished and then trucked to the cathedral site in Ann Street.

The third stage of construction cost A$40 million which was raised by public donations, bequests and grants from the federal, state and local governments.