A READER of your front page article this/last week (Journal, July 2), “Cathedral launches Constable master plan”, might be led by the words, “plans include reclaiming the Bishop’s Palace”
to conclude that the Bishop’s Palace had once been occupied by the Dean and Chapter. This is not the case.
Down its long history until 1946 the Palace was in the ownership of the bishops, the diocese or the ecclesiastical commissioners.
In that year, in large part through the efforts of the last resident bishop, Bishop Neville Lovett, the Palace was transferred to the Dean and Chapter for the purposes of a school and almost immediately occupied by Salisbury Cathedral School, which has remained there till the present day.
The Dean and Chapter were sorely in need of school premises as their own cathedral school site in The Close had been found by a Ministry of Education survey of 1944 to be seriously inadequate.
Cynics might see this aspect of the new master plan as more of an audacious property grab than a reclamation.
STEPHEN JEFFERSON Ebbesbourne Wake
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