Lambeth Palace is the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Anglican Church. The place is on the banks of the Thames, just across from Westminster, has an old Church (and not only) history.

The residence of the archbishops was occupied already in the XIII century, and in the XIV century it was tried by the ecclesiastical court of harbinger of English Protestantism John Wycliffe. From that era remained Gothic chapel. In 1440, was built the tower of Lollards – the so-called fleeing to England members of the Christian egalitarian communities of Flanders, who joined the movement Wycliffe and took part in the revolt Wat Tyler. Choose lollardy left England long before the construction of the tower, but the dissenters in this prison during the English revolution outlasted many. Still later in the Tudor period, was built of red-brick entry to the Palace grounds.

During the civil war, the Great hall of the Palace was plundered by the troops of Cromwell. After the Restoration it was rebuilt by Archbishop William Jackson, in which for the first hundred years was used for the roof exposed wooden farm complex design – brilliant legacy English carpenters of the middle Ages. The Palace turned out in the spirit of antiquity with Gothic elements. In the XIX century it was already updated in the neo-Gothic style by the architect Edward Blore (author of the Alupka Palace in Crimea).

In the Palace exhibited a collection of portraits of Anglican archbishops, including paintings by Holbein, van Dyck, Hogarth and Reynolds. Here is the official library of the Archbishop of Canterbury, founded in 1610. Some of it is stored in the manuscripts belong to the IX century, that is, to the era before the Norman conquest. Public library contains more than 120 thousand volumes, including the New Testament by Johann Gutenberg, published in Mainz in the fifties of the fifteenth century, and manuscript Lambeth Bible, a priceless legacy of Roman England.

Park of the Archbishop, the Palace adjoining, public. Although the Palace is home of the Archbishop and his family in the days when the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church resides in London, quite possibly a visit to the residence with a guide.