Building a piece of history: the Remember Me Covid-19 memorial

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One of the biggest highlights was actually just being part of the cathedral life.

So, our site was really small, but we were right on the heart of

the cathedral floor. So, we had to work around all their major events.

So, you know working in the cathedral at Christmas time.

So, you'd have you know, the Nativity, you'd have all sorts of amazing

events going on that you had to kind of immerse yourself in

and be a part of the cathedral life. So,

I'd definitely say that was one of my highlights working here.

This is undoubtedly one of the most challenging projects I've ever worked on,

maybe that I will ever work on. I would say working in a cathedral environment

is particularly challenging because you're working in a building

that's designed to reverberate sound and working on that

in the heart of the cathedral floor, you had the general public next door,

you had hourly services. So, you know, we did some quick tallies up

of some of the statistics. We actually manage the project

around 34 major events, over 1,800 hourly prayers.

You know, I'll never work on a project again where I've got

to plan an hourly prayer or Eucharist service in my programme of works,

but we just worked with the building, you know, we'd know what organ player

would be playing what day and who would be louder, so there were certain

opportunities that we could then have louder works coordinated around

an organ that's so unique and special to working in a cathedral environment.

There was a huge amount of challenges actually just getting materials

into the building. So, a lot of our larger materials all had to come through

the West Front, which is you know the main famous facade of

St Paul's Cathedral. So, a lot of our works would have to be before

the visitors would come in in the morning, so we'd be here at you

know 4 o'clock in the morning 5 o'clock in the morning.

We'd be setting up out front and we'd have to lift items, materials,

over 17 linear meters worth of steps which you know is a challenge

in itself when it feels like you've got the whole of the city of London

watching what you're up to. Then getting them into the building, I always

remember on my first day Martin Fletcher, the clerk of works here

said Kat, you know you can only have the doors open for one minute.

The cathedral doors open for one minute, and I was thinking okay, that's a new site

constraint, and the reason was on the bottom, sort of right hand side

of our site was the cathedral organ. So, if we had the doors open for

any more than a minute, we could risk the organ having to be retuned, which would

have been a huge cost to the cathedral. So, you know there were so many unique

site constraints with this project that were hugely challenging, but what we did

as a project team was to work with the cathedral, and work with their agenda,

and their way of managing the building, rather than against it

and we had the best time. You know, it's an amazing project

that we're all incredibly proud of.

So, the impact of this project, although it's a small project, has been absolutely

huge. It was actually my first project on my own. So, it's my first role

as project manager. So, I feel very grateful to the cathedral and obviously

to Sir Robert McAlpine for giving me the opportunity. I learned so much you know,

I think on the smaller projects there isn't a huge great big team so you do have

to get stuck in and do a little bit of everything. You know, there were some

nights where I was mopping the floors and you know doing all sorts.

I had to do everything myself on this project, so it was a huge, huge

learning curve, but a fantastic opportunity.

The thing that I'm most proud of, I think working in an environment like this you

are or certainly I was very conscious that you're building a piece of History.

So, inside the cathedral this was the the Portico project was

the biggest, most significant modern intervention in over 150 years.

So, you know, opportunities like that don't come along very often, so I was

very conscious that we needed to build something of the highest quality

because in my mind I just thought, gosh, if, you know, Wren was walking through

here, I would want to know that he, you know, came through with his little book

and gave it a tick as if to say "I'm happy with that" and, you know, that's what we set

out to achieve and that's what we've done. We've created a memorial, so there's a

huge social impact with this project.

You know, people will come here and reflect on some pretty

challenging and terrible times with Covid and we have,

we've built a piece of amazing history here that's going to outlive all of us.

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English

Building a piece of history: the Remember Me Covid-19 memorial

The Remember Me Covid-19 memorial at St Paul’s Cathedral was a project like no other. A tribute to those who died during the pandemic, housed within one of London’s most iconic buildings. The first project of its kind to be built inside St Paul’s for nearly 150 years.

Katharine Cary, Project Manager

Building the Remember Me Covid 19 Memorial at St Paul's Cathedral

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