EXCLUSIVE Barts Guild recently enjoyed a conversation with Will Palin, Chief Executive of Barts Heritage, when Phil Moss met him in the Square at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
Published: August 29th, 2025
| The Project at Barts | Early Years and Education |
| Career in Heritage | Sharing the Heritage at Barts |
The Square was resplendent in the sunny summer afternoon and the sound of scaffolders hard at work – unbolting the metal bars and removing the wooden planks and sheeting that have encased the North Wing for the best part of two years – provided a noisy but welcome soundtrack to our discussion about the restoration of the Hospital’s North Wing and Will’s pathway that led him to Barts.
The Project at Barts
Will joined Barts Heritage in 2019 “just before Covid – we had grand plans that we had to rethink quite quickly when the first lockdown happened” but hasn’t regretted a minute. “Barts had several attractions. Firstly, it was the North Wing itself. It’s a sensational building designed by James Gibbs, one of the most important architects of the eighteenth century; then there’s the Hogarth Stair – what can you say about that? Wonderful! – and also that it’s not well known, so it had a real appeal of somewhere that you could bring to wider public attention.
“The fact it was the City of London also appealed – I quite liked the idea of getting under the skin of the City a bit! – and there was also the Barts Health NHS Trust. They seemed to be prepared to let me do what I wanted, so that was probably the main thing because I was quite used to having a certain degree of control over what I did.”
Alongside the autonomy, the Hospital’s support was another key factor in Will’s decision to get onboard. “The Hospital has been brilliant and its chief executive, Charles Knight, couldn’t have been more supportive – he bought into the project, saw how important it was from the Hospital’s point of view, plus the 900th anniversary was approaching, and all those things together made the project really kind of work and attractive for me.”
For the project to go ahead and succeed, a huge fundraising campaign was necessary to raise the required £9.5 million, which was given a massive boost in January 2023 when the National Lottery’s Heritage Fund awarded Barts Heritage a grant of £5.3 million, a testament as Will sees it to having the right project. “The Heritage Fund have been incredible over the years and I think my feeling’s always – if you get a good project everything falls into place, but it’s got to be a good project. You can’t just decide you need to save a building; you need an idea what it is and how it’s going to work. We’ve been very well supported by the Heritage Fund – big thank you, big shout out to them for supporting us – alongside our many other benefactors, including the Guild who granted us £50,000.”
As the scaffolding went up outside and inside the North Wing, the building would remain hidden from visitors to the Hospital for over 18 months, during which time “thankfully there weren’t any big surprises because surprises tend to be nasty surprises. We’d done a lot of work to investigate the building because you want to de-risk the project as best you can. Having said that, we encountered some interesting challenges at the roof level, which we’ve overcome, and the kitchen has been upgraded. More pressingly now, we’ve encountered some interesting problems with the balcony on the north side which was, like the entire building, subject to repairs in the 1960s.”
With the project progressing thanks to a great team of specialists, it became clear when the floor of the Great Hall was taken up “how much work had been done on the building post WW2. We discovered great steel girders supporting the floor so all credit to the Hospital at that time – there’s a lot of work which we uncovered that had been done 70 years ago.”
When asked about some of the highlights of the project, Will’s eyes lit up. “It has been really wonderful when you clean the Hogarth Stair, when you clean the cornice, and you discover the quality of the original work and it comes back to life – the vibrancy and colour of the Hogarth’s [paintings] being revealed during cleaning was really quite moving. Likewise, that beautiful plaster ceiling in the Great Hall, seeing that meticulously repaired and getting close to the undulating slight imperfections that reflect the hand of a human being on those original plaster details, was a really quite powerful experience, one which you can’t see from ground floor – you have to get up there – so I loved all that.”
Early Years and Education
Will said his interest in architecture and historic buildings was “definitely there from quite an early age. There are architects in my family on my mother’s side, an uncle who was married to my mother’s elder sister. He was an architect in Camden who ran a really interesting practice which specialised in community architecture and a lot of rehabilitation of old building stock, and he used to take me around. I did my 5th form [Year 11] work experience with him, so there was an awareness there clearly and my interest in architecture and my environment grew from there.”
Recalling his early years, Will “had a very normal childhood” before slightly correcting himself, “well, in some respects it was normal. I grew up in north London, Gospel Oak – my parents had moved there in the 60s as new settlerists – and it’s quite an interesting part of London, quite a lot of creative people settled in and around Kentish Town at that time.
“I went to the local primary school and from that point of view it was an absolutely normal, down-to-earth childhood. Obviously, I had in the background the fact that my Dad was my Dad [Sir Michael Palin], but it didn’t… those early years I just remember the benefits of that, going to interesting places – going off to New York when he was doing ‘Saturday Night Live’ and stuff like that – and a certain amount of interest from the teachers, which obviously helped and gave me a bit more leeway to behave badly, and it was quite exciting because always something was happening.
“My Dad was always doing something new and it was in the background, and it formed part of my sense of myself. It is what it is, but funnily enough I think it became more… when he began to travel, which was when I was in my mid-to late-teens, that’s when he as an individual began to become more famous.”
Recalling Monty Python – which started out as a television comedy series that ran from September 1969 for 5 years and starred his father alongside Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam – Will says that his memories focus more on the subsequent films that ‘the Pythons’ made between 1975 and 1983.
“I have a vague memory of going to Scotland when Dad filmed ‘Holy Grail’, but I do remember very vividly going to Tunisia for ‘Life of Brian’, and I also remember going to Elstree Studios when they were doing the ‘Meaning of Life’. It was the films that I recall… I had to watch the television series on enormous Philips video tapes; they were pre-Betamax and my Dad had one of the earliest video recorders and you put these great bricks in, slammed them down and watched these fuzzy Monty Python recordings, so that’s how I got to know them.”
Will then described his education. “I attended the local state schools and from William Ellis I went to Oxford University, where I studied English, and as many students of English Literature feel when they leave their course, the question is ‘what the hell am I going to do?’! I did a small period in journalism – rather I was a sub-editor at Mirror Group Newspapers in Canary Wharf – for a year and a bit, and then I went back to college and studied an MA in Architectural History at The Courtauld [Institute of Art in Somerset House].”
Career in Heritage
Upon completion of his master’s degree, Will commenced his ‘proper’ career in heritage and ended up as Assistant Curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum, located close to Somerset House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. “I worked there for 7 years and it was an incredible place to work; an amazing museum with fantastic collections, and all sorts of interesting people coming in and out, particularly architectural historians.”
Will then moved to SAVE Britain’s Heritage, which is headquartered near to Barts in Cowcross Street. SAVE has been a “big campaigning building preservation charity” for over 50 years, undertaking “heroic kinds of work to stop historic buildings being needlessly demolished and looking for productive reuse for buildings.”
The next career stop was Greenwich and specifically the Old Royal Naval College, where Will became director of the estate and led the 3-year project to restore the Painted Hall, which was “amazing. I couldn’t have worked on a more important building and the conservation of over 50,000 square feet of decorative paintings, so that was a good one. And it was a project with a very high profile, so I benefitted from being associated with that and it was very successful, winning lots of awards.”
At the same time as his work in Greenwich, Will was a trustee of The Spitalfields Trust, a charity established in 1977 by a group of campaigning architects, architectural historians and journalists to save the early Georgian buildings of Spitalfields in east London.
“Spitalfields eventually started doing stuff out of London because it was too expensive to buy even derelict buildings in London, and they bought a Tudor gatehouse on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent for a pound from English Heritage. They began work on repairing that building and putting it to a new use, and it was while we were down there during one visit in 2016, a few of us went on an exploration and found Sheerness.
“It was an extraordinary post-industrial place – you’ve got a steelworks, a commercial port, a huge Tesco, and then this remarkable survival, this enclave of historical buildings from the old naval dockyard, which looked like it had fallen from Bloomsbury into the marsh, and at the end of this magnificent terrace of houses was this burnt out, magnificent monumental neo-classical church, which had been destroyed by fire in 2001.”
Will was so taken with the place that he decided to buy a property and do it up, and when a group of enthusiasts began to coalesce, they set up The Sheerness Dockyard Preservation Trust. “We managed after a long, long period to get hold of the church, and then we put together a Heritage Fund project to repair it, put a roof back on and return it into beneficial use. That started in 2020 and completed in 2023, and that was just an incredible project because the building was so far gone, and it’s now become a vibrant community space – there’s a café, there’s co-working spaces, meeting rooms, and an event space.
“Sheppey is the butt of all jokes on Kent and to be able to give them a world class building that has helped to redefine the way they think of themselves is amazing, and I’m really proud of that project. I was doing it as a volunteer, as chairman of the trust, but working with the same team as at Greenwich, and some of that team came with me to Barts, even though we were running the two projects simultaneously.”
Sharing the Heritage at Barts
The conversation had returned to Barts and another of the reasons why Will wanted to get involved. “We called the project ‘Sharing Historic Barts’ because we wanted to open up the building, to give a higher degree of public access, and to put the building to better use in terms of the community, the Hospital, and around the Hospital as well.
“All of this was very important, and it was during Covid that the whole idea of the heritage and wellbeing narrative began to develop, because we saw there was a real demand from the Hospital for staff to get into the building during those dark days in lockdown, getting away from the clinical environment to somewhere where they could switch off a bit, and also there was something very comforting about a historic building from the sense of continuity.
“This building has been here for 300 years and been through all sorts of trials and tribulations, and people found that comforting and still do, both staff and patients and patients’ families. We saw there was an opportunity to build on that and that’s when we put together this exciting and ambitious programme of public engagements based around heritage and wellbeing, and that really has been one of the special elements of this project.”
Guild volunteers were absolutely thrilled to be given a tour by Will of the North Wing and particularly the Great Hall in January 2025, when the indoor scaffolding was still in place. “It was nice to do that and the scaffold tours was something we did at Greenwich and they’d been done elsewhere. It’s an obvious thing to do but it’s not exactly as easy as it seems because you’ve got to build the project around the public access element.
“There are all sorts of questions about ensuring that you don’t prevent the contractors from doing their work, so it has to be baked in from the start, and they have to know that this is non-negotiable. And there’s all the health and safety elements to it, but if you can get people in, share it, everyone comes on the journey with you and it’s exciting. They value what you’re doing much more because they can see the painstaking work going on and the incredible expertise of the team who are doing the conservation.”
It wasn’t just members of the Guild and Hospital staff who benefitted from the opportunity to take a tour of the North Wing. “The tours worked really well and the team assembled this brilliant band of volunteers, some of whom were from the Guild, who did the tours, so it wasn’t just the tours that were being of benefit, it was the fact that we were using the tours as a way of training up and giving confidence to a whole load of people from different aspects – some from the Hospital, some from elsewhere – to develop new skills and confidence and come with us on the journey.”
Those volunteers are going to be crucial members of the team – “We’re going to be reliant on them to help stewarding it and keeping it going” – when the building reopens in October 2025, initially for two days a week, Mondays and Tuesdays (plus the first Sunday of the month), 10am to 4pm. On those days, members of the public will be able to come as a visitor and just walk in. It’ll be free entry, but you’ll be encouraged to make a donation, and you’ll be able to hire a multimedia guide if you like.
“There’ll be new information in the rooms, you’ll be able to see the Hogarth’s in their splendour, properly lit, and there’ll be other organised tours and things taking place. On the other days of the week, we’ll continue our wellbeing programme and they’ll be concerts and cultural activities which’ll be ticketed, and there will be the opportunity for private hire because that will provide the revenue needed to sustain the building.”
Will admitted that the opening ceremony, or whatever form it takes, was exercising him when we spoke and he added, “I think there’ll be a few parties in October!” Sir Michael, an ex-patient of Barts, attended the Hospital’s 900th celebrations in 2023 and Will hopes he’ll be back for the reopening. “Dad is a donor to the project, which is very kind of him, so yeah, he’ll be invited to the big opening and we hope to have a really good party and celebrate an achievement for the whole Hospital.
“I’m lucky enough to be Chief Executive of Barts Heritage but everything here has been done by the people and the team we’ve had has been brilliant. We’ve still got challenges ahead – I think it’s really important for everyone to realise that keeping the building going and keeping on top of other works within budget is a big challenge, so I think we’re going to be continuing our fundraising forever, sadly.”
The conversation closed with Will confirming that he’ll be “sticking around to get the building going. We’re working with our close Barts family to ensure they can continue to do their traditional events” in the Great Hall. And looking to the future, Will said that “there’s potentially another phase of works involving the Barts Museum and the Barts Archive spaces, so we’re looking at that at the moment, and there’s lots of other exciting possible projects that could follow on. We want to build on the momentum of this first project to continue with these works.”
For more information about visiting the Great Hall and Hogarth Stair, please go to BARTS NORTH WING.
Huge thanks to Will for giving up his valuable time to talk to the Guild, and also for writing his regular updates on the ‘Sharing Barts Heritage’ project since November 2022 for readers of Barts Guild News (Issue 20 onwards). Copies can be read and downloaded from our Publications page.
PHIL MOSS