Will Palin: ‘My father is a big personality… I wanted to do something different, get a sense of myself’

A week before his mother’s death, Will Palin showed her drone footage of the Grade II-listed Georgian church he had spent the past decade rescuing and resurrecting, from burnt-out ruin to a £9.5 million centre for enterprise.

“She was pleased,” says Palin, of his saving of a Kentish neoclassical masterpiece. “My mother was never someone who would say, ‘Oh I’m so proud of you.’ She was a quietly supportive person. And she would always add: ‘Don’t work too hard’.”

Palin, 52, is the architectural conservationist son of Michael, 80, Monty Python star, TV travelogue adventurer and bestselling author, and Helen Gibbins, a teacher and bereavement counsellor, who died last month aged 80 after a long illness, a month after the couple’s 57th wedding anniversary. Michael said his wife’s death was “an indescribable loss”.

Will is the second child of three: self-effacing, intellectual, doggedly professional, with his father’s merry eyes and almost-identical voice. His elder brother Tom is a businessman; his younger sister Rachel works in television.

Palin’s Georgian terraced house is vast and elegant, full of heavy period furniture, some of which he says he rescued from skips, and smatterings of family clutter.

Sitting in his kitchen the day after Helen’s funeral, he is clearly deep in mourning. It was a family service, with tributes read by Michael and Will: “Three lovely hymns sung heartily. It was a beautiful day.” A second celebration of his mother’s life is planned for July.

“My parents were a partnership and it was that security that kept us all going,” says Palin. “We are a very close family so we will be spending as much time as possible together supporting each other. Dad has projects that will keep him busy and we are around for him during the inevitable slumps. He has lived in the same house in Gospel Oak [North London] for 45 years and has many friends. He is happy there and has no plans to move.”

Palin is already back at work on the Dockyard Church project in Sheerness on the island of Sheppey, where he owns a house and, with his young family (he and his wife Heloise have two sons, aged seven and five) spends much of his time there.

The resurrected church opens on Wednesday June 7. Hundreds of people are invited, the Government is sending Dehenna Davison, the junior Levelling Up minister; and the local sea cadets will pipe in guests as they arrive.

Palin came to conservation through an architect uncle, who instilled a love of historic buildings in him. “My father is obviously a big personality, and so there was always a sense that my identity was blurred because it’s tied up with that,” he says. “My feeling was to do something different, to get a sense of myself.”

After an undergraduate degree at Brasenose College, Oxford, and a masters degree in architectural history at the Courtauld Institute, Palin worked as an assistant curator at the Sir John Soane museum before becoming director of Save Britain’s Heritage and joining the Spitalfields Trust as a trustee.

In 2020, he led the £8.5 million restoration of the 18th century Painted Hall in the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Today, Palin is chief executive of Barts Heritage Trust, where he is in charge of the £22m restoration of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, by coincidence where his father underwent heart surgery in 2019.

Dockyard Church is a different kind of challenge, set up to attract inward investment, business development and economic action to Sheppey. Palin wants the project, part-funded with £4.2 million of Lottery money and the rest by philanthropic donations, to be a catalyst for elevating the people and prospects of this post-industrial island an hour’s drive from London.

As well as Dockyard Church, the council recently bid for – and won – £20 million from the Government’s £2.1 billion Levelling Up fund – a policy associated largely with improving prospects for poor communities in the North. South-east England drew just over 10 per cent of cash available in the same round of funding. That this Kentish island was prioritised reflects its acute need for investment. Four food banks serve 40,000 people; more than half of children there live in poverty.

“Places like Sheppey need help, too, and over a range of deep, systemic problems,” says Palin.

The Levelling-Up agenda is relevant to the South as well as the North, he believes, particularly in deprived communities that feel forgotten. “When that happens, you can start to bristle. There’s a discontent that simmers.”

Palin’s adopted town was once at the centre of the British naval industry: the Royal Naval Dockyard, a vast complex first laid out by Samuel Pepys in 1665 to service the Admiralty’s fleet. It closed in 1960 after more than 300 years of industry.

There is a hard-bitten beauty to Sheerness, with the robust, York-stone church standing alongside a row of fine Georgian terraces built for naval officers and hard up against a thundering arterial road and piles of shipping containers. The rest of the island is relentlessly flat, mostly fields, with a peppering of factories, big-box shopping centres and industrial estates.

Palin first visited Sheppey in 2006 and was beguiled by its “strange magic”. The church, built in the 1820s to unite naval, military and civilian worshippers, in its ruinous state struck him as emblematic. Many might have written it off. It was in the hands of a private developer who seemed happy to leave it to rot.

But Palin saw neglected treasure: “I knew the original architect was George Lewell Taylor, a naval surveyor who also designed developments around Marble Arch,” he says. “He had an urbane, sophisticated flavour to everything he produced: Greek revival, enormous ionic columns.”

In 2015, Palin co-founded the trust, brought in his contacts, connections and expertise, and set about helping the local council to acquire a compulsory acquisition order and raising cash for restoration.

“I hope we have created something special in a part of the world that is not prioritised for this type of architecture,” says Palin.

After a three-year retrofit, Hugh Broughton Architects (the same firm that worked on the Greenwich Painted Hall) has brought modernity and sophistication to the church’s Georgian bones. The 200-year-old arched windows and patterned-tiled flooring remain. Through the grand doors, past those ionic columns, the nave is now an airy workspace, with sleek meeting rooms and a café. A mezzanine has been built for quiet desk work.

The lobby is flanked by two stone staircases, both of which were found to have shattered under the weight of the collapsed roof. One has been restored; the other cleaned; its broken treads left as a sculptural, shattered spiral. “That’s the theme of this building,” says Palin. “Letting it speak for what it’s been through.”

The furniture is chic and expensive. Someone has accidentally left a window open, and pigeons are flapping around the pristine timber ceiling, which sends Palin into panic. “I’m worried about the furniture,” he says. “If it gets on the upholstery, it’s £1k worth of damage.”

The Architect’s Journal once described Palin’s plan to save the ruined church as “somewhere between visionary and insane”. Seven years later, he is about to prove them wrong. “The madder a project is, the more exciting and interesting it becomes,” he says.

“Sheppey is rough and ready, tougher certainly than [nearby] Deal and Whitstable, which are fairly chi-chi. But this is about attracting business and industry; it’s not focused on being a destination for Londoners.”

The advisory service will be run by the Kent Foundation, an established mentoring and support charity for young entrepreneurs. Many local young people already run technology micro-businesses in fields such as web design, app development and social media marketing – highly mobile businesses with comparatively low start-up costs that can grow quickly with the right support. The workspaces will be open to entrepreneurs of all ages.

Despite his different career path, Palin says he inherited his work ethic from his famous father. But he credits Helen, his mother, with the familial stability he grew up with, compassion for others and a certain tenacity.

“A lot of what I’ve done here is just persuading people to do things, and I get that from her,” he says. “She was unpretentious, she helped keep my dad’s feet on the ground, and she could talk to anyone.”