Between 1837 and 1858, Charles Barry (1795-1860) was responsible for the rebuilding of the new Palace of Westminster which had been destroyed by fire in 1834. He and the designer Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852) gathered together an important collection of casts taken from various wood carvings in English medieval churches, and from the choir stalls of Amiens cathedral to give to the carvers employed for the restoration true examples of gothic art. An inventory made in 1859 of the Thames Bank workshops, where wood carvings for the New Palace were manufactured, listed 7,499 plaster casts. This suggests that the art workmen were surrounded by innumerable examples of medieval sculptures. (A.Wedgwood 1984, p.68).

The casts from Amiens were taken in 1847 under Pugin's supervision by a team of cast makers sent to Amiens by M. Jacquet, the cast maker at the Louvre. The authorisation had been granted by the French Ministre de la Justice et des Cultes, through the intermediary of the Duc of Broglie, the French ambassador in London. (Archives de la Somme, 3 V 32). The operation triggered a strong reaction from the Société des Antiquaires de Picardie, a society of antiquarians, who alerted the authorities of the inherent risk of casting. However, Pugin managed to collect more than 500 casts of the stalls: '45 figures, 76 pendants, 23 details of niche and pedestal, 140 pieces of running enrichments, &c…' (see the Register of Reproduction of the South Kensington Museum, vol.1, 1862-1867).

This collection of sources was stored at the Thames Bank Workshops until it was transferred by the Board of Works to the Department of Science and Art at the South Kensington Museum in 1862. At the end of the 1860s the collection was lent to the Royal Architectural Museum, from whence it returned once again to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1916.