WORCESTER Cathedral is to be given £106,000 to carry out essential work that will bring a 20-year restoration programme to a close.

Staff at the cathedral said they were delighted to have got the money from the cathedral grants scheme run by English Heritage and the Wolfson Foundation.

The money will be put towards repairing masonry in the cloisters, one of the failing buttresses and a wall in the southern part of the nave.

Hereford Cathedral is also set to receive £94,000 for masonry repairs to the south aisle and nave clerestory.

Worcester Cathedral steward Les West said: “We are very pleased to have received the grant. The cathedral always needs maintanence work.

“It’s more about maintaining the fabric now rather than major restoration.”

Mr West said the work, which will start in April and must be finished by the end of March 2010, will be carried out by the cathedral’s very own team of local stonemasons, which includes one apprentice. It is one of only eight cathedrals which employs its own stonemason workforce.

Professor Sir Barry Cunliffe, interim chairman of English Heritage, said that maintaining cathedrals was important.

“Cathedrals are some of our country’s most imposing and beautiful buildings,” he said.

“The excellent craftsmanship demonstrated in these places of worship is something we must strive to preserve for generations to come.”

Worcester Cathedral was founded in the year 680. Saint Oswald built another cathedral in 983 and established a monastery attached to it.

The last Anglo-Saxon bishop Saint Wulfstan started to rebuild the cathedral in 1084.

It was completed in four major stages over a period of 400 years.

During Anglo-Saxon times, Worcester was one of the most important monastic cathedrals in the country. It was a centre of great learning, which continued into the later Middle Ages, when Worcester’s Benedictine monks went to university to study a variety of subjects, including theology, medicine and law. The monastery continued until 1540 when Henry VIII dissolved it.

The cathedral was badly damaged in the civil wars and a major programme of rebuilding was required after the restoration of Charles II.

Both King John and Prince Arthur, the ill-fated heir of Henry VII who died at the age of 15, are buried at Worcester Cathedral.

The only existing copy of William Shakespeare’s marriage licence to Anne Hathaway is on display there.