Architectural heritage - restoring the faith

The significant grants announced last month towards the repair and restoration of seventeen churches reveal the increasing recognition of the historic value of the finest Catholic architecture

Preston, Rochdale, Great Yarmouth, Ramsgate, Newport on the Isle of Wight: these are some of the most deprived towns in England – and they all have magnificent Catholic churches. Maintaining them is a challenge, never more so than in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many parishes have understandably placed restoration programmes on the back burner and diverted their scarce resources to supporting those in need

The latest round of grants from Historic England (part of the government’s Culture Recovery Fund) has gone some way towards getting these urgent repairs back on track. Seventeen out of 30 applications from the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales have been approved and will get a total of £2.9 million from the £35 million allocated to Historic England’s capital works ­programme of grants for repairs to Grade I and Grade II* listed buildings that are open to the public. Last year Catholic churches achieved a similar result when they were awarded £3 million from a £34 million pot.

The bishops’ conference’s patrimony committee had less than three weeks to prepare its bid and so gave preference to applications that were “oven-ready” and met the criteria. The committee will distribute the money and oversee works, which must be completed by 31 March 2022. The individual grants amount to 80 per cent of the total cost of the repairs, with the churches borrowing the remainder from their dioceses or embarking on urgent fundraising.

The grants are further evidence of the patrimony committee’s giant strides in gaining recognition for the finest Catholic churches. It works closely with Historic England which part-funded Taking Stock, a review of the churches of England and Wales that resulted in many more Catholic churches being listed and upgraded, thus making them eligible for grants. Increasingly, it is the laity leading fundraising efforts. Awareness is growing that applications need the input of experienced conservation architects or surveyors who understand historic churches and ensure they are restored sympathetically. None of this comes cheap, which is why the support of the diocese is so important. Vice chair of the patrimony committee, Sophie Andreae, says it is telling that those dioceses that invest in this expertise are particularly successful in attracting grants for their churches.

With this latest round of grants, Historic England said it wanted to spread the money as widely as possible and expressed a preference for new projects. All but five of the successful Catholic schemes are new while the rest need one more tranche of funds to complete existing restoration programmes. The Catholic list is varied and inclusive. It takes in St Thomas of Canterbury (1792), Newport, Isle of Wight, one of the first churches to be built after the 1791 Second Relief Act allowed Catholics to build public places of worship under licence. There are masterpieces of the Gothic Revival, including three cathedrals, the unique 1950s shrine complex at Aylesford Priory, Kent and, for the first time, a historic house, Harvington Hall.

Unusually, two former Anglican churches now in Catholic use are included: St Paul, Alnwick (1845) and Our Lady, Tavistock (1867), as well Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen in Lynford, the only Catholic church leased to the Norfolk Churches Trust. None of the spectacular concrete and glass churches of the 1960s are on the list, but none applied for funds. A deserving candidate, among many, would have been the Church of the Good Shepherd (1963), Woodthorpe, Nottingham, designed by Gerard Goalen with stained glass by Patrick Reyntiens, which is seriously affected by concrete decay.

All 17 beneficiaries are fascinating buildings, but here’s the lowdown on five of the best, with the size of the grant allocated.

St Walburge (1854), Preston, Lancashire, £252,210
Victorian High Gothic and startlingly ori­ginal: the church has an immense timber roof, modelled on West­minster Hall, with statues of saints perched at the ends of the hammer-beams. Pevsner called it a bad dream. As a reminder of the ambition of the architect J.A. Hansom, and his Jesuit masters, it is second to none and Grade I listed. St Walburge’s sparkling white limestone spire – at 309 feet the tallest of any parish church in England – features prominently on the Preston skyline. The roof has never been replaced. Water penetration is threatening, among other things, the war memorial, a giant triptych with a fifteenth-century rood salvaged from a French abbey destroyed in the Great War. The grant will pay for a third of the roof to be done. St Walburge’s is the shrine church of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, which celebrates Mass in the Tridentine Rite. The group has launched a sponsor-a-slate scheme to find the £75,000 they need to raise for the work.

Quarr Abbey (1912), Ryde, Isle of Wight, £229,817
Is it a mosque? You may wonder when you first glimpse the conical tower from the ferry as it approaches Ryde from the mainland. But then you see the cross and realise that this is a Christian building, in fact, the abbey church of the Solesmes Benedictines at Quarr. The monk architect, Dom Paul Bellot, was inspired by the Moorish architecture of Cordoba and Seville. He used Belgian bricks in a colour palette of red with tinges of pink, orange and yellow. The church is a veritable Mount Everest and maintenance is costly. This grant will pay to replace the flat roofs above the chapels on either side of the high altar and repair leaded windows in the south aisle. Quarr has become a popular heritage attraction with visitors welcomed to the church, gardens and impressive ruins of what was once an import­ant Cistercian monastery.

Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen (1878), Lynford, Norfolk, £119,956
It is a remarkable fact that the grand church of Our Lady of the Assumption and the English Martyrs in Cambridge was built from the proceeds of the invention of the lifelike glass eyes on Victorian dolls that open and shut. The same is true of this little gem accessible only via a forest track. It was built by Yolande Lyne-Stephens, a former French ballerina and widow of Stephens Lyne-Stephens who patented the said invention. The couple settled at nearby Lynford Hall; after her husband’s death, Mme Lyne-Stephens decided to build herself a chapel, commissioning Henry Clutton, a Catholic convert specialising in French Gothic. The church is beautifully finished with great attention to detail. The external flint, for instance, is not just knapped but split into roughly circular pieces of equal size. The buttresses include rare early Romanesque figurative panels repurposed from an unknown source. The inside is richly decor­ated with fine stained glass, a Pugin-style stone altar and reredos, and Italian ceramic floor. The church has the occasional Mass and is leased to the Norfolk Churches Trust. Currently closed to visitors, it will reopen once repairs have been ­completed.

St Barnabas Cathedral (1844), Nottingham, £25,088
Somewhere under many layers of paint lies A.W.N. Pugin’s original decoration for ­Nottingham’s cathedral church. In all likelihood there is his characteristic stencil work with angels bearing scrolls, roundels, chevrons and fleur de lys, all in ­dazzling colours with liberal use of gold leaf. Nottingham Trent University has been trying to uncover these wonders using laser scanners and traditional paint-scraping techniques. The cathedral had one lot of lottery money for this research and is hoping for another once it has established how to restore Pugin’s original vision. In the meantime, this latest grant will pay for the crucial repairs to the stone bases of columns damaged by rising damp from the underground rivers that run underneath the building.

Harvington Hall (1578), Harvington, Kidderminster, £117,855
This is billed as the “House of Secrets” for its connection with the intrigue and dangers that faced recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England. It has seven priest holes, the most ingenious of which are thought to be the work of Nicholas Owen, master carpenter and serv­ant of the Jesuit superior, Fr Henry Garnet. The manor house was built by Humphrey Pakington, a Catholic who inherited the estate from his great-uncle, Sir John Pakington, a wealthy lawyer. Since the 1920s it has belonged to the Archdiocese of Birmingham but it is only in the last 18 months that major efforts have been made to attract visitors using a revamped website and social media. There is free entry to the grounds, a popular guided tour and a programme of events going into the winter. The grant will pay for repairs to the two bridges that cross the moat and provide access to the house. Next, it is hoped money will be found to restore rare Elizabethan wall paintings.

OTHER BUILDINGS AWARDED GRANTS

St John the Baptist, Rochdale (1927), £182,442. Urgent repairs to the west transept. Syro-Malabar Cathedral of St Alphonsa (formerly St Ignatius), Preston (1833), £218,202. Repairs to south roofs, windows and stonework. Our Lady, Tavistock (1867), £314,680. Repair and conserve tower. St Mary, Great Yarmouth (1850), £298,132. Roof repairs. Shrine of St Augustine, Ramsgate (1845-52), £168,627. Repairs to the cloister. Cathedral Church of Our Lady and St Peter of Alcantara, Shrewsbury (1856), £113,992. Repair and conserve east window. Aylesford Priory (also known as The Friars), Kent (1242 and 1950s), £172,893. Roof repairs. St Thomas of Canterbury, Newport (1792), £52,800. Roof repairs. Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Manchester (1871), £177,444. Repairs to side chapels. St Paul, Alnwick (1845), £117,976. Re-roof east end. St Cuthbert, Bradford (1891), £136,800. Roof and masonry repairs. St Alban, Macclesfield (1841), £172,228. Repairs to roof, cloister and clerestory glazing.

Elena Curti is author of Fifty Catholic Churches to See Before You Die (Gracewing, £14.99), and is a former deputy editor of The Tablet.