Introduction

Everyone has their own local Cathedral, the diocese they were born in. For me it was Lincoln. Only when you climb these buildings do you realise they are actually giant works of craft. The Medieval masons understood and abstracted nature in their work.
 
Nearly everywhere has a great church, even in Oxford the great church came before the colleges, they always have a relationship to the growth of a place even if it is not immediately evident.

One object within a great church can tell a national picture, such as St Augustine’s Chair and its existence as a political statement of history.
 
The World Monuments Fund funds a variety of sites and manages the World Monuments Watch to raise advocacy for sites in need. This can include Bolivian mission churches, mud castles and rice terraces along with Selby Abbey, which struggled in the shadow of York Minster. Old industries in York had declined and income in the city had declined. The WMF identified the decay of masonry and this was repaired where needed. They have also done small works in Westminster Abbey. In Winchester they are assisting in the repair of high alter casing and in St Albans they have assisted with surveys. In St Pauls WMF has assisted in working with American Express to fund ‘Oculus’.

 

Carol Heidschuster – Lincoln Cathedral

Masonry repairs and related capital campaigns

The great thing about Cathedrals is that as buildings they are still used for the purpose they were built for. They are a teaching resource for architecture students and offer a sense of stability. At Lincoln they have a continuous programme of repairs ongoing. The Cathedral is still 15 years from even being watertight, and there is rot due to lead fail. They have high level masonry issues. They don’t want to have to have a knee jerk reaction to maintenance needs. The quinquennial report identified 25 years worth of work. Lincoln has masons and traditional craftspeople onsite. Smaller projects such as the boxed sculptures on the front cost around half a million but as are stable these are not a priority.

Repair costs continue to rise, with about 20% extra on contracts as a result of health and safety needs. They do an annual high level abseil inspection to remove loose masonry and take photos of unreachable areas. They found that on a tower near the main entrance they were removing a lot of stone and there was a real risk of it dropping on someone. They had to be objective about the process and the decision about things such as re-carving sculptures has to be made taking into account their 100 year cycle, as well as how original the statues are.

The scaffolding alone for this project cost quarter of a million. They discovered Portland cement in the turrets, as it is stronger than the stone it causes cracking. Stone shedding is a real issue for conservation. They created details photogrammetric drawings of the tower and did detailed structural recording, with coloured diagrams showing different mortar mixes and stages. They also left information on why they did what they did and what materials used as why so that people coming after would know why changes were made.

Very cold temperatures of up to -15 have caused further damage to the stones.

The 10 year plan for the Cathedral comes in at £16 million, with £2.5 million for the turrets alone. The average budget for works at Lincoln is £1.3 million and the overall budget for the Cathedral is £3.4 million, a huge amount of money to raise.

They have launched a new campaign using features like turret shaped moneyboxes. Launched in 2010 for sponsorship and have £300,000 so far. They also have corporate sponsors (Co-op, Lindum, and University of Lincoln). They have a business fundraising group where they invite local businesses to advise them how to take their fundraising forward with corporates, especially those who benefit directly from a Cathedral in the City, such as those using it as part of their logo and tourism.

The loss of EH will be an issue as have had lots of support from them.

The HLF Place of Worship scheme changes to being all HLF funded but will have more in the pot.

Lincoln has a real emphathis on training; they balance capital funds with investment in training. Without investment in capital there won’t be sites available for training.

In 2010 Lincoln was put on the Heritage at Risk register by English Heritage. They have a dedicated works department and training and outreach scheme. They are building a Heritage Skills Centre, due to be open at the end of 2012.

On 21st May they have an event on the 1000 years of traditional crafts. It will have craft stalls and lots of demonstrations.

Despite the uplift in HLF funding there is due to be a reduction in £700 million in funding from other sources for the heritage sector. 

Justin Cross – St Albans Cathedral

The ‘New Cloister Project’

St Albans is an organisation running at capacity. They have a drive for excellence and high quality, but poor facilities. This has led to lots of reviews of their premises. They have no major significant fabric issues. The bedrock of the place is pilgrim and worship, which has taken place on the site since the 3rd century. They tie this into the Story of St Alban himself. The sense of length of presence is important to what happens within the Cathedral. They want to promote the story. St Albans is also the largest covered area in Hertfordshire.

They have 1393 on their electoral roll and a regular congregation of 1000, as well as 180,000 visitors and 16000 school children visiting on top of this.

The AEC survey showed that people were visiting locally for religious reasons in the most part and any project must not risk this core audience.  

However there was a lack of core facilities and poor quality facilities that were there. As well as this the battle for multi use of spaces was an issue as well as tired interpretation which did not bring out key themes of the place. Storage was also an issue. They have been constantly fundraising for repairs and upgrading.

Unusually the city is to the North side of the cathedral, so the west end is not the main entrance. They also need portaloos for events. 2/3 of visitors are forced to go through the small door next to bins to enter the space.

Their nave project, going forward for HLF funding, is to improve physical and intellectual access into the Cathedral. This will entail putting in new external and internal signage, information and interpretation, ramps and lifts, new storage, retail and toilet provision.

They will create the infrastructure that will allow different groups to use the space, and add in more statues to create an increased sense of sanctuary.

They want to work closer with the local council on the vision for the city as a whole, when the council wrote their ‘vision’ they missed out on Cathedral entirely. They want to work together to make the city a proper tourist destination.

Working with the WMF they created an initial premises feasibility study, a topographical survey, a desk top archaeological assessment an ecological assessment and a tree survey. They also produced an educational development report, a business plan and an architect’s options appraisal before their first round bid. They aimed to integrate their education and informal learning teams into a single body who would deal with visitor learning, interpretation, exhibitions, lectures, seminars. They would use expertise across the different functions to do this. They want to dramatically increase the experience of the site and the public realm within the Cathedrals ownership. They also want to bring objects out of storage.

They are going through the feasibility process which showed that the school and visitor facilities were both inadequate (independent report) and that they needed a step change to grow.

New facilities have been designed to provide appropriate teaching space and an improved welcome. These are not by themselves financially sustainable so they have created a business model to become sustainable over the long term through increased community use of the new spaces.

They have also added in more provision for the song school and musicians. They aim to be a beacon of sustainability. They decided not to push against the flow to get entry into the west end but to make the most used entrance nicer.

The archaeological assessment helped deal with issues around the scheduled monument nature of the site.

They did a fund raising resources study to look at raising the £15 million needed for the total project, including consultation with the council, English Heritage, the Cathedrals Fabric Commission. Responses will inform the Chapter on the way forward. This will then enable them to go from the feasibility to the design stage, with the creation of a fund raising prospectus and a public launch.  

Anne Fletcher – St Paul’s Cathedral

Visitor management and interpretation

Anne is an Interpretation Consultant. Deals with Visitor Management with the aims of – welcome, efficiency, providing access to all, minimise queues, protect the building fabric and collections, encouraging flow around the building and supporting worship.

Visitors see St Pauls as an attraction and there is a tension between this and the mission.

They are working with WMF to look at spreading people around the building more and encourage people off the beaten path more. People buying a service are buying intangible activities (especially if charging). This is the experience economy; people will spend money on experiences but not on products in times of hardship. Need to take a commodity, create a service and turn it into experience e.g. Starbucks and Coffee.

Interpretation provides information, answers questions and is for the enjoyment and engagement of audiences. Most visitors see the cathedral through the interpretation of it and this is used to create an emotional response. Best book on heritage interpretation ‘Freeman Tilden, 1957 ‘Interpreting our Heritage’.

Only through understanding of heritage do we get appreciation and protection. Not just giving information but engaging people. Need them to realise the significance of place to understand the need to protect it.

Competing with other attractions e.g. cinema, football, Tower of London. They are in the business of providing a valuable experience, why not go to IKEA? Museums can be seen as hard work, elitist, for kids to go to school trips to in the week. Need to be entertaining and attract new audiences.

The interpretation strategy for St Pauls was 18 months going through the Chapter. They wanted to create good welcoming teams and visitor management, a good first impression. Did customer care training for specific job roles rather than rotating volunteers on all posts. The ticket desk in the nave gave the wrong first impression as it stopped immediate engagement with the Cathedral. Have added crypt visitor facilities to allow those with disabilities to see the panoramic views from the top of the Cathedral (the Oculus, below). They aim for physical, intellectual and virtual access for all audiences.

Started with market research and an audience development strategy, realised families were badly represented. Talked to staff, visitors, vergers, Dean, used the ideas they had to drive the project. There was a broad consensus for the way forward.

Audiences loved the breadth of history and the idea of chronology and events and significant people related to the cathedral. Some did not realise it was still a place of worship and the sense of mission was blurred to them. This was a big worry to St Pauls. St Pauls wanted the main vision to be the worship, so it was decided to take out the clutter from the church floor for this and make the interpretation audio passed rather than through panels so the sense of the space was not lost. Have used previously closed areas to tell stories to the public. The audio guides and the guided tours are both free and the audio comes in 11 languages and sign language and audio described. They were initially worried people would look at the screen and not at what was around them so they made it audio only in some areas, except for images of worship or weddings etc to show the cathedral in use.

Oculus has a 260 degree projection of events and of the view from the roof.

The entry fee (£29.50 for a family of four) at St Pauls has been a barrier to local family entry, although this is cheaper than Westminster. Families are unrepresented within their audiences. They need to give value for this money. 

Matthew Butler – Canterbury Cathedral

Stained glass conservation

Matthew is the fundraiser, and since 2006 has raised £6 million for the Cathedral to spend on urgent and necessary conservation work. There remains £37 million of conservation work still to carry out. They have raised £12 million so far towards this total and are looking at a £15 million lottery bid.

They have a lot of stained glass within the Cathedral. The miracle windows around the trinity chapel relate to Beckett's shrine. There is in total 400 square metres of stained glass. They have issues with weather and storm damage, blowing windows off settings.  

Victorians moved some other window glass into the Great South Window, but the glass is Romanesque. The South Oculus window is the largest Romanesque window of its date (1180s) in Europe.

The Great South window was first conserved in the 1970s. The whole window is held in by iron glazing bars. They have put in layers of protective glazing after experimenting with different types the glass needs to be ventilated so it does not trap moisture and so the temperature remains constant. Eventually used kiln distorted float glass.

The process is: remove glass, clean it up (Canterbury has its own glass studio), then consolidate it and return it, The South oculus had the complication of an original iron grille across it. This alone was £400,000 to preserve.

Did lots of monitoring of conditions and movement before any decision was made about the window. Discovered bell ringing caused the stones to move but then they moved back again afterwards.

They thought the windows were fixed but then a stone fell and nearly hit a tourist so the glass had to be removed again; it has taken 18 months to understand why and related to leaky medieval drains, movement of corner towers and Georgian interventions. This project, totally unexpected, now needs £750,000 to support it. They have created an exhibition of the glass which will be seen in the Getty in LA. The WMF has been supportive in its advice.  

John Crook – Winchester Cathedral

The High Altar Canopy and its Carvings

John is the Archaeological and Architectural Consultant to Winchester and an expert in early shrines.

He is working on a World Monument funded small scale project. They are preserving a baroque carved woodwork piece originally created for the great screen.

The seventeenth and eighteenth century High Altar at the Cathedral consisted of a Laudian (Anglican High Church) timber canopy surmounted with an ensemble of carved drapery, cartouche and naturalistic festoons in the style of English wood carver, Grinling Gibbons. A James Cave watercolour dated 1801 shows this ensemble in position. Since then, as a result of changes in liturgical practice and fashions, the canopy arrangement has been disassembled and scattered to different areas of the cathedral with the carved drapery and festoons hanging, largely unnoticed and in a worsening condition, below the south transept crossing arch.

Aspects of the original screen have been recycled as mirror surrounds. Elements are now being conserved and will be returned as in the picture above.

Evidence hunting: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

Some pictures of Winchester Cathedral