Inside the chapel

The iron gates that give onto the main street, so long padlocked, were open that day and the big arched double front doors ajar. Its a stunningly beautiful beautiful front. A long narrow tarmac path leads between drystone walls to a big palin gritstone facade. Above the doors was a great elegant swan-necked lamp, above that a round window and either side two tall arched windows.

Inside, wooden panelling made a narrow entrance hall with stairs on either side curving up to the gallery. Directly opposite the doors was a double-door hatch in the panelling – the coffin door, allowing coffins to come straight in through the front door and be rolled over the backs of the pews. Either side of this hatch narrow double doors lined with maroon baize lead into the main hall. For the first time we smelled the chapel’s own smell a compound of sunshine, dust, 200 years of face powder and Sunday best clothes.

Long pews ran down the centre, with ranks of shorter pews either side all facing a dias railed and covered in red carpet. On the far wall a great ornate painting ‘Enter his courts with praise’ scrolled across the top of a vase of lillies supported by angels. The lovely lady remembered as a child the painting being done in the 1930s. Tall arched windows either side were edged with red patterned ‘flash’ glass.

To the left was a beautiful organ, its lovat green pipes painted in scrolled red and gold patterns. On the right the vestry, two walls of wooden panelling enclosing deeply cut opaque glass created a corner room where, presumably, the preacher changed. The pulpit in the centre had already gone.

I was deeply touched by how welcoming and cheerful the lovely lady was and always had been to us. If my whole life had been bound up in this chapel the way hers has, I doubt I could have remained so cheerful while it was stripped and sold. But perhaps the years of decline and struggle to keep the building going had absorbed all the regret and sadness. She walked with two sticks because she was waiting for a knee operation and the effort of keeping the building going must have been a great burden.

Our first visit to the Chapel

It was a sunny Saturday morning in July 2000. The phone rang. It was someone from Main Street chapel. The chapel was going up for sale and they need to clear the building. Would Grimsdale, as a woodworker, be interested in making an offer for the pews? No, but we’d be dead keen to look round the building.
Grimsdale and I were still separate items then, living in his house at the top of the village. My house in a village across the valley had been rented out for a year, not wanting to burn my boats too hastily. But a few months back I had put it on the market, and that same morning had shown round the couple who were to buy it.

So if either of us was going to buy the chapel, it would be me, G’s cash all being tied up in his house.

We walked down the hill to the chapel. The door was open and inside, the lovely lady, one of only three left in the congregation (all old ladies and Edith was in a home), was waiting to show us round. Her mum and dad had been married in the chapel, she herself had been christened here, her husband buried from here. I had thought she might be sad, or even resentful that the chapel had to go, but she was kind and welcoming and everything took a long time because she loves to talk.

The last service had been a funeral in August 1999, and the lovely lady came in regularly to play the organ and keep it going. She was getting around with two sticks, so was happy to let us wander around. The sun poured in through the 17 great windows, she played ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ and we decided we wanted to buy the chapel.

How it all began

One winter Sunday 7 or 8 years ago we walked across the rough grass of the old leadmining area and talked about the chapel as it appeared in the distance. Looming above the lane and the houses around it, the grey rendered walls were grim in the darkening afternoon. But that’s the back view.

The front, built of pinkish gritstone, has an altogether brighter look although many drivers race past the ramshackle iron gates and hardly notice the rundown old chapel set back at the end of of a long path.

We knew it would be coming up for sale some time. Wouldn’t it be great to buy it and convert it? There’d be space for a workshop, we could open a restaurant, a gallery, a cinema. Wouldn’t it be fun? Wonder what will happen to it?

Basement windows

There are six windows in the basement (formerly used as a schoolroom, venue for theatricals, dances, bandpractice, choir practice etc). Grimsdale restored these, ooh, ages ago, they were finished in January 2002. Detailed pictures of them on his website, see Blogroll on the right (Jacob Butler’s Joinery site)

2007 is windows year

View from the back of the chapel, looking through one of the long windows (left: to the round window at the front. Right: winter scene)

There are 10 windows this size to replace, though only 2 have the red coloured flash glass.

A lot of moving around upstairs yesterday. Grimsdale’s put 2 workbenches end-to-end along the chapel ready to start making the first big window.

‘There’s no escape,’ he said. ‘Got to start now.’
However, so far today he’s been down to water his brussel sprouts, now he’s trying to buy a catalogue for the Gaudier-Breszka exhibition we saw in Sheffield, then there’s coffee to make.

Windows were Grimsdale’s speciality for 25 years. ‘Sash windows, panel doors and all period joinery’ read the late lamented Peugeot van.

Since the rest of 2007 is going to be all windows, maybe it’s time for some window background.

There are 17 all told. One round one in the front centre

Progress so far

The roof’s been repaired.
The dry rot in the basement’s been dealt with.
The basement is insulated, plastered and painted.
We’ve got a shower.
We’ve got 4 rooms in the basement: living room kitchen with multi-fuel stove, bedroom with en suite (shower, toilet, washbasin),
the big room (with books and computers), hall
And we’ve got a garden.