St Saviour's is a church firmly rooted in Community life. For generations it has met and served the needs of those in the parish and surrounding area. To maintain it's active and integral part in meeting these needs internally the church needs to be updated to provide more adaptable and functional space for community and church groups using the space.
There is very much a sense that the time is right for us to push forward. This blog is intended to chronicle our progress and also be a point of information regarding progress, events and activities. If you want to find out more about the project please come to the launch on Sunday at 12pm at St Saviour's Church.
The people of Bath, and in particular those of Larkhall, Grosvenor and Fairfield Park have been blessed with a great building, St Saviour's Church, in which to meet together and worship God. Now 180 years old, originally this Church was designed as one vast space capable of enabling over a 1000 people to worship God together. It has a huge gallery which could sit hundreds. But today, the sides of the gallery are unusable, as they do not meet modern fire regulations, and hence the gallery rarely used, other than for storage.
ReplyDeleteThe west end of the church was separated off from the rest of the Church in the 1970’s by glass walls to form the Fellowship Centre. This is a useful open space, which is used for many activities, including crèche, Sunday school activities for the various age groups of children and youth, fair trade sales, week day lunches for the elderly, etc. This space has to perform many different jobs, often concurrently, and is a lot less than ideal, lacking proper storage, effective means of sub-division, or sound insulation from the main church. In the 1990s the need was identified for more rooms to enable parallel activities to occur. Many options were discussed, including building outside, reusing the crypt, etc., but the Church community settled on the concept of making new rooms above the fellowship centre, and moving forward the gallery to accommodate these. Using the great height inside the church, three floors of rooms could be accommodated, and the use of the gallery restored.
We also decided to open up the main part of the church by replacing pews with chairs, carpeting and under floor heating. The kitchen was to be moved from the west door to restore the Church’s original entrance. Funds were sought and raised, and the first phase to open up the main part of the church was completed in 2002. However, there were insufficient funds to complete the rooms above the fellowship centre. Much expenditure and work was then required to replace and make safe the stone parapets on the church roof.
So now we are ready to go for it. To enable our vision to establish flexible room space for the plethora of activities that occur, and we would want to occur, in our great church building, for the community who worship at the church, those who will worship in the future, and for the greater community of north east Bath too – as a venue for drama, concerts, meetings, keeping fit – to deepen the links between groups of people within the Church, and to witness to the wider community that St Saviour’s is a lively community of caring people, and the building is a good place to go.
Our project will reinvigorate the building, as relevant to the needs of our and future generations. We are now committed to raising the approximately half million to bringing this vision into fruition. We hope you might come to feel the same way.