Canynges Society Annual Gazette 2016

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Winning Scheme presents compelling solution Purcell, the Bristol-based architectural practice, presented the winning scheme in the recent competition which sought conceptual ideas for the development of the church precinct in the coming years and which would form the basis of a Heritage Lottery bid to raise funds to realise the scheme. Dan Talkes, Senior Architect at Purcell, outlines the inspiration and thinking behind their ideas for this exciting scheme. In 1574, Elizabeth I declared St Mary Redcliffe to be ‘The Fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England’. To coincide with the 450th anniversary of this statement, the St Mary Redcliffe Project seeks to undo the post-war planning decisions that have isolated the church, to repair its context and to relocate the church at the physical, spiritual and social heart of its community. Purcell are delighted to have been selected to assist the church in realising this vision. As Dan Tyndall has said, ‘We searched across the globe but found our architects around the corner’. Indeed, working from studios in King Street, Bristol, we have a long-standing involvement in Redcliffe, members of our team having lived, gone to school and worshipped in the area. Two of our team, Rob Gregory and Dan Talkes, have also tutored architectural projects in Redcliffe, at Bath University and The Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, respectively, and Rob was also a key member of the Redcliffe Futures Group. We therefore bring to the project an intellectual understanding of the church’s historic importance and a personal understanding of both the particular challenges of Redcliffe and the unique potential of this project to repair not only the church’s physical context but also to embed it within the aims and aspirations of its community. Our approach is rooted in history. Through analysis, we peeled back the post-war layers to understand how radically the church’s setting has changed and particularly how the dual carriageways of Redcliffe Way and Redcliffe Hill have isolated the church, creating dual faultlines. Our concept seeks to repair these by creating new ‘stitches’: © Richard Carmen first an east-west stitch that connects the Redcliffe Caves, Redcliffe Wharf, the Quaker Burial Ground, the Hermitage, Chatterton House and, ultimately, Temple Meads, to reintegrate the church in its historic context: then, a north-south stitch that links the Redcliffe Children’s Centre, St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School, Somerset Square, The Ship Inn, Pump Lane and St Thomas Street to forge a new connection between the more affluent communities of north Redcliffe and the relative deprivation of south Redcliffe. These stitches consciously unite not on the church’s crossing, but rather on a new community garden generated to its north-side. Located on the exact footprint of the former north-side churchyard, and adopting the ‘lost’ historic alignments that became instrumental to the form of our proposals, this community garden reestablishes the church’s mediaeval enclosure. This was critical to our concept since, as residents of Redcliffe, we had all experienced just how experientially threatening it could be to access the church, its great beauty and near cathedral-like scale, whilst undeniably contributing to its significance, also presenting a potential barrier to its principal function as a parish church. However, during the competition process, we surrounded ourselves with historic images of Redcliffe and, from these, we noted how, until relatively recently, the church was seen not in toto, but rather through a series of tantalising, more human-scale encounters that had the potential to encourage more personal engagement. Indeed, our proposal is underpinned by the desire to increase the physical, social and spiritual accessibility of St Mary Redcliffe, 4
ANNUAL GAZETTE <strong>2016</strong> the scheme achieving the completion of the processional way to provide a fully accessible route around the church, for the first time in its history. On the north-side, this route engages with a new welcome building that, conceived as a permeable extension of the street, houses a combination of visitor welfare facilities, meeting rooms, clergy offices and an exhibition space that, via its spectacular views to the north porch and spire, provides a fitting location for the display and interpretation of the – currently largely unseen – collection of church treasures, including the mediaeval armoire and an early fire engine! Crucially, though, the scheme recognises that the principal function of St Mary Redcliffe will remain a place of worship and therefore proposes a semi-external gate lodge that enables worshippers to access the church without encounter with the more secular functions, such as the café and shop. © Richard Carmen Beyond the gate lodge, the processional way passes below the Lady Chapel to connect to the south churchyard. The competition brief hinted at a total of two buildings, but we felt that a north-side welcome building and a south-side community building would serve only to highlight the fault margins we were seeking to repair and, instead, proposed an interlinked series of buildings, with an extremely modest pavilion within the south churchyard that, in recognition of the importance of this place, weaves between the existing mature trees and touches the ground very lightly. It provides a dual aspect multi-use hall that opens to both the church and a new community square that, formed outside the historic and socially-important Ship Inn, also links to the final building in the sequence – the community building. Located upon the existing Methodist site, it redefines the site’s edges to create a positive and rewarding streetscape that reinforces the proposed north-south stitch and recognises the potential value of Prewett Street as a ‘high street’ for the Redcliffe community. The building represents the physical manifestation of St Mary Redcliffe’s outreach, providing a night shelter for the homeless, workshops and office spaces to assist social enablement, and a series of communal spaces to provide a contemporary friary for Faithspace, the site’s current occupiers. Finally, as a reinforcement of the importance of both history and place, each of the linked buildings utilises a palette of materials that reflects the ‘lost’ industrial processes of Redcliffe, rising from a base of red concrete that references the ‘red cliff’ and culminating in a lantern of ceramics and glass, a highly perforate and luminous beacon, symbolising the hope, ambition and energy of the Redcliffe Community. © Richard Carmen Dan Talkes BA (Hons) CAP BArch (Hons) DipArch Associate, Purcell 5
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Canynges Society Annual Gazette 2016

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