St Mary Redcliffe Tower Tours Feasibility Study

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guidelines. But the visitors are allowed to walk as far as the fire wall at the crossing and to look over the parapet at the west end. To a lesser extent, visits to the Belfry have been organised. The party takes the stairs (stairway B) through a door off the walkway over the west door, up to the ringing room. The clock mechanism is well displayed in its cabinet through a glazed window. The bell ropes hang in a circle in the middle of the room. There is a model bell mounted on the wall, to demonstrate ringing. The handbells are in a glass fronted cabinet. The ascent to the bell chamber is limited to six people at once. The staircase leads to a ladder of seven steel rungs, thence on to a landing next to the eleventh bell, which is the second largest bell. When this bell is rung, it sweeps an arc encompassing most of this landing. There is no barrier between the floor of the landing and the sheer drop to the roof of the ringing room. The visitor proceeds on to the gantry above the rest of the bells (except for the extra treble bell, which is now at eye level.) A[er the eleventh bell landing, the gantry has a balustrade and kick board all round, except for an opening on to the ladder leading down to the bells. The opening is closed with a chain shackled to the handrail. The electric ligh@ng is ample and all six visitors can occupy the gantry at once. The route back down follows the same two staircases and west gallery walkway. Very occasionally, small par@es (maximum of six) have been escorted up beyond the belfry to the base of the spire. I will men@on this again later. Dan’s Proposal Dan proposes a one way tour of those hard to reach parts of the Church, both above and below floor level. As discussed above, a one way route helps with Health and Safety (H and S) and makes the tour more efficient. However in SMR's case, each high part is isolated from the others: to progress from one to the next requires first a return to a lower level level. What is more, each high part has only one stairway. The only excep@on to this is the roof of the Lady Chapel. Thus, the nave roof has just one stairway (A) from ground level. The door to the stairway is at the west end of the south aisle. The belfry and tower has just one stairway (B), which does not actually reach ground level. Instead , it ends at a doorway onto the walkway over the great west door. The route of descent then runs south along this walkway to a door opening onto stairway (A). The <strong>St</strong>rongroom A doorway in the north wall of the Lady Chapel opens onto a newel stair which leads up to the Lady Chapel roof and down to a small lobby. The threshold of this doorway is on the wall bench round the chapel, which amounts to a 45cm step up from the floor. A massive fire door on s@ff hinges opens from the lobby into the strongroom. This small windowless rectangular chamber of plain stone walls is mostly lined with bookshelves. The shelves are stacked with old ledgers, minutes and accounts. A door in the east wall of the lobby opens onto the processional way under the Lady Chapel. 4
The Lady Chapel Roof The staircase in the north wall of the Lady Chapel, which leads down to the strongroom also leads up to the roof. The space above the vault is not visible from the stairs, but there is a hatch in the low pitched roof which lets the visitor see the vault including the capstone. A visitor interested in visi@ng the roof of an historic Mediaeval Church might be delighted with the experience of the Lady Chapel roof. A tourist wan@ng a view of Bristol from a high vantage point, might likewise be pleased. But I think that a visit to the roof of the Nave will beNer meet those needs. The strongroom beneath the Lady Chapel is of no interest to the general visitor. The North Porch A door in the east side of the inner north porch leads to the upper levels. It passes a passage to the wall walk in the outer north porch. This walkway has no parapet and is out of bounds to all visitors. The stairway climbs to a chamber called the Easter Vestry over the inner north porch. This contains a quaint garderobe and a traceried opening giving a view across the west end of the nave. Above this level, the visitor can climb to the ChaNerton Room. This is a spacious chamber, well lit by its mul@ aspect windows. Further ascent leads to the roof of the North Porch. This roof has a shallow pitch up from a transverse guNer which bisects the roof east to west. The <strong>Tower</strong> The tower roof forms a square, but unlike Bath Abbey and the other tower tours men@oned earlier, SMR has a spire, which arises from the tower. The base of the spire occupies most of the roof. A narrow walkway runs in a gully on the four sides of the roof perimeter. This gully is two feet wide; it is flanked by the spire on the inside and a parapet with trefoil openings on the outside. At each corner a turret blocks the way and prevents simple progress around the roof perimeter, but these turrets do have doorways connec@ng adjacent walkways. The turrets each contain a spiral staircase, all but one of which is blocked further down before it reaches the ringing room below. Only the one in the south east corner allows ascent from the ringing room to the turret above, where opposite doorways open on to the walkways. But the stair rises in a spiral as it passes these doors, so the level of each pair of doorways is unequal and does not correspond to the walkway beyond. A short flight of steps up from the walkway to the turret door nego@ates this disparity. The parapet is only 60cms high where the turret door opens onto the east walkway. The parapet flanking the door to the south walkway is ample, however. Any aNempt to walk all round the spire, following the perimeter gully, meets the same problem at each turret. Either the door into the turret or that out to the next walkway will be flanked by a very low parapet - at some places, only 30cms high. A grab rail has been mounted opposite the parapet of the east gully where steps climb to the south east turret door. This is in fact a stainless steel cable which is on the side away from the sheer drop. The east walkway is obstructed by a raised threshold to a doorway into the spire. This again diminishes the rela@ve height of the parapet so a metal rail has been screwed to the parapet to compensate. 5
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Page 9 and 10: Appendix 2 St Mary Redcliffe CHURCH

St Mary Redcliffe Tower Tours Feasibility Study

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