Clearing out the Vestry

One of the small but very important parts of our project at All Saints Langport has been to clear out the Vestry at the far East end of the building.  The room has been used for storage since time immemorial and is a veritable treasure trove of documents and material culture exhibiting the life of a church (that's quite a cool way to describe a store room, eh?)

The original use of the room was for the incumbent priest of the church to change into his sacred vestments (robes and scarves), hence the name 'Vestry', and do the administration work attached to running a parish church, but in a lot of churches its regularly used as a storeroom now.  The Vestry is also traditionally where the married couple go straight after the ceremony to sign the marriage register, our's isn't the nicest of spaces to do that yet though!

Here are some 'before' image of the space:

... and here's how it looked 'after' we cleared out and cleaned up:

Much better!

Gems that we found included...

• The marble top of a tomb for James Heron, the architect who made changes to the church in the 18th century, originally located in the South Chapel, now used as a table top (complete with historic graffiti!)
• Lots and lots of very rich Bible bookmarks and altar cloths
• The very fragile Roll of Honour showing the names of soldiers from Langport who died in World War One. We'd like to put it on display eventually, once it's been conserved and looked after by the CCT
• A book recording all the weddings at the church between 1722 and 1822

(We'll be showing off more of our discoveries at the Community Archive Exhibition events in 2013)

Our plan is for New Saints to be able to use this room for committee meetings and a small amount of document storage, but it also means that room is now a usable and comfortable part of the building, available for other users.

Whilst we were doing the clear-out our blue sky thinking included installing a phone line, letterbox and wifi (as well as a lot of heaters and insulation) to turn the Vestry into a real office for the New Saints, or space that could be rented out on a daily basis as hotdesking space... what do you think?