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?

Hunky Punk artist recruitment with SAW (with a deadline this Friday!)

Just a quick update about our art and community project about the Hunky Punks at All Saints Langport.

We're using some of our Heritage Lottery Fund grant, as well as match-funding from SAW to hire an artist to help us develop the project to run workshops in schools and the local communities. I'm bringing it up on the blog because if you're a textiles artist, and especially if you're under 25, there's an opportunity for you to work on this part of the project with us!  Check out the application form on SAW's website, and get filling in, the deadline's on Friday!! (I'm on the interview panel, eek!!)

The workshops will be designed for the attendees to learn how to make as many Hunky Punk sock monsters as they like (see previous blogpost's image) to take home and keep... providing that they're brought to the Hunky Punk toy product launch event at the church. 

Our aim is to have the church absolutely brimming with Hunky Punk sock monsters, all made by local people of all ages. (If you're interested in attending a workshop and creating your own Hunky Punks, keep checking back on the blog, or also follow our twitter feed to find out when and where they'll be!)

The serious bit behind this fun spectacle will be that by creating your own Hunky Punk, you'll learn a bit more about the stone Hunky Punks on the church, what they're for, why All Saints has so many, and the history of these particular Hunky Punks. What's not to enjoy?

New Saints Needs You!

A couple of things to update on this time.
First of all, our recruitment drive is well and truly kicking off - we're looking for young people (aged 16-25) who live in or around Langport and the surrounding area that are interested in gaining career skills and working to improve their local community. We're looking to increase the capacity of the core group of New Saints, so you would be required to attend fortnightly meetings (in the evening so they don't clash with school or work), and be able to give about 5hrs per fortnight of work towards the project.  If this is you, (or your children, grandchildren, neighbour, etc. etc.), get in touch!

This is our poster for recruitment - spread, share, reblog, retweet please!

Second update: we had a great meeting earlier in the week with Somerset Art Works (SAW), who are our partner for the Hunky Punk Toy part of the project. The plan at the moment (though this is subject to change depending on the artist that we hire to lead it) is to create kits for everyone and anyone to make 'sock monster' versions of our Hunky Punks, as well as making a good few of our own.  On top of this we hope to be running workshops in schools and for communities around Langport so that we can have a church full of Hunky Punk Toys for the launch event (full details of this are yet to be confirmed)

Whilst it is obvious that these sock monsters don't look too similar to our Hunky Punks (check out Walter for reference), there are (and can be) an awful lot of similarities. For example, all of our Hunky Punks are unique - we've got dragons, griffins, lions and other anonymous hellish creatures all looking different, either by design or by natural weathering, and each sock monster Hunky Punk that our project creates will be unique.  When we're creating our kits for making your own toy, we can substitute ears for horns, and arms for wings, or you can make a cat-like one look even more lion-y! The possibilities are endless.  Anyway, this is all at the planning stages, so I'm not allowed to get too excited as it all might change!

Third and final update: the build up for this one has been a long (long, long, long) time coming, but we finally have the first semblances of a New Saints website! At long last, that link on the right over there >>> will finally be live and send you to our brand spanking new website!

Here's a very tiny sneakpeek just for you lucky readers:

What do you think? I'm sure we'll be able to reveal more soon - and even more at our website launch event (another of our HLF funded events over the next year)

'Walter' the Hunky Punk, back in his rightful place

Last Friday the churchyard at All Saints Langport was echoing with applause and cheers as our brand new Hunky Punk (affectionately known whilst he was residing in the church porch as 'Walter') was cemented into place on the South wall of the building.

Walter has had a long journey from being a lump of stone with sketchmarks on in one of Corbel Conservation's stonemason workshops,

 
to occupying the South Porch and keeping an eye on the visitors,

 

to finally being winched up the scaffolding and manouevered back into place with one of the best views of the Levels you could possibly hope for!

We were lucky to have a front page photo on the Western Gazette last week in a build-up article for the event, and the reporters were there again on the day to write an article for the next issue!

The event was a great opportunity for the groups of people with vested interest in the building - New Saints, keyholders, the CCT, Corbel Conservation, and local Langportians to come together and celebrate the building, as well as discuss the exciting plans for the future!

For more photos of Walter's journey from sedimentary to elevated, have a look at the CCT's facebook photo album

July Update - Website, Recruitment and Partnerships, People using the building

I think we're definitely overdue a little update on the project from July!

So, last you saw us, we had submitted our HLF application.  In case you hadn't heard through twitter, or our newsletter, we were successful! We've now begun our 'Who made our church?' project with a lot of event planning, partnership brokerage, brief writing and consultant hiring!

One of the first things that we were able to do was start researching a good web design company to create our new website for us! You see that link over on the right that has said 'website: coming soon' for the whole of the project so far? Well now it really is coming soon!  We're really pleased to be working with Cosmic Ethical IT to build, design, and maintain our website, one of our HLF funded events is a website launch event, so watch this space!

We realised that with such a big project on our hands we're going to need a few more members of New Saints on the committee.  Our recruitment drive has been a mix of posters up around Langport, word of mouth through youth clubs and Scouts, and volunteering websites such as Do It.  If you, or someone you know might want to join New Saints (and is between 16 and 25), have a look at these forms and get back to us!

I've been very busy building some good strong partnerships for the project in July - Somerset Art Works are working with us to match fund and support a young artist project leader for our Hunky Punk Toy Project (Hunky Punks are the grotesques ornamenting the outside of the church, our project will work with SAW to make toy versions for local young people to make a fun connection to the building).

We've also recently had a very positive meeting with Bridgwater College's Business Studies Dept, to organise how we're going to work with the students as if we were their clients for the event management and marketing of our HLF funded events.  This will be a great opportunity for the students to work on 'live coursework', where the decisions they make have real ramifications and real rewards, rather than a hypothetical project like most students would work with.  We will also be sticking true to the philosophy of the project by utilising and building the skills of young people rather than relying on +25yr olds professionals.

Finally, I wanted to share some pictures of the recent creative use of the All Saints.  St Gilda's are a centre in Langport (just across the road from the church) that take young people from all across Europe and help them learn English language skills.  They use the church for summer schools every year, and this year they haven't disappointed! I really like the way they have re-used the space creatively, making different zones within the one big space:

Training

I'm really looking forward to hearing a responce from emails sent about training oppertunities with New Saints.

May Madness!

We've been a bit quiet on the blog front recently, but that's not for lack of activity.  The New Saints have been beavering away at a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) application; plans for events in the church to welcome in the local community; and ways to wow the Churches Conservation Trust's Trustees when they stop off at Langport on their tour of CCT churches.

...And all of this comes to a head in May!

We submitted our HLF application at the very start of April; they take 8-10 weeks to review applications, so we should be hearing their final decision at some point in May (the suspense is building already at Camp New SAints!)  This will provide us with funding for a series of events over the following 12 months to give the New Saints great experience in leading events, to strengthen ties with local institutions such as Huish Episcopi Sixth Form, Somerset Art Works, and the Langport and District History Society, get lots of people of all ages and backgrounds into the church to reignite the whole community's passion for the building, and allow us to speak to those members of the community to hear what they want and need in Langport, so that we can start planning new ways of using the building in future accordingly.

Our first (non-HLF-funded) public event is going ahead on the 12th May.  We're holding a cinema event in All Saints church, showing 'Toy Story 3'.  We chose this film because it's enjoyable for all ages (I'm certainly looking forward to it), so that children and their parents, and grandparents can get engaged, and there's very little to find offensive about it.  This is our amazing poster, designed by our very own Charlotte:

We're very grateful to SPAEDA, specifically Flora, who have worked with us to get this event off the ground and into reality.  Please come along and enjoy the show!

As I mentioned above we're getting our act together ready to welcome the CCT's Trustees to All Saints Langport toward the end of May.  I would like to think that the main exhibit will be ourselves - a group of young people passionate and active about seeing new uses happening in a CCT church, but we're also sorting out some displays using Prezi a really cool new display tool that will hopefully knock their socks off!

Stay tuned for a write up of the cinema night, hopefully with photos of a very full church and happy people!

The Limelight!

On Sunday the New Saints were at All Saints Langport to be filmed!  This was for a new promotional video, being made by the Regeneration Taskforce at the CCT.

It is a sign of very good things to come for All Saints Langport, as the film is only being made about the best, most interesting, and most promising of the Regeneration Taskforce's projects, and right from the start, the youth empowerment and regeneration project at Langport was on the cards!  There were a lot of new skills to learn that day - being interviewed on camera isn't as easy as it looks!

Joe’s thoughts about the filming….

I really enjoyed my filming experience for the CCT Regeneration Taskforce DVD..  The camera crew were a great laugh and a pleasure to work with;  all though having three stranger’s, a camera and lots of bright lights shining in my face was rather intimidating.  I almost felt like I was being questioned by the police.  I’m happy I attended though as I’ve never worked with a professional film crew before and it was very interesting.

Charlotte's thoughts about the filming….

I was super nervous when we started but the film crew we’re lovely and very good at what they did, which made the process a little easier! All in all I would never have expected to be doing this kind of thing, it was an amazing experience and a great example of the new experiences I have come in to contact with by taking part in New Saints in Langport.

Grant’s thoughts about the filming….

I really enjoyed our filming adventure. It was great experience to meet the film crew and see the work that they do. They were very friendly and dedicated to what they do. I found the interview was quite intense and interesting. This was defiantly a great life skill to build and I’m sure there will be many more opportunities in future. It allowed time to also reflect on the journey we have all taken so far but also what will be achieved in the future. 

Once the videos finished I'll be able to post it on here so that you can see what we're talking about!

I'm looking forward to reflecting back on this experience in 5 years time and seeing how different the people, the building and Langport are.