Friends of Friendless Churches

Thank you. As always we are grateful to the members and donors, who made this possible!

This pulled the roof back into a shape close to its original medieval form — a form it hadn’t known for centuries. Believe it or not, the roof is now 2ft higher than it was before the repairs.

📷 Interior after repairs © Lily Watts

After 3 months of squeezing, jacking, sawing, splicing and plenty of replacement, Jones & Fraser had the trusses close enough to transfer the weight of the roof back to where it was originally intended.

🎥 Time-lapse of the roof being brought back into shape

Thus, stainless steel plates were bolted onto the trusses to increase their capacity to carry the weight of the stone tiles. Also, any timbers that could be salvaged were repaired using traditional joinery techniques.

📷 Roof structure, with steel plates, during repairs © Lily Watts

Accordingly, after 300 years of overloading, the principle rafters had become hugely deflected — to the note of 200mm along their length — or in some cases had cracked completely.

📷 Snapped truss before repairs

Composed of 29 carved arched braced trusses, the roof structure was initially designed to take the weight of a thatched roof, not 300 years of a 32 ton diminishing stone tile roof.

📷 Exterior before repairs

On the advice of Andrew Faulkner, emergency propping was introduced to support the timber wall plate on the north side of the nave — which, at that point, had just 20mm of bearing on the stone wall below.

📷 Props before repairs
1/2 - © Lily Watts

When our Director, Rachel Morley, first visited St James’s in March 2019, she noticed that there were clearly structural issues with the church’s magnificent medieval wagon roofs.

📷 Wagon roof before repairs

Sagging, deflected, and perilously close to collapse, the roof of St James’s, Llangua was in a dire state before our repair project. Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Jones & Fraser, the roof has been brought back to a condition much closer to its original medieval form.

We are lucky enough to care for some of the finest examples, in particularly, St Mark’s, Brithdir, Gwynedd and St Mary’s, Llanfair Kilgeddin, Monmouthshire.

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Nevertheless, from the rural hills of North Wales to the busy streets of London, there are countless Arts and Crafts churches and chapels waiting to be explore.

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📷 St John the Baptist's, Matlock Dale, Derbyshire © Alec Hamilton

Instead, what we call ‘Arts and Crafts’ was a merely a memorable name for publicising the first exhibition in 1888 by the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.

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However, although there is an alignment of artistic sentiments and design instinctive among the various practitioners, there was no strict and clear ideology for the Arts and Crafts style.

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For instance, the ethereal stained glass windows were produced by Louis Davies and George Bankart did the rich plasterwork on the ceiling.

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To create this varied yet generally harmonistic chapel, Dawber enlisted some of the finest Arts and Crafts practitioners.

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Through its architecture and fittings, this chapel exemplifies the sophisticated simplicity at the heart of the Arts and Crafts style.

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This Derbyshire chapel was designed by Guy Dawber, who would later become President of RIBA in 1925. Other than a crematorium chapel in Enfield, this is the only religious building that he designed.

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St John the Baptist's, Matlock Dale was built in the late 1890s in the Arts and Crafts style for Louisa Sophia Harris (née Leacroft) in memory of her uncle and aunt.

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Arts and Crafts was a “movement” in architecture and design that was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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📷 © Oscar Proctor

St John the Baptist's, Matlock Dale is one of several charming Arts and Crafts churches that we care for across England and Wales.

Read the rest of this threat to find out more about this chapel and the Arts and Crafts style.

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That’s wonderful to hear. Thank you for regularly visiting St Mary’s.
It’s our pleasure. And of course, it wouldn’t be possible to care for this church if it wasn’t for the generosity of our members and donors, and volunteers on the ground.

St Mary’s, Tal-y-Llyn came into our care in 1999, after several years of neglect, decay, and vandalism following its closure in 1992.

However, St Mary’s wasn’t entirely without parishioners as the church was expanded in the 15th century and the refurnished in the 18th century.

In the aftermath of that medieval pandemic, the village of Tal-y-Llyn was severely diminished; its inhabitants either having perished from the plague or forced to move elsewhere due to the subsequent economic dislocation.

In the summer of 1349, the Black Death (Bubonic plague) reached Anglesey and decimated the population - as it had done elsewhere in Britain and Europe.

The oldest parts of this simple religious building date back to the 12th century. Originally, St Mary’s was built as a chapel of ease to St Peulan's, Llanbeulan (another church that we care for on Anglesey).

In the early 14th century, St Mary's church sat at the heart of a large village called Tal-y-Llyn. It is thought that the village had a population of over 100 people.

This small medieval church is all that remains of a village that was wiped out by the plague in the 14th century.

Four decades later, in 2021 and 2022, we carried out a series repairs to St Mary’s thanks to grants from the Culture Recovery Fund. These repairs included new roofs and crenellations, new drainage, glazing repairs and internal redecoration.

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Thankfully, with the support of the Hardmead locals, we were able to prevent the sale of this medieval Gothic gem, ensuring the preservation St Mary’s for future generations.

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