 A church re-ordering project can be a highly worthwhile enterprise. Not only can it give a tired-looking interior a new lease of life, but the practical benefits of removing fixed, hard pews and replacing them with moveable chairs enable you to use the space flexibly for all sorts of activities throughout the week, not just on a Sunday.
However, reaching that point means getting over a number of hurdles. Firstly, of course, you need to get the plan right, with bodies like the Church of England offering guidance on how you may proceed. It is important to do this as it may be that some changes cannot be easily undone if you go ahead with them. Secondly, you must raise the funds. Thirdly, you need to employ interior design experts at least and, if the work is to be more extensive, such as including changes to auxiliary buildings, architects. There may also be issues such as objections to your plans from heritage bodies if it is an older or listed building and if planning applications may be required. All this can happen before the actual work begins. In order to ensure the whole enterprise is carried out effectively, you will need effective project management to bring everything together. That means managing the funds, paying contractors, checking that health and safety laws are maintained at all times (including whether the building can remain in use while work is being carried out), and the all-important task of keeping things on schedule. If the latter cannot be managed, mitigation planning will be required. As can be seen from the above list, this is not something that ministerial staff, wardens and others should take the full burden of, not just because of the various calls on their time, but the depth of expertise needed that they are unlikely to have, unless they have prior experience in project management themselves.
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 The best way to preserve the historic beauty of churches is to keep them in use as much as possible. Abandonment and underuse can often be the first step towards a beautiful property falling into disrepair and dedicated project management can help with this.
However, if the congregation of a church is not enough to sustain the building, one option to keep the church open and the community thriving is reordering, which is where the church building is adapted and rearranged to incorporate secular uses. This can be something as subtle as turning a piety shop into a more secular cafe, or it can be something as substantial as turning a church building into a school for trapeze artists or even an indoor skate park. However, as even a small reordering project is a big step that will affect the congregation, it is important to prepare, consult and be as transparent as possible with your proposals. The first step to this is to consult your Diocesan Advisory Committee or similar governing body depending on denomination. They can provide excellent advice and signpost successful churches that have followed a similar approach, as well as highlight historical issues. Another aspect to consider is that a lot of reordering projects are relatively small and subtle; they are less about rapid construction or destruction of the existing space away from the chancel but more about maximising what is there. Because of this, it is worth thinking about what you need and why. Do not try to make do but at the same time avoid being overambitious with projects that do not seem to have an evident need for your local community. You will need to prepare statements of significance and needs so the sooner you think about these steps the better. Finally, consult with members of the congregation and the local community but also get an architect on board as soon as it becomes clear that this project is likely to start.  Embarking on a construction or renovation project of any kind will always be an exciting endeavour and there’s really nothing quite like watching what’s on the blueprint develop over time and start to come to life.
But, of course, the road to success is paved with all sorts of obstacles and, while you can manage the project yourself, it will likely increase your stress levels, make the process a lot less enjoyable and potentially cause issues that might not have manifested had you enlisted the services of a professional and qualified construction project manager. This is the route that most developers go down because it does make everything run a lot more smoothly, with the construction and delivery of the project taken care of on your behalf. Skills to look out for when finding a project manager to appoint will naturally include in-depth knowledge and experience of the construction industry, as well as building contract and contract law, and the intricacies of the construction work itself. But you also need to make sure that they have strong problem-solving skills because development projects often come with a range of complicated problems that could be resolved in various different ways. Communication skills are also an absolute must, since it’s often necessary to liaise between different parties and manage everyone’s expectations effectively. From your perspective, working with someone transparent and honest, who provides you with accurate reporting on a regular basis, will give you greater peace of mind that the project is on track. Leadership is something else your choice of project manager must demonstrate and you need to work with someone capable of reacting to circumstances positively, rationally and in a clear-headed way. Having someone in your corner who knows the industry inside out and who stays up to date with all the latest innovations coming to the fore means your project is far more likely to be successful, completed on time and on budget. If you’d like to find out more about the benefits of this kind of service, get in touch with the Dilys Wilson Layton team today.  One of the biggest pushes forward when it comes to new build project management is in the field of affordable housing.
This is far from surprising given that the average asking price for a house is ten times the median salary, and given that most mortgages only allow a person to borrow up to 4.5 times their annual salary, the dream of owning a house is beyond the reach of a huge number of people. The solution to this requires a concerted effort across developers, planning authorities and the government in order to create the best circumstances to create high-quality, long-lasting affordable housing, which given the scale of housing required necessitates new builds. Building huge numbers of houses is not common but it is also not unprecedented; in 1942, the Burt Committee was set up to determine the most cost-effective ways to rebuild Great Britain following the devastating effects of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz bombing campaigns. In just six years from the unconditional surrender of Germany to 1951, 1.2m new houses were built, around 11 per cent of which were prefabricated. This was an incredible level of production which amounts to over 173,000 houses being built each year. Whilst this is half of the roughly 300,000 houses needed per year to meet the government’s housing targets, they do not have the lingering effects of the most devastating war in British history to contend with. Exactly how this will be tackled is likely to coalesce around the time of the first Budget of the new government, which will determine how much money will go into affordable housing and the establishment of a planning and housing system that goes beyond a local scale. That will be half of the battle, with planners, architects and developers also playing a huge role in developing effective housing that is not only beautiful but designed around need rather than short-termism.  In many places, the church is the centre of the community, is one of the most historically significant buildings in the local area and one that often requires care when managing reconstruction and renovation projects.
Adapting churches is far from a new practice; Greensted Church in Essex is the oldest wooden church in the world and has been adapted many different times over the centuries to meet the needs of the rural communities that rely on it. Most reordering and renovation projects are far more harmonious than Greensted, but the concept of a church changing with the times is shared between this and other historic community pillars in ever-changing worlds. In an ecclesiastic context, reordering is the alteration of church property to incorporate additional uses, not all of which need to be exclusively religious. This could include adding secular function rooms to a church by altering or reducing chapel space commensurate with the number of regular practitioners, adding cafes, eating areas and cultural centres. Some reordering projects are particularly unusual; St Paul’s Church in Bristol has been adapted to include a flying trapeze school, taking advantage of the extra height of a church to allow for an unusual, highly interesting repurposing. Whilst some religious hierarchies are opposed to reordering, it is far from a new concept. Churches have always been mixed-use to some degree, owing to their importance to the community. They have served as village halls, been used as polling stations, been used as makeshift places of rest and recuperation and formed the centre of more secular celebrations such as village fetes. Ultimately, a church should consider effective reordering with the help of strong project management and construction if there is a concern that the alternative is falling into disuse and disrepair. Nobody wants to see a historic building disappear, and reordering is the best way to avoid it. |
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