The success of Southolt events lies in the variety and the breadth of appeal. The usual services are Easter Holy Communion, Summer Service, Harvest Festival and Christmas Carol Service, although not all happen every year. They are all, though, social events as well, and this is important to their success. The Easter Service is always followed by coffee and biscuits and the Carol Service is rounded off with mulled wine and mince pies and a warm atmosphere in the church. The Harvest gives an opportunity for a fund-raising Harvest Supper which usually draws about sixty people. The Summer Service is written by Trustees and is full of music, hymns and poetry to celebrate summer and the natural world. Tickets are sold to the ‘Strawberries and wine on the Green’ event which takes place afterwards on the common beside the churchyard.All our services are on Saturdays in order not to compete with regular church services and usually start at 6.30pm. They draw in friends and residents from local villages and are well attended.
It all sounds easy and in a way it was.We were lucky that we had a good mix of skills and experiences amongst the interested villagers.We had a number of recently retired people who had the time to take the project on, and a real determination to keep the church at the heart of the village as it was in the past.
In the future, the main concern will be to sustain this level of involvement and commitment. It is a priority to encourage younger people to participate in events and appreciate the role the church building plays as a community focus. So far finding Trustees has not been a problem, but our age-profile is decidedly silver! We would like some youngsters on board but there are very few in the village, and this may be an issue in future.
Fig. 1 (right): The church of St James,Warter, East Riding of Yorkshire.This was built in 1861 by Habershon and Pite, and closed for worship in 1976.The story of how a Trust restored it to life some twenty years later is told in this article.
Fig. 2 (below): One side of an explanatory leaflet produced in 2011 when two stained glass lunettes by Robert Anning Bell, originally in a mausoleum in the churchyard, were restored and placed in the church.
I AM TOLD IT ALL BEGAN with a champagne picnic in the graveyard at Warter, one summer’s day in the 1990s.
Warter is a tiny estate village of about one hundred people, and the church at Warter is large for such a small village, built in 1861 by Habershon and Pite and listed Grade II (Fig. 1). It had been closed for worship in 1976, some twenty years before the picnic, and been up for sale ever since, but no one had wanted it. Now there was talk of demolishing it and taking away its important Arts & Crafts work – including sculptures by Sir George Frampton and glass by Robert Anning Bell, and in the churchyard two bronze sculptures by Gilbert Bayes.
A group of interested people met at the church to discuss possibilities, and had a picnic afterwards. By the time the food – and the champagne – were finished, the picnickers had decided that they would buy the building to save it from demolition and keep the contents in the village. And that was the start of the then Yorkshire Wolds Buildings Preservation Trust (now St James Warter Preservation Trust).
The Trust committee had eight people, including some with professional experience in Heritage Management and the production of marketing and interpretative materials. It is this mix of skills which make this case rather different from many others in this book. It was the explicit intention of the Trust to develop the future of the building as heritage-based, but forward- and outward-looking and providing a service to local people.
Using the building
After amicable negotiations, the Trust paid the diocese £1 for the church. This lump sum included the graveyard, which is closed and now being managed for wildlife.
The first task, a huge one, was to bring the building up to scratch and make it ready for a new use. This was done with the aid of a grant from the European LEADER fund (about £100k) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (about £500k).This project took several years of everyone’s life, but was seen as absolutely necessary to give the building a sustainable future: as well as major repairs, and the updating of the electrics, a small kitchen and toilets were inserted.This work was completed in 2006.
Display stands were acquired for exhibitions, and interpretation panels were produced to explain the building and its history. Leaflets were put on display for local tourist trails and suchlike.Although most of the pews were left in place, a few were taken out to increase the space, and this gave enough room for activities.