Priory Project
Why help? Old College Hall Transept roofs Willis Organ Heating & Lighting Local fund raising How to donate
The Transept roofs
It must be admitted that there is nothing particularly special about the transept roofs themselves, but they are obviously vital to what is below them.
On the north side we have the Lady Chapel with two sculptures by Josefina de Vasconcellos and a small exhibition about her work and the Sleeping Child Garden at St Bees.
On the south side we have the magnificent Willis organ, one of the top 100 organs in the country and the last to be built under the personal supervision of the Victorian master organ builder Henry "Father" Willis. Any failure of the overlying transept roof would endanger this instrument.
The slates on both transepts are beginning to fail, with nails holding them giving way, and the plaster below them crumbling. We have had some minor water leakage, but the main concern is that after any strong wind we are likely to have lost one or two slates. What makes this issue worse is that these are large, heavy slates which would seriously threaten the welfare of anyone in the vicinity when they come adrift. So far damage from falling slates has been restricted to damage to the slates over the side aisles. This, plus the inaccessibility of the area, makes the cost of even a simple repair a costly exercise as it requires scaffolding to be built, even for a 5 minute job to replace a single slate.
An application to English Heritage resulted in a £9,000 grant to assess the work required and £10,000 towards the estimated cost of £100,000. The assessment has been carried out recently and we are currently awaiting the report. Once this is available we will be in a better position to know exactly how much we need to raise for this work.
The transepts will be done as soon as funding permits and we continue to apply for funding alongside the fund raising required for Old College Hall. To date we have been awarded £4,000 by the Headley Trust, one of the Sainsbury funds.