Angels in the Architecture

It’s not every day that you meet Angels in the Architecture but this evening I came across three of them at St. Bridget’s Church, Brigham. 

The late afternoon sun was slanting across the churchyard warming the gravestones and casting long shadows behind the yews, but the church door was open a crack. When Debbie and I peered in we could see the interior was swathed in dust sheets and boarding covered the floor. A partition of plastic sheeting hid the whole of the chancel and altar.  That, together with the scaffolding around the tower outside, showed that major work was in progress.
Although the light was muted through the stained glass it was enough to show us that the glory of St Bridget’s lies in its ornate and beautiful painted ceilings. The high beams and plasterwork far above us were patterned and coloured in panels with stars and scrolls and stylised foliage.
Harriet had been staying at my place whilst being employed to restore a part of this ceiling. She had kindly invited us to see the work in progress. We were not sure quite what to expect but after a couple of minutes she appeared from behind the plastic and told us a bit of the history. The ceiling had been commissioned from the renowned British Gothic Revival architect William Butterfield in the mid 1800’s.  His use of polychrome colours and romanticised mediaeval design was very popular then and has held its charm through all changes in fashion.

When Harriet asked us to ‘Come up and have a look,’ we could not resist and followed her up narrow ladders through two floors of scaffolding to where she and two colleagues had been painstakingly labouring over the past 3 weeks, cleaning the candle-carbon grime of years, filling cracks, blotting out damp stains and restoring the colour-work. Seen up close what was spectacular from below gained detail and texture. The gold stars shone and the red Tudor roses glowed. ‘Alleluia’ shouted the banners. For a quiet place so far removed from the real world it still felt vibrantly alive and full of the vigour and passion that the original painters had thrown into the design. Excitingly, one beam held their signatures, a group from Cambridge. The three women carrying on their work described the difficulties of matching the colours, the trials of evaporating acetone and the physical discomfort of working at an angle but with a passion that lit up their faces and a pride that the finished result matched up to the original.

We came away feeling so privileged. Creation and restoration are truly the work and nature of the soul and spirit, both of people and of angels.