No sooner had I posted a blog-article complaining that St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield had stood a roofless ruin for six months than the demolition team moved in.

Within a week, March 10th-14th 2014, the building was flattened – an eyesore that need never have been an eyesore. The earliest reference I’ve so far found to the possibility of  closure is in 1993.  As late as 2004, Ruth Harman and John Minnis clearly thought it merited an illustration in their Pevsner  Architectural Guide Sheffield (2004), p 188. By the time I became aware it was threatened and my neighbours started a campaign to save it at the end of 2011 it was far too late to have any effect. This is what I’ve learned from following the fate of St Hilda’s Church:

• the Church of England’s procedure for disposing of redundant churches is ponderous, glacially slow and largely ignores the possibility that the secular community might resolve the problems of disposal
• local politicians, hammered for a generation by central governments’ stripping away of their autonomy, think in terms of solving problems rather than exploring possibilities
• the network of amenity organisations, particularly English Heritage and the national amenity societies, prioritises its concerns in terms of national perspectives, with a bias against twentieth-century architecture and buildings of purely local significance
• just as the churches declined because people think they’re going to be there for ever and never set foot across the threshold, so local people will sign petitions but aren’t inclined to participate actively in seeking uses for derelict local buildings

It was always on the cards that St Hilda’s would go. One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable. The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom. For details please click here.

After I’d taken part in the Church Commissioners’ meeting to discuss the redundancy and proposed demolition of St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield, I spent some time talking to people in the Parson Cross community about the building’s practical possibilities.

Apparently, there aren’t any.

Local community workers told me that there’s already full provision of community facilities on the Parson Cross and neighbouring Foxhill estates:  a further facility, if it could be financed, would threaten the viability of those already existing.

Public finance is, of course, an impossibility.

One City Councillor told me with understandable passion of the difficulties of maintaining social provision in the face of draconian financial cuts.  One particular priority at present, justifiably, is somehow to maintain a branch library within reach of local residents.

Yet the emotional pull of St Cecilia’s still remains.  A clergyman spoke movingly of how the building holds the prayers of seventy years of congregational worship, and is a monument to the revered Kelham Fathers who built up the parish from nothing.

The one positive insight I heard came from someone with enterprise experience:  “The only hope for that building,” he said, “is serendipity.”

That, after all, is what happened at Gorton Monastery in Manchester, the Abbeydale Cinema on the south side of Sheffield, and the former St Thomas’ Church, Brightside, which is now Greentop Circus.

The Gorton Monastery project was co-founded by Elaine Griffiths, MBE;  the Abbeydale Cinema turned a corner when Phil Robins spotted its possibilities as a climbing centre;  the founders of Greentop Circus had the wit to challenge Anneka Rice.

In other words, the only possibility of finding a use for the building is if someone comes along with a practical idea that no-one else has thought of.

The only way of saving St Cecilia’s is for someone who needs an attractive space on the north side of Sheffield to come up with a business plan that relieves the Church Commissioners of the need to spend nearly £200,000 knocking the place down brick by brick to the great inconvenience of the neighbours.

Last August the scaffolding went up around St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield, and it was apparent that it would be demolished. I was told that the schedule was to have the site cleared by the end of September 2013. A cheerful crew duly turned up and over a matter of two or three weeks removed the entire roof. Then they went away, and nothing further has happened. The place continues to stand a roofless ruin. My diocesan source tells me that the delay results from “discussion between the Sheffield City Council Planning Department, Church Commissioners, Diocese and the Contractor”. The Church authorities don’t seem to have much luck either with keeping redundant buildings standing or knocking them down. St Hilda’s is now neither one thing nor the other. It’s perhaps mischievous to point out that roofless churches have been preserved against all the odds, such as the Welsh Presbyterian Church, Toxteth, Liverpool [http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/toxteths-welsh-presbyterian-church-new-6086259] and the Welsh Baptist Chapel, Upper Brook Street, Manchester  [http://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/the-unitarianchapel-upper-brook-street-manchester]. Both these examples are listed, and are of undeniable historical and architectural merit. But sometimes even the most unassuming derelict buildings gain a purpose that keeps them standing and restored to good order:  https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?p=1461. Update – March 11th 2014:  The interrupted demolition of St Hilda’s has resumed, and it should be gone within a matter of days. One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable. The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom. For details please click here.

St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield (August 29th 2013)

I remarked in an earlier blog-article that I couldn’t understand how the Gloucestershire architect Kenneth B Mackenzie got the commission to build St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield in the late 1930s.

He certainly had no previous experience of designing churches, though he was apparently a sensitive restorer of existing church buildings in the Diocese of Gloucester.

St Cecilia’s is a fine essay in twentieth-century Gothic revival design.  Its stone exterior sits comfortably in its tight little close of council houses, now protected by trees that have matured over three-quarters of a century.  Its stubby little tower is in scale with its domestic surroundings, so that Chaucer Close has the feeling of a village green in the midst of the vast Parson Cross municipal housing estate.

Within, its concrete rendered walls, lit by the plain glass of the rectangular traceried windows, enclose a calm, expansive space, entered through a narthex into an aisled nave, with a sanctuary dominated not by an east window but by a reredos that was added in 1971.  Above the narthex is a west gallery filled with the magnificent case of the 1986 Cousans organ.

Kenneth Mackenzie was clearly fluent in the aesthetic language that the Anglo-Catholic congregation required, and left plenty of scope for additions and embellishments.

He was, like many architects of his generation, less adept at making his building easy to maintain.  He probably, in the late 1930s, assumed that future generations would give priority to preserving the building, in particular giving regular attention to the slate and asphalt roofs.

He couldn’t know that the electrical wiring installed in 1938 would still be in place seventy-five years later.

And he took it for granted that the stream that runs beneath the building would behave itself, which it hasn’t.  The presbytery, always known as the Priory, regularly flooded before it was demolished in 1994, and now that the church is disused the undercroft floor is heaving.

As a source close to the Church Commissioners remarked, the current difficulties with the building arise from defects of maintenance, not from its structural integrity.

It’s certainly untrue that St Cecilia’s Church has necessarily reached the end of its life.

But the unintended consequences of Kenneth Mackenzie’s decisions about structure and design have left a heavy legacy for anyone who contemplates bringing it back to any kind of use.

It seems that Kenneth Mackenzie was the nephew of Mr A R Heathcote, the then anonymous benefactor who paid for the building.

Campaigning to save the church of St Hilda, Shiregreen, Sheffield (Leslie T Moore, 1938) was a frustrating experience because of the opacity of the Church Commissioners’ processes for the closure and disposal of redundant churches.

Earlier blog-articles record my interest in the subsequent closure of the nearby church of St Cecilia, Parson Cross (Kenneth B Mackenzie, 1939).  Because I formally objected to the proposed demolition I’ve been given far more information about the building than ever we saw about St Hilda’s, and I was invited to make direct representations to the Commissioners’ Pastoral and Church Buildings (Uses & Disposals) Committees.

The condition and location of St Cecilia’s Church presents an intractable dilemma for the parish and the Commissioners.

It’s practically unusable because of the state of the roof and the wiring, yet the parishioners are saddled with the considerable monthly expense of securing and insuring it while trying to maintain the more compact daughter-church of St Bernard of Clairvaux, in which they now worship, at the other end of the parish in Southey Green.

The diocesan authorities fear the expense and disruption of demolishing a building hemmed in by inhabited houses with restricted road access.

Sheffield City Council has made it clear that the only acceptable change of use would be residential, yet the existing building would not adapt well and a replacement apartment block would be uneconomic in an area where substantial three-bedroomed houses sell for £80,000.

For the moment, the Commissioners have referred back the Diocese’s proposals in an attempt to find an alternative use that avoids the punitive cost and disruption of demolition.

Meanwhile, the small combined congregation of St Cecilia’s and St Bernard’s pay an inordinate price because St Cecilia’s is not yet formally redundant – though almost everyone agrees it should be – and St Bernard’s is not yet consecrated as the parish church of the future.

I continue to argue that the secular community around St Cecilia’s has been given insufficient opportunity to work towards an alternative secular practical use for the building, yet the take-up at the two public meetings that were called was disappointing – fifteen people in 2011 and twenty in August this year.

The Church of England hasn’t been able to find a way to dispose of St Cecilia’s Church from within its own resources and procedures.

The building needs a use that takes advantage of its quiet setting and its light, airy interior space, and that can somehow be supported financially.

After the public meeting about the demolition of St Cecilia’s Church, Parson Cross, Sheffield Paul Beckett, the Assistant Diocesan Secretary (Property) of the Diocese of Sheffield, invited me to see the interior of the church to gain a better idea of its condition.

It would indeed need serious money to deal with the water ingress, the fallen plaster, the undulating floor in the undercroft and the shot-to-pieces wiring.

If someone could contrive a practical way of recouping an investment of up to a million pounds to save the Church Commissioners spending perhaps £200,000 demolishing the place, they’d have a very beautiful building for their money.

Kenneth McKenzie’s church looks much bigger inside than you’d expect.  It’s a broad, light, elegant space, picking up the elements of traditional churches in the stripped-back manner of inter-war architecture.

As it stands, it has a melancholy time-warp feel:  although disused for the past couple of years, the hymn-books are still on the shelf and the vestments hang in the vestry.

Because the parish was always at the high end of Anglo-Catholicism, it retains statues of saints, a Pietà and a highly ornate reredos of 1923 which is in fact a refugee from the demolished church of Holy Trinity, Preston via another demolished church, St Margaret’s, Burnley.  Presumably it will once more go on its travels.

St Cecilia’s also has an impressive-looking organ, built in 1986 by Cousans of Lincoln from the previous organ by Vincent’s of Durham (1972) with additional parts from two other organs by the Sheffield firm of Brindley & Foster.

Checking the organ in the National Pipe Organ Register [http://www.npor.org.uk/cgi-bin/Rsearch.cgi?Fn=Rsearch&rec_index=N01088] alerted me to a revealing chronology:

1972:  new organ
1986:  another new organ
1999-2003:  renovation of undercroft (nearly £400,000 funded largely by the Single Regeneration Budget and the National Lottery)
2010:  roof, heating and electrical wiring beyond economic repair
2011:  church closed

It’s clear, with the luxury of hindsight, that it would have been better to prioritise maintaining the outer envelope of the building rather than embellishing the interior.

As it is, the cost of doing anything with it – knocking it down or reviving it – will be onerous.

I mentioned again the stern requirement in the Pastoral Scheme for St Cecilia’s that the church shall be demolished, and Paul assured me that if anyone were to come up with a practical scheme to save the building the process towards demolition could be stalled.

It’s a big ask to fill an empty envelope.

At the belated start of the belated campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield I knew a good deal less about the byzantine workings of the Church Commissioners than I now do.

As the scaffolding goes up to begin destroying St Hilda’s, I’ve learned that to develop the land on which an Anglican church has stood requires unusual tenacity.

The conditions of sale demand that a prospective purchaser has a practical business plan and planning permission for the proposed development.

Planning permission involves a significant amount of expensive professional support.

Then, I’ve discovered, the prospective purchaser has to demolish the church building before they can purchase it.

Clearly, this requires nerves of steel and a great deal of faith, because it can cost close on a six-figure sum even to create an empty site.

I hope whatever goes up in place of St Hilda’s looks at least as good.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.