Published: 14/01/2025
Updated: 14/01/2025
As 2024 drew to a close, the scaffold started going up inside and outside St Andrew’s, South Runcton in Norfolk. A programme of extensive works to repair the church is now underway, and we expect to welcome people back inside in late autumn 2025.
St Andrew's is the ghost of a Norman church. By 1812, the church was a crumbling, overgrown ruin of Romanesque arch and apse. Norwich artist, John Sell Cotman’s sketch of the church at that date shows what survived when Norwich architect, John Brown came on the scene in 1839. The Surveyor for Norwich Cathedral and County Surveyor for Norfolk, Brown rebuilt St Andrew's from these tumbling ruins. He adopted a Neo-Norman style for is rebuild, with period party-pieces such as zig-zag, dog's tooth and blind arcading.
Built on a rise over the Downham Market to Kings Lynn Road, St Andrew's has been languishing for more than a decade. The roofs are leaking, the drains are clogged, the vaults are collapsing, the stonework is fractured and the render is peeling. We took the church into our care in 2023, and are relieved to finally have started on site.
Led by our architect, Ruth Blackman, the contractors, Greystone & Mason, started by investigating the internal floor structure and underlying vaults. These were sunken and uneven throughout, and needed consolidating and strengthening before the full bird-cage scaffold could be erected internally. Special lifting equipment (seen in the image opposite) was necessary to hoist some of the enormous and enormously heavy ledger-stones.
Defective plaster at low levels was removed to reveal rubblestone walls. These will be consolidated where necessary, and, in due course, replastered.
Externally, a full scaffold has been erected and the contractors have started to strip the slate roofs. All roofs (nave, apsidal chancel, and conical vestry roof) need complete re-roofing with localised repairs to coping and kneeler stones, and structural timberwork. While exposing the wall-heads, elements of dressed medieval masonry were revealed. Some are clearly identifiable as window mullions and cills, but others are harder to place.
Whilst the high-level access is in place, repairs will also be made to the stonework to the bell-cote and west front, which is splitting vertical in many places, as the images in the gallery at the end of the post reveal.
We plan to overhaul the rainwater goods throughout the building, improve rainwater disposal details and get the below-ground drains working once more.
While stripping the chancel roof, we were delighted to find this box of cigarettes and matches, which had been carefully placed inside by the previous roofs for us to find. We don't know for certain, but Google suggests this packet dates from the 1940s.
St Andrew's would have been sold for private, domestic conversion if we didn't step in and offer an alternative future. As ever, our work in England is funded completely by donations, membership subscriptions, and occasional grants. Because of the people who support our cause, at South Runcton, we are able to give employment for 11 months to a terrific team of builders, craftspeople and conservators and consultants, and more so, St Andrew's will survive as a public building, available 365 days a year for evermore. Our heartfelt thanks to our supporters.
