Time warp

Today, another Match Day, the weather not being good enough for a decent walk, we ventured out to Nelson to visit Llancaiach Manor, a sixteenth century dwelling, which I recall as a shabby old farm house, growing up, and going hiking in that area as a young Boy Scout in the fifties. Since then it has changed hands, and is no longer owned by a farmer. It has been well restored as an historic visitor attraction by Rhymney Valley District Council, and is open to the public.

It's an impressive venture, and the place is well used, with a varied programme of activities, some of which exploit its reputation as one of Britain's Most Haunted houses. Apart from its posh tourist shop and its scenic modern restaurant, it has an excellent visitor interpretation programme. The place, after renovation was restored to represent the house as it appeared in 1645 equipped with period artifacts.

The tour guides are in the period costumes of household servants and speak in period English. You are invited to imagine that you are invited to the house of Colonel Thomas Pritchard, Lord of the Manor, and at that time co-incidentally governor of Cardiff Castle. The Colonel and his family are away from Llancaiach, but the servants welcome visitors and show them around, telling the story of life in their times as they go, in fascinating detail.

Pritchard was a Puritan and prominent local Baptist, initially loyal to the king, then to Parliament, eventually taking a more independent stance seeking to shield Glamorganshire and the neighbouring counties from being sucked into the Civil War - was his armed militia a kind of prototype Free Wales Army, I wondered?

It was good to see such creative imagination being applied to bringing an historic monument to life for the modern age. It reminded me of 'Brother' Thomas, the Cistercian costumed guide to Tintern Abbey, seen during our Parish Pilgrimage back in the summer.

Will there come I time, I wonder, when St John's visitors will be shown around by a role-playing guide emulating the last generation of active believers to have served God in the heart of a totally secularised city?

Building diplomacy

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Met this afternoon with our church architect, Martin Killick and an officer from CADW, the Welsh conservation quango. The idea was to find out where the no-go areas might be in proposing changes to certain aspects of our grade one listed building.

We want to make the building more visitor friendly, as it is one of the place most visited by tourists to Cardiff - at least 15,000 a year. The west porch doesn't work. It is uninviting, difficult to negotiate with a pushchairs or laden with bags, and has an internal which step people trip over with worrying frequency due to poor sight lines rather than lighting deficiency. We want to remove the porch and have state of the art glass doors and glazed panels under the tower, to make it all lighter more open and inviting. We also dream of moving pews to side aisles from the back of the nave, then raise the floor to lose the dangerous step, and create a welcome area in which we can hold exhibitions, and greet people before services - maybe even an information desk, who knows what may work best for all, at this stage?

The south church entrance is paved with gravestones, and would benefit from being re-laid with a single consistent regular surface, as it becomes uneven in only a few years of wear and tear, as the stones are all of different thickness. How we haven't had a bad accident out there I don't know. Very soon now the passageway between the churchyards will be laid with new granite paving which eventually will cover streets on all sides of the church. I am hoping we will be able to replace the gravestones with the same paving. The surrounds would all look good then - a worthy setting for such a fine building.

Fortunately the CADW man didn't seem to think any of our ideas run contrary to the received conservation doctrine, so it's now a matter of drawing up plans and preparing more faculty applications to get permission to do the work. Knowing that support from CADW is possible to obtain for sensible plans easer the way to get a faculty approved. The number of such faculties I've applied for in the past four years runs into dozens. It's not a task I'll ever enjoy, only improve at doing well.

Conversations and entrances

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On really horrid days, it’s good to have one like today to remember.

I walked down to church for the Eucharist – for a while at least it wasn’t raining and the sun came out. The lady who stands in the City Hall underpass quietly witnessing to her faith,(see 14th Feb posting) looked up as I passed and for the first time caught my eye and gave me a beautiful radiant smile, which (I hope) I returned when I said : “God bless you.” as I passed her. Contact at last.

After the noon Eucharist I had a conversation with a visiting couple from Toronto – she was a Quebecoise and he an Italian Canadian of fifty years standing. They were trying to work out what sort of church St John’s is, as well as fascinated by its history and relationship to the city and country. Coming from another bi-lingual city, they were impressed by the visible evidence of two languages in the way the city presents itself to the world, and wanted to know what degree of political autonomy Wales has. It was one of those moments of feeling pride in our particular social experiment, and feeling that our little corner of world Anglicanism has made a strong contribution to healthy pluralism - living together with our differences – despite apparent problems elsewhere in the Communion.

Oxford House South section demolition is now under way, and I was able to grab some quite spectacular photos of the demolition machine in action. Being half term there were more people causally watching than usual. I must find out what the site workers call these machines. I don’t even know their proper technical name. When this one toppled sections of a brick and breeze block end wall, or smashed a window and grabbed out its entire frame and mounting in one blow, there was an audible gasp of amazement from passers by. Live entertainment for half-term week!

I had a chat with Gerald (it said on his hat) one of the site foremen, who in between sentences was redirecting traffic at the junction of Bridge Street and the Hayes. Although the NCP multi-storey car parks had finally been closed for demolition three days ago, the banner notice announcing they were still open was not taken down until two days ago, and out of habit, motorists were driving in search of parking right in front the building site, before having to turn around and exit frustrated and denied. Gerald told me that he had worked on a similar development in the centre of Plymouth for four years, and how he’d got to know the local photographers, including a septuagenarian who’d researched old film archives of building, rebuilding and redevelopment of his city over his lifetime, as a way of documenting social change. That’s a bit more ambitious than my photo-blog, but I fully understand the kind of enthusiasm that drives such a project.

I left Gerald sorting the chaos and went to visit Nia Wynn-Jones in her workshop behind the ‘temporary’ city library over the railway from Bute Terrace. (Check out Nia's website) She’s making the ornate wrought iron gates that will grace the entrance of the south churchyard, once the new east-west path has been completed. She's copied the fleur-de-lys motif from the existing railings to use as decoration - hundreds of them ! She's also replicated the corner ironwork pillars from the churchyard, and will be re-cycling the pieces of fencing taken out to create a gap for the path, to use in the gates. It's going to be an eye catching design, that will fascinate visitors and enhance civic pride. I'm determined to get Nia to do some work on the church tower porch gate which could do with something kinder than renovation. It only fills two thirds of the gothic arch it encloses. Extending and embellishing it to fill the complete space, in a way that echoes the design of the gates would give the entrance a lift.

The churchyard site manager, Danny McGee was consulting with Nia when I arrived. He and I had spoken on the 'phone, but so far I'd not succeeded in finding him there, so it was good to have a face to face with these two people whose labours are going to transform one small ancient corner of the city centre into an open air sanctuary from all the hustle and bustle. I got some great pictures of the ironwork too.

Last but not least, I had an email from someone I know well, who has been thinking through life the universe and everything for some months, and has shared some of the journey with me, now asking to be prepared for Confirmation. It’s one of those things that crowns any day, no matter how bad or good it may have been.