Maintenance Grants
"Laziness lets the roof leak, and soon the rafters begin to rot.” Ecclesiastes 10:18
Congregations are by no means lazy. Many are raising the funds to spend on the basic maintenance that’s needed to avoid huge repair bills in the future, but too many do not know where to begin.
We are testing this approach by part-funding maintenance trials in two Church of England dioceses – those of London and St Edmundsbury. In both, the diocese creates a scheme for individual parishes to subscribe to but in St Edmundsbury, there are five local contractors working to a specification with a previously tendered price. They clear gutters, down-pipes and drains and write a brief report on further work they think needs to be done so that the parish can alert their architect or surveyor. We are also strongly supporting the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’ proposed training seminars for volunteer maintenance workers.
Peter Aiers Project Development Manager, Diocese of London:
“As each parish in the Church of England is responsible for the upkeep of its own church building there has been a large variety of approaches to maintenance, from doing absolutely nothing to having a strict maintenance regime in place.
The Diocese of London is undertaking a pilot study in the City of London to look at the benefits of a centralised gutter clearance service so that the gutters on all churches in the Diocese, as well as vicarages and church halls, are cleared twice a year. We employ a contractor to clear the gutters, down pipes, hoppers and check the drains.Whilst on the roof the contractor also undertakes emergency repair work such as fixing slipped slates. A simple checklist and digital photos are used to show the condition of the roof and gutters – even in hard-to-reach places. This provides good information about what repairs are required. The initial pilot scheme has been such a great success that we are now going to set up a centralised project for the whole Diocese of London. We are very grateful for English Heritage’s support.”
A Stitch in Time
“Church spires are the great punctuation points of the English countryside. But the religious buildings of this country not only tell where we are geographically, they tell us where we’ve come from.They’re often the only place in a community which has a living, visible connection to the past. They hot-wire us into our history.” Jeremy Paxman Broadcaster and journalist.