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These drawings show a plan to turn the way church is done through 90 degrees. So instead of the dais being at one end of the church a pillar was going to be removed to have it at one side with a new pulpit, communion table and rails. The opposite side of the church (the right hand side as you come) would have a gallery built with some upstairs seating as well as additional rooms while under a hall would be created with moving partitions so it could be opened for additional seating.
: This is always a sore point for St Silas regulars, most people (I've ever heard from) don't like the way it is at the moment. These plans show a small lobby area with two ways into the main sanctuary, access to the gallery by a new spiral stair and access to the hall and one small room. This first room appears to be the same size as the Crèche room added in May 2005. |
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The most obvious thing about this lay out is having the dais in the middle of one side of the building. This places the seating in rather strange configuration. I am assuming that the seating shown are to be replacement pews. However even with chairs I can't see how you would have good sight lines. The elevation shows a view looking towards the Dais with the removed pillar and the structure which would replace them - the drawings show a broken line of the two arches and pillar which would be lost (see here) I have removed them digitally for clarity and to try to tidy this up a little. Of course how we use the church even for a week in week out service has vastly changed. There is less need here to consider sight lines as hymn books would be used instead of OHP or data projector. Also, there would have been no PA considerations as the music would be from the organ loft. This also explains the 'where would the worship band stand?' question that I had. So, (at least in my opinion) I think if the people of St Silas had gone through with these changes there would have been a lot of alterations still required for the buildings use now. |
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Again, the thing that strikes me is how much the way a service is conducted has changed over the years. We no longer use Clergy Chairs, Pulpit or even the Rail any more. |
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The area of the original communion rail (which we still use) and where the current dais stands is a proposed lounge area with a meeting room over (off the gallery). It is shown on the drawing that the dividing wall was possibly going to be a sliding screen to open into the sanctuary area. What isn't shown on these plans (the drawings I have are marked as No's 2, 3 & 4) is how the ceiling floor of these two rooms would affect the view of the main window of the church? |
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: Here we can see that a room was to be built at the back and the area down one side was to be a hall. The line of pillars would be the wall line with moveable partitions to open this up to the main area. The balcony above was to extend out further than this, and a kitchen was to be built towards the far end which could serve into the sanctuary or the hall. The top edge of this image is the center line of the church. This size of the hall is easy to imagine as this is the area that we regularly divide off at the moment using lengths of fabric for things like Deeper. How it would feel with a ceiling is a different matter. It is nice to see from this drawing that the kitchen planned in 1977 was eventually moved to this position (although not the same size) in 1999 and the room marked as 'room1' was built as the Crèche in 2005. |
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The Gallery level would be accessible by two spiral staircases. Presumably the original spiral staircase which still leads to the organ would not be used as (I think) it does not conform to Health and Safety requirements. This level would have seating for 63 people and access to 7 meeting rooms (unfortunately I just cropped out meeting room 7 on the right which would be above the lounge area described previously. There is a note on the drawing above which shows below the gallery that it could be considered to have the large hall above and smaller meeting rooms downstairs. I wander what the sound would be like up here during a service, both from the organ and the preacher? |
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This last bit is a mystery to me. This drawing shows the view looking back towards the entrance to the church and organ loft. It shows that the gallery area would come out almost to half way into the building (see the centre line of the rose window. However, there roof line is all wrong! The darker lines of the roof show that they have been lowered and in the main area (between the pillars) there are three 'peaks'. The original roof line is show as a faint line which doesn't show up well in the photographs. Was the entire roof going to be replaced or was this an internal 'false roof' for some reason? |
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This is a bit messy as I'm not sure what it includes, additional seating possibilities and with the hall partition open, etc. could alter this. Anyway, simply taking the figure for 'Permanent Total' at 322 is impressive. The current (1992-date) layout of the church uses green chairs, there are 200 of them. We also have a lot of folding chairs that are used regularly, however even for the large scale events (typically the annual carol service we still only have a capacity of around 300-350 chairs. |
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