In the small hours of Sunday 9 December 2018, fire broke out in the tower of St John’s Church in Royston, Hertfordshire. A resident of a nearby flat became aware of the blaze and called 999. Firefighters and police raced to the scene. At one point some 25 firefighters struggled to bring the fire under control. They finally turned their hoses off just after 8am.
Clare Davies, now a churchwarden at St John’s, tells of the damage.
“The fire caused really major damage to the tower (it is believed that temperatures in excess of 600°C were reached) and then spread to the nave roof – the sky was visible through the part of the roof closest to the tower. All eight bells in the tower cracked as a result. The stonework of the archway between the tower and the nave was so badly damaged that it had to be completely rebuilt.
“The fire travelled along the nave roof as far as the chancel and the organ was ruined. Much of the damage was then caused by the smoke and the water used to extinguish the fire – the pews were damaged beyond repair by falling debris and water damage; the floor beneath the pew platforms was washed away leaving just uneven ground.”
Services all round the town
The Sunday morning service happened in the Banyers Hotel opposite the church. There was no time to organise an alternative location, and people had gathered there. The following Sunday, the services were at Meridian School (King James Academy Royston). This was not the only alternative accommodation that had been offered to the church, and over the next four years the worshippers met in the Town Hall and several other schools.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Clare goes on:
“We had been fundraising for a refurbishment. Thanks to the energy and support of the congregation and the wider local community, we have been able to ensure that the rebuilding of the church has also incorporated improvements to make the building into a useful community space in the centre of Royston.”
A choir’s been awhile a-wandering
One community organisation that had made the church its base for many years was Royston Choral Society. Their wanderings during the four years of repair were much wider than the church’s. Chair Huw Jenkins recalls:
“We’ve used King James Academy twice for Christmas concerts. We’ve sung in Ashwell parish church a couple of times, Standon church two or three times, Chrishall and Barkway… We rehearsed in the Methodist Church until COVID hit. Post COVID, that was a rather small building to get a large group of people in. And so we rehearsed in Bassingbourn Village College.”
The links in that quotation are to Google Maps. The choir did indeed get around a bit.
Huw backs up Clare’s point about the improvements to the church.
“They’ve made it much brighter, a more pleasant place to perform in. And the acoustics of the building are better than they used to be.”
A community space
I asked Clare and Huw what they felt were the biggest lessons of the fire. Clare’s answer was ‘neighbourly’.
“We have realised how much the church means to the people of Royston (churchgoers or not), and have appreciated so much support, and are thrilled to be able to repay all that kindness by restoring this building in a way that means it’s much more useful as a community space. For the congregation, it enabled us to stop being so reliant on a building, and we realised that we, as a group of people, are the Church.”
Huw was more cautious.
“If you regularly perform in the same venue, you build up something of a following. And if you become as nomadic as we did, you lose that continuity. We’re all pretty resilient, we found ways around the tragedy, the choir was more than the venue, the choir could survive without the venue. But the choir benefits from having a venue that’s semi-permanent.”
Royston Choral Society’s connection with its semi-permanent venue is set to continue. It has a performance of Haydn’s Creation lined up for Saturday 25 March, and other concerts are planned for later in the year.
A clock and its future
The church meanwhile has a plan to donate the old mechanism of its clock – formerly housed in the tower, not far from where the fire started, and badly damaged in the fire itself – as an artefact to Royston Museum. The mechanism dates to 1873. If it had kept working to its sesquicentenary (150 years) this year, it would have driven the big hand round the clock face more than one million three hundred thousand times. The work was rudely interrupted four years ago. The clock deserves its proposed shift from keeping time to showing history.
