Welcome to the first in a series of mostly photographic posts, I’m tagging these with #churchproject and #worldmappin because you’ll be able to find them on the map for posterity. The story behind the project, you’ll find at the bottom of each of these posts as I publish them.
The goal is to build a photographic archive of churches and related buildings across the UK and I suspect the project will take many years to - complete? Can you complete such a project? Is it in fact even a project? Or a pastime?
Well it involves photography at least and I love that. Talking of which I might use just one camera for this, as a technical challenge of sorts; that is the Ricoh GR3X, a very pocketable compact camera of a similar size to something like a Leica, I’d love one of those but this was a bit more affordable!
It’s a fantastic picture taker, mind you it’s a fixed lens camera, it’s equivalent to 40mm in 35mm terms. I can remember at the time struggling to choose, this or it’s 28mm sibling the GR3. I chose this one because, it’s better for street photography, details, macro to a degree.
So for some of these photos where I wanted to squeeze the entire church in to the frame, I needed to step out to the edge of the churchyard to do so, the details no problem, you just step closer to them.
I actually prefer this to working with a lazy zoom, plus there are less chances of artefacts, distortion etc - though vignetting in some light conditions does occur at times.
This is starting to sound like a camera review.
St Denys, Church
Some time ago I used Google Maps and other tools to create a list of churches across the country. I’ve added around 300 so far and most of these are located around the Wessex area of England, within easy reach of our home in Berkshire, some might be “day trip” distance but many could be done in an evening after work, in a weekend whilst doing other things.
St Denys is in a place that feels like a million miles from a big bustling town such as Reading but it’s barely a few miles apart. It’s located on the edge of a charming village or more hamlet to be honest, called Stanford Dingley.
Stanford Dingley parishioners are lucky to be the current custodians of St Denys’, a priceless piece of English Heritage. With relics of its Saxon origin within the interior walls, this grade 1 listed building is one of the oldest churches in Berkshire. It is of real historical importance and has been the focal point of village life in Stanford Dingley for over a 1,000 years.
Today’s church is of 12th Century origin, but it still holds a Norman font. The Victorians decorated over painted medieval murals, which after recent restoration, fragments can now be seen.
The church in 2019 completed a large year long overhaul installing heating, a kitchen and toilets to make it a more comfortable place to enjoy.
When walking around yesterday we noted that on one side, further building works are being carried out, which is good to see, as so many churches are starting to fall into a state of disrepair.
Doors are always great subjects for photographers.
The Church Project
There are some 160000 churches spread across the UK and all have some interesting stories to tell. Whilst I’ve never been a church goer at any point in my lifetime, apart from a short period of time when Tina and I would take Alice (my step-daughter) to our local church where we lived at the time, as she wanted to learn more about Christianity; I think we all got more than we bargained for, then moved house and haven’t been back since. Religion perhaps isn’t for us but churches are, they’re for everyone. I think this is because for the two of us, we’ve both grown up with an immense gratitude towards churches, we got dragged around them as kids by parents who had some fascination with these ancient places. Ok I used to hate the national trust, garden centres, churches, scones and jazz. Now I love those things and churches too. Then of course Tina and I got married in a Methodist church, North Camp, Farnborough where Alice went to her youth club as a young girl some years before.
This project is very much a husband and wife thing, it gets us out, we explore and discover places we wouldn’t have known existed otherwise.