Do your research
Welcome to a new instalment in the #churchproject which as we approach autumn and the shorter days of the year means; I have to plan this project a little more carefully, in order to visit places with less available daylight hours to boot. Weekday evenings will pretty much go out of the window come October, as we swap what we have been doing in recent months for other activities. One of the things I want to do, is plan ahead for the coming months, to start my articles before I visit places, which will mean, posts will be easier to update as and when I've got all of the photos I need. I can do my research ahead of time because to be honest I have been conducting this process a little bit back to front.
So here is the plan - I have a map of churches around the area, I shall add a draft article for each one, a map location for #worldmappin, write some notes in each, interesting facts about each church, doing research on those dark nights. I will then schedule into weekends from October till about March, the locations I want to visit and gradually get some form of momentum going with this project.
Some posts might take longer to write, as I have a few favourite churches that I wish to go back to two or three times during different seasons, in order to create some deeper articles.
It's all in the planning.
Let's go to church
Anyway, onto today's location and this time round I filmed a video rather than taking photos because why not? Only thing is I didn't record much of a narrative, so the video is just going to roll with some music and I put it up on my YouTube channel, the embedded video is below.
The original church goes back as far as the 1500s and was rebuilt in the Victorian era using the Romanesque style, which makes it rather different to other more traditional buildings in the region. It's tower is stunning, cylindrical in style, very unique indeed.
I believe Augustus Pugin was the inspiration behind this church, especially the chancel but was actually designed by J.B. Lacey. There is a picture of the old church inside the current building, from what I've read, it is etched into one of the stained glass windows.
The churchyard there is huge for what would appear to be such a small village but probably served a more important role in the past, like so many churches up and down the UK.
Looking across fields, you can catch a glimpse of the AWE site, a former munitions factory, now a nuclear weapons manufacturing plant, the very reason, housing development in the area has been prohibited. That is another topic entirely which I might touch upon again in my future blog posts, especially when I next visit Greenham Common....
Here is the video, hope you enjoy and I will return to some more photography soon.
https://youtu.be/tahziS7qVrU