It’s hard to believe that it was a year ago that we received the offer of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to enable us to put in hand urgent repairs to St Laurence Church. You may be wondering why there is no scaffolding up and no builders at work.

Well, there’s a lot of preparatory work to do, which is why the scheme gives us a year to develop exactly what the project involves. On the repair side, we’ve been held up as the reports from experts on bats, structure, stonework and glazing have been long in coming. As a result our architect has not been able to draw up a full specification of work but is now hard at work on it. That will then have to be approved by both HLF and the church’s planning department before going out to tender when we will finally know the true cost of the project.

Other aspects of the development work have been going well: we think we have enough grants from other bodies to mean we have the total funds for the project (no mean feat). Just as excitingly, we’ve been working on historical research to find out about some of the people of Measham from times past – so that as well as being able to open up the architecture of the church, we can tell the stories of real people.

We hope you’ll come in the future to join the excitement of what we’ve been discovering!