photo by Tom Ebdon
Church Records
Church Records is a project to create a contemporary archive of the Penryn Methodist Church, a grade II listed building in the centre of Penryn.
The church was built in 1891 to accommodate up to 1000 worshipers and served the Methodist community of Penryn for many years. With the congregation having declined to just a handful of people, the church held its final service in August 2023 and put the building up for sale. It is now being given a new lease of life and being transformed into a contemporary art gallery.
In 2024, we commissioned artist, architect and researcher Frances Crow of Crow Architecture, and artists Katie Etheridge and Simon Persighetti of Small Acts to co-create a contemporary archive of this important listed building before it changes.
The resulting project, Church Records, uses digital technology and creative approaches to capture, present and preserve the building’s structure and layout, as well as more ephemeral qualities of atmosphere, sound and light. The acoustic qualities of the main chapel space have been recorded through live events. Visits to the Archives and Cornish Studies Service at Kresen Kernow, have revealed intriguing details about the church’s early inception and its design. The thoughts and memories of people connected to the church over the years have been collected. They tell us what the building has meant to them and illuminate the traditions, rituals and social life which revolved around it.
It is hoped that by paying attention to the building’s history and local importance, Church Records not only preserves this for future generations, but informs the building’s new life.
In his oral history interview for the project, Charles Wenmoth refers to Church Records as the ‘keystone’ in the bridge between the building’s past and its future: “we all know the story of the keystone in the bridge. You take that keystone out, everything falls down.”
Church Records, 2024/25
Project Artists: Frances Crow, Crow Architecture, Katie Etheridge & Simon Persighetti, Small Acts
Acoustician: Robin Tyndale-Biscoe
Funded by: The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and the Architectural Heritage Fund
How to EXPLORE CHURCH RECORDS
Church Records has uncovered, produced and collated a wealth of information, artefacts, interviews and sounds which together tell a story of the former Penryn Methodist Church and the people connected to it.
There are two ways to explore Church Records:
You can use the document below - the Church Records Gazetteer. It will take you from the early foundations of the new church in the 1860s to digital mappings of its interior in 2024, via readings, historic documents and recollections. Explore the links in the document to reveal more.
You can also scroll down through this page to see all the different aspects of the Church Records project. You can listen to a range of audio files and follow links to the project’s activities.
Church Records Gazetteer
In its basic form, a Gazetteer is a list of items or a catalogue, which locates objects in a space. Taking a technique used in conservation architecture, one of the simplest forms of a Gazetteer is a list of rooms with photographs of the four walls, ceiling and floor.
The artist team took this approach as a starting point to create the ‘Church Records Gazetteer’, an annotated document containing physical and digital content cataloguing the tangible and intangible culture of the Penryn Methodist Church.
Gazetteers are usually organised by type and scope of information presented. The Church Records Gazetteer uses sound as its principle guide. The design of the Church Records Gazetteer is based on a Pew Rent Ledger, found at Kresen Kernow. The Pew Rent Ledger lists who sat where and how much they paid for their ‘sitting’.
The material referenced in the Gazetteer, has been collected in conversation with the community, through visits to local archives and collections, and spending time in the chapel to discover what the building itself can reveal about the motivations of the people who built it, worshiped in it and came together in communion.
Frances Crow, Crow Architecture
Record Cards
The Gazetteer includes a list of Record Cards that provide a visual record of the artefacts referenced in the text. These artefacts were discovered or created during the making of the Church Records project.
Record Cards 1-12 have been created during the project, with the idea being that more can be added over time.
The Auditory Plan
The Auditory Plan is a design principle in Methodist Churches to ensure that every person in the chapel could see and hear the preacher.
By mapping the spatial relationships in the building and referring to archival records, Frances Crow uncovered the relationship between the ‘speaker’, who stood at the centre of the auditory plan, and the ‘hearers’ who sat in the pews. This relationship defined the overall scale and form of the building.
Frances produced an Auditory Plan of the chapel based on an original sketch drawing of the church dated 1865, held at Kresen Kernow.
The Church Records Auditory Plan. © Frances Crow, Crow Architecture
Sketch plan of the Penryn Methodist Church. From the collection at Kresen Kernow, reference MRF/647-650
Recording the Hele & Co Organ
On 29 August 2024, David Collins, a former organist at Penryn Methodist Church, kindly gave up his time to play the Hele & Co Organ for the Church Records project. Robin Tyndale-Biscoe recorded the sound in the empty building.
Listen to David Collins playing the organ below
David Collins playing the Hele & Co Organ. Photo by Frances Crow.
Recordings made by Robin Tyndale Biscoe
Re:Sounding
An evening of music and song, 7 September 2024
Re:Sounding celebrated and captured one of the more ephemeral qualities of this important heritage building - its unique acoustics. The evening included singing by Mabe Ladies Choir and organ and piano playing by their accompanist, Rico Gerber.
Project artists Frances Crow, Katie Etheridge and Simon Persighetti spoke from the pulpit and gallery. They shared readings from documents found at Kresen Kernow, including the original application to build a chapel, the organ specification, and names from the pew rent ledger.
Re:Sounding took us back to a time before the chapel was built and helped us imagine the days when it was filled with 1000 voices.
The event was recorded by Robin Tyndale-Biscoe
Photography by Lottie Matthews
Mabe Ladies Choir singing at the Re:Sounding event. Photo by Lottie Matthews.
Re:Collections - Oral Histories
At the first Open Day for Art Centre Penryn on April 27th 2024, many people spoke about their connections to the Chapel either as Methodists or as local residents who had been to social or ceremonial events in the building. They filled in index cards with thoughts and memories and some respondents agreed to be recorded. Small Acts invited them back into the building to choose a specific location or pew where they would like to be interviewed. This means that we can hear their voices recorded in the particular echo, ambience and auditory atmosphere of the building they were speaking about.
We are very grateful to Charles Wenmoth, Lisa Dann, Phillipa Holden and Rose Webber for sharing their recollections of life at Penryn Methodist Church.
Listen below
Interviews conducted by Small Acts
Portraits by Lottie Matthews
Re:collections - Tea Party
On Thursday 25th July 2024, Small Acts hosted a tea party in Penryn Methodist Church, bringing together a group of individuals who had been connected to the chapel in different ways over the years to share their memories. The conversation became an opportunity for tea party guests to reminisce collectively whilst reflecting on how important the chapel has been to their lives individually.
Thank you to the tea party guests: Sharon Bawden, Margaret Dancer, Margaret Harrison, Jenny Major, Janet Thomas, Rose Webber.
The Church Records Tea Party. Photo by Lottie Matthews.
Re:Drawing - Visual
In 2022, Crow Architecture worked with Penryn Museum and Falmouth and Exeter Universities to preserve a record of the interior of the Chapel building. They used a LIDAR scanner to create a pointcloud of the interior of the main chapel space, which produced this ghostly image.
Image © Crow Architecture - created with support from Exeter and Falmouth Universities Immersive Business Support programme
Re:Drawing - Acoustic
One element was missing from the model, the acoustics of the space, which as many visitors to the church mentioned, where amazing. So in addition to creating a visual record through the LIDAR scan, they also captured the acoustics by recording its Impulse Response, a sonic equivalent of the pointcloud.
Both the LIDAR scanner and the Impulse Response involves sending out a pulse of information - light in the case of the LIDAR and sound in the case of the impulse response. Light and sound disperse through the space and, where they hit a surface, send information back to the device that is recording them. The former, produces points of light in the form of a pointcloud and the latter a resonance from the reflections of sound that reverberate off the surfaces of the space.
Both the pointcloud and the impulse response are digital models of the visual and acoustic space of the church. Together they create a historic record of the auditory plan, with its balcony, pews, pulpit and rostrum, that dictated the relationship between the ‘hearers’ and the ‘speaker’.
Robin Tyndale-Biscoe made a series of impulse Response recordings of the main chapel space. Photo by Frances Crow.
Hele & Co Organ Sample Set
Acoustician Robin Tyndale-Biscoe has made a sample set of the Hele & Co organ. With these samples you can have the experience of playing this distinctive church organ from your home!
There are instructions for using the sample set in section 2.7 of the Gazetteer.
If you would like to have access to the sample set, please contact us at info@artcentrepenryn.org
Pipes inside the Hele & Co Organ. Image © Robin Tyndale-Biscoe
the team
Crow Architecture
Through her work as an architect, researcher and academic over the past two decades, Frances Crow has developed a deep-rooted interest in the conservation of land and buildings – whether they have heritage value, are under-used or redundant, or need adapting to better serve the environment around them. Church Records draws together her experience from working as a partner in Liminal, a collaborative sound arts practice, and working as founding director of Crow Architecture, a regenerative architecture practice.
Small Acts
Small Acts work with people and places to make socially engaged performances and live art projects. Since 2011 artists Katie Etheridge & Simon Persighetti have developed a unique collaborative practice that explores the intersection between architecture, community, place and performance. Specialising in face-to-face connection, they create extraordinary experiences that bring individuals and communities together through small acts that make a big difference.
Lemonade Factory Studio
Set up by Robin Tyndale-Biscoe in 2017, Lemonade Factory Studio is nestled in the heart of Falmouth, Cornwall, catering for the full breadth of music production services, from Recording/Tracking, Mixing right the way through to commercial grade, release-ready Mastering.
Thank you to the Archives and Cornish Studies Service Kresen Kernow for support in searching their archive and for permission to share items on these pages.
Church Records is made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able to make a creative archive of an important listed building in Penryn town centre. This project is also part-funded by the UK Government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund and the Architectural Heritage Fund.