Image: ghostly image of the Penryn Methodist Church © Crow Architecture, produced with support from Falmouth and Exeter Universities’ Immersive Business
Image: © Tom Ebdon. Interior view of the chapel
church records
CROW ARCHITECTURE and small acts
Church Records is a project to make a creative archive of the beautiful former Penryn Methodist Chapel.
The project will preserve the building’s social and material history for future generations, understand and celebrate the building’s local importance to inform its re-development, celebrate the people who have had a connection to the chapel over the years, and create a historical record for future researchers, historians and the wider community.
Church Records will record and capture the building’s structure, materials and layout, as well as its acoustic properties. These elements will be brought together with people’s memories of the chapel to create a contemporary archive of this important heritage building: The Church Records Gazetteer. This will be an annotated document cataloguing the building’s tangible and intangible culture - collected through conversations and historical and contemporary survey methods – and will be exhibited in the chapel before being made available online and accessible through the Penryn Museum.
If you have memories or historic photographs of the former Penryn Methodist Chapel, please email info@artcentrepenryn.org to share them as part of this project.
About 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.
About 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.
Church Records is made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we are 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.