Songs of praise – a look back at concert venue’s church days S
As the £6.3m renovation and refurbishment of St George’s Brandon Hill nears its completion, Eugene Byrne looks back on the rich and dramatic story behind the original church and its neighbourhood
T George’s on Brandon Hill is now back in business as a performance venue following a £6.3m extension and refurbishment programme. The new pavilion-style extension is to improve visitor experience, provide step-free access and provide a flexible space for performances, workshops and more.
Additional work has included restoration of the steps at the front.
St George’s is well-known as one of Bristol’s leading music venues, with a reputation across the entire region for bringing some of the biggest names in jazz, classical, folk and world music to Bristol.
It started out, of course, as a church, one of the numerous socalled ‘Waterloo Churches’ built all over the country with government money from the 1820s through to the early years of Victoria’s reign.
It’s often wrongly believed they were built to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon, when they were actually a response to social unrest and the increasing popularity of nonconformist religion.
The establishment hoped that the steadying influence of the Church of England (and not the nonconformist churches, some of which were regarded as hotbeds of radicalism and sedition) would help head off revolution.
Dr Hislop, the vicar of St Augustine-the-Less, saw an opportunity and seized it. He applied for, and got, government funds for a “chapel of ease” for his College Green church.
This was not because St Augustine’s needed more room for worshippers; it needed more space to bury its dead. Hislop was probably also entertaining ideas of building a grand church for wealthy worshippers living around the fashionable slopes of Brandon Hill, though what he needed most urgently was ground in which to inter his deceased parishioners.
The architect, Robert Smirke found his first design was turned down in favour of a more expensive Gothic design, but the Commissioners, who held the purse strings, ensured his ‘Greek Revival’ design was reinstated.
They liked it so much that they used an identical design for the building of St James’ church in Hackney. They paid Smirke half his usual fee in return.
Aside from tensions between Anglicans and nonconformists, there were also divisions within the Anglican communion which would grow increasingly bitter through the 19th century. These were between “high” and “low” Anglicans, between those who favoured elaborate Roman Catholic-style ritual and those who preferred a more simple, “evangelical” form of worship.
These tensions were even expressed in church architecture, and into the row over whether the St George’s design should be “Gothic” or “Grecian”. The former was favoured by many because the Grecian design would make it look more like a nonconformist church. The problem was that this would be more expensive, so ‘ Grecian’ style it would be.
This design was what keeps the building in business nowadays. The interior of the church is like a massive shoe-box; from an acoustic viewpoint it’s perfect for unamplified music of the sort for which St George’s is nowadays famous. (“For thrash metal, not so good,” St George’s press officer remarked dryly.)
The acoustic nature of the design was fully understood at the time, though our forebears were more interested in its suitability for preaching rather than music.
Within nine years of opening in 1823 St George’s had been hived off as a separate parish of its own. And if Dr Hislop had dreamed of a socially exclusive congregation, he would be disappointed.
This was a time of huge change in Bristol, and as the years passed, the church found itself at the centre of an extremely diverse community socially.
There were plenty of wealthy parishioners paying annual rent for “sittings” in the better parts of the church, but there were plenty of poor parishioners and outright paupers, too.
Doreen Pastor, St George’s Community Learning & Volunteer Coordinator, in charge of heritage activity and education said: “There’s this idea that this was an affluent area, but what we also found was that the majority of burials were from Lime Kiln Lane, which is now George Street which was a slum, so the average age in our graveyard was around 37. This shows the disparity in wealth. And there are spikes in death numbers, like when there was the cholera outbreak in 1837.”
Two years ago a major archaeological survey of the graveyard was carried out. Some graves were plainly of well-off people, but there were plenty of poorer ones, too. The tops of the skulls of some of them had been neatly sawn off, suggesting that their bodies had been “loaned” to the medical profession for dissection in return for a decent burial afterwards.
Another body proved to have an elaborately carved wooden leg. Perhaps a former sailor or sea-captain?
Part of the Heritage Lottery Fund money for the refurbishment and extension was for exploring the rich history of the church and its neighbourhood.
So in the months and years to come the public and schools alike will be treated to talks, public tours and displays.
St George’s Staff and volunteers have been busily researching for the last few years (a handful of their many findings thanks to a little help from Bristol Times and its readers.)
Doreen Pastor is confident there’s plenty in the building’s history to enthuse adults and schoolkids alike. Some of it is agreeably gruesome:
“Because of the local area you had a lot of wealthy merchants, but we also had a lot of surgeons living here because of the proximity to the BRI. One of them was the founder of the Bristol Anatomy School, and in those days you didn’t have the bodies you needed to do your studies and he and a friend were wandering around Bristol stealing bodies and he was eventually caught in Brislington.
“He was living in Great George Street at the time. He was put in front of a court and paid a small fine and got away with it.”
Another nice story that’s been uncovered is from the early days of the church and concerns some ne’er-do-well who broke in, hoping to thieve something valuable. Instead he got drunk on communion wine and was found passed out the following morning.
There is now a permanent heritage exhibition showing the story of the building and its neighbourhood, with wall-displays, touch-screens, stories and artefacts.
There’s a recording of the very last service held in the church in 1984, there’s Canon Percy Gay’s gas mask (he was a Royal Navy padre during WW2), though perhaps the most noteworthy object is what’s
left of the German incendiary bomb that nearly destroyed the church during the Blitz.
If you’ve been to St George’s you may have noticed a metal star set into the ceiling, pictured inset left.
This marks the spot where the bomb landed.
It did a small amount of damage which was easily repaired, but Canon Gay had the star installed as a permanent reminder of his church’s deliverance from destruction.
Michael Beek, St George’s Heritage & Engagement Manager, told BT: “We thought how great it would be to have the bomb, but we never expected to have it.
“But it turned out that Percy Gay had kept it. It was then passed on to one of the churchwardens and he gave it to his son – who brought it in for us!”
The memory of Canon Gay (1891-1975) dominates the later St George’s story. Many readers who have been longstanding Bristol residents will remember him as an outspoken and charismatic local figure.
He was also known for his sense of fun and his eccentricities; he apparently liked to enter the homes he was invited to for Sunday lunch through the windows.
Gay was vicar of st George’s from 1930 until 1975 (with a break for wartime service), a time which saw his congregation numbers fall dramatically as churchgoing declined and population moved away from central Bristol.
Gay was not the sort of man to simply accept the church’s decline, though. In 1966 when the church had to close for vital – and expensive – repairs, he launched an appeal. Every day for several weeks, parishioners and supporters would sit outside with Canon Gay underneath his umbrella while they solicited donations from passersby.
After the church was declared redundant in 1984, a charitable trust was established to establish the building as a recording and concert venue. It was extensively renovated in 1999.
But what’s not often realised is that St George’s as a performance venue was originally Percy Gay’s vision.
The heritage research has revealed how he saw the way that St George’s could become what he called a “church for the arts”, a place which would host concerts, theatrical productions and which would have a café. It was hosting BBC lunchtime concerts by 1977, if not sooner.
“We always thought that our founders had this great idea after Percy Gay died,” says Michael Beek, “but in fact that idea was already there.”