Church renovated by local man in 1950s lovingly restored by the charity he set up 80 years ago

Watch Church renovated by local man in 1950s lovingly restored by the charity he set up 80 years ago - Tindle News on Dailymotion

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00:00It's a very important historic building. It was in a simply appalling state before we stepped in.

00:07It had been restored in the 1950s, but you are a stone's throw from the River Munno here.

00:13It flooded. It developed very serious structural problems, and at one stage it's got a very

00:20important 15th century barrel roof inside, and the roof was literally forcing, the weight of the roof

00:28was forcing everything downwards, and if we hadn't acted, the whole thing would have been a heap of

00:36rubble, or the roof would have collapsed, probably fairly quickly. Now, what we've been able to do

00:42with help from a number of bodies, particularly the National Heritage Memorial Fund, is that it's

00:48now been restored, and it'll be all right for another 100 years without much needing to do to it.

00:53It was initially restored in 1954 by Ivor Boomer Thomas, who was very much a local Monmouthshire

01:00man, who had a very distinguished career in journalism. He had times at one stage. He certainly would have

01:09participated in the 1940 Olympics if there hadn't been a war, and he was a government minister in

01:13the actually government. He founded the Friends of Friends Churches, the organisation which I chair

01:18shortly afterwards, to rescue other churches. This is the first example of a church which he restored,

01:24and he did, out of family money basically. His second wife and family, they paid for it, but it was a

01:31revolutionary thing to do at the time, and a striking achievement. And the building continued in general

01:38parochial use and for the benefit of community, right up until very recently, when unfortunately the

01:44deterioration in the structure meant that it closed. To achieve this, there's been a formidable team

01:52of experts who have been engaged. I'm not an expert in restoring buildings, but we have assembled a very

01:59important team which was able to do the necessary. But this is a very big project. You're talking

02:05six or seven hundred thousand pounds of the total damage for putting this right, but it will now stand

02:11for another hundred years without much need of doing to it.