Restorer tried to take on doomed Truro church but was 'ignored'

St Paul's Church in Tregolls Road, Truro
-Credit: (Image: DCM)


A restoration specialist wanted to take on a now doomed church and keep it standing but was ignored by the Diocese of Truro, he claims. The church organisation has announced that after years of trying to sell St Paul's Church on Tregolls Road in Truro, it will demolish it.

The Diocese said it could cost up to £7m to repair and maintain the Victorian landmark church. The Grade-II listed building dates back to 1845 and had its tower completed in 1910. However, both the tower and church are in a bad state of repair, with water coming through the roof and the tower's polyphant soapstone eroding.

The Diocese said there is no technical solution to the damage and all there is left to do to make St Paul's church safe is to pull it down. The news has not gone down well with many residents in the city.

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Falmouth building restoration specialist Daniel Edwards said he offered to take on the project of restoring and maintaining the church. He said he wanted to use the building as a heritage skills centre and keep the space going for the community.

In a post on Cornwall Live's Facebook page he wrote: "We were happy to take it and all liabilities on and our plan was to turn it into a heritage skills centre and multi-use space and keep the building as was. We had an engineer's plan to build an internal steel skeleton that would settle and take the weight of the tower. It would have cost a fraction of this invented £7m repair bill. It's clearly being overblown in an attempt to justify demolition and selling off to developers."

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He said that he first offered to take St Paul's off the Diocese's hands three years ago. He told CornwallLive that there is a way to further protect the polyphant stone on the tower from the elements in a way that's sympathetic to the architecture.

He added, "We were promised access to the church with our engineers to inspect before we put our plans down. We had an idea that involved reinforcing inside the tower with a steel skeleton, underpinning or buttressing the front, and then building standalone boxes for heritage skills craftsman workshops down the nave and a multi-use community space at one end.

"There are photos of the church some 30 years ago with a gravel area for cars at the front so parking would not have been an issue. We were told to contact the surveyors who had the keys. We phoned and emailed constantly for over a year and they refused to return our calls or engage at all which made me suspicious that they were formulating other plans."

Mr Edwards believes the £7m price tag used by the Diocese is inflated and he reckons his project would have cost a mere fraction of that. He added: "The costs we had were nowhere near £7m. The original costs projected by the church and their engineers were £1.2m.

"It's fairly obvious to me that this new £7m is being plucked to try and justify demolition. We were looking at Heritage Lottery funding and would be interested to see if the Church has actually really looked into repairs. If so where are the new reports and where are the plans and real costs and can we see them?"

A spokesperson for the Diocese of Truro said: "The proposals are now part of a formal consultation being administered by the Church Commissioners. As this is a consultation period, we would welcome serious proposals for the future of the site and building, including from those who have previously explored the possibilities, having not received viable suggestions that have progressed to date."

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