St. Saviour’s Church is located in the picturesque Larkhall area of Bath

admin ♦ August 6, 2010 ♦ 1 Comment

St. Saviour’s is an active and growing church located in  Larkhall, an area with a village atmosphere in the North East part of Bath.  It’s a lively, friendly, welcoming church with modern informal and more traditional services. We are passionate about Prayer, see the Bible as our inspiration and are open to the moving of the Holy Spirit.
St. Saviour’s Church is located in the picturesque Larkhall area of Bath. The hills around include Solsbury Hill, which was one of the earliest settlements in the area. The local shops retain a strong village atmosphere and include a post office, newsagent, chemist, garage, delicatessen, butcher, hairdresser, hardware store, pubs and even a  small theatre.
The church is tiny and it has a pleasant courtyard. In the courtyard is the grave of Macedonia’s greatest national hero who was leader of the national movement for liberation from the Turks, and Macedonian independence, Goce Delchev. There is a small museum about him in the buildings around the courtyard (you have to enter the museum to buy a ticket for the church). Among the paving of the courtyard there are some 18th and 19th century gravestones. Turks didn’t allow building of new churches during their occupation, but as the empire was weakening in the 18th century they started giving permitions for building of churches to keep the population happy. There were many rules to be followed like the exterior had to be without decorations and the floor of the church had to be at least one meter below the ground so the church wouldn’t dominate the skyline of the city. St. Saviour Church is example of one of these churches. It was built in the beginning of 19th century on the site of a church destroyed in the 1689 fire (as you enter, turn right to see remains of the frescoes and the level of the earlier church). The church is famous for its interior and wood carving. The iconscreen is work of Petre Filipovski Garkata and Marko and Makarie Frckovski, the best wood artists in the 19th century in Macedonia. In 1926 a British museum offered a blank check for the iconscreen, the state to fill in the amount if they decide to sell it. The beauty of it is that it is a deep wood carving from whole wood boards (the figures are not attached to eachother), and it is not covered with golden paint, as it is tradition in Orthodox churches so the game of light and dark shades is quite dramatic (the doors into the altar and the cross on the top are covered with gold paint, so you can compare). The iconscreen was made from 1819 to 1824 and is 10 meters long and 7 meters high. There are scenes from the old and the new testament. The figurines are 7 cm tall. Look for the creation of Adam and Eve on one of the columns next to the doors of the altar and the dance of Salome, where she dances for king Irod so he would give her the head of St.John the Baptist (she is dressed in traditional a dress from Galichnik). All around there are flowers and animals typical for the region presented. On the far right look for the self-portrait of the artists presented as they are working on the iconscreen. The icons are some of the best of the Byzantine revival.

St Saviours Church was built in two phases between 1870 and 1890, and is Grade Two listed. Located in Wilton Street, just behind Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, the church had a dwindling congregation and a significant redevelopment potential. Rather than close the church and church hall down, the diocese decided on a compromise strategy to reduce the size of the church and community centre, to free up 70 % of the site for residential development.

Our clients, The Raven Group, bought an 80 year lease on the site, and based on studies by SCH Architects, opted to create two house, each in excess of 800 square metres, rather a number of much smaller flats, on the basis that this solution would provide the most appropriate given the huge constraints of the confined site and listed fabric.

As well at the Church, the property also included a church hall built in the late 1960’s on a narrow strip of land next to a row of Georgian cottages. The client’s brief was to maximise the usage of the site and so it was decided to place one house on the site of the hall (The Courtyard House), and the other in the rear half of the church (The Church House). The Courtyard House was to comprise a four storeys, including a new basement with swimming pool, while the Church House was also four storeys built up inside the volume of the church. Our initial site surveys revealed that the church had a relatively deep raised timber floor, and so we proposed a new basement within this building as well, into which was also added a swimming pool.

Extensive geotechical surveys established the size and depth of the church foundations and also those of the adjoining properties. We found that the Georgian cottages would need to be underpinned by 4.5 metres, that the church would need 2.5 metres of underpinning, and that the six central nave columns within the church would need underpinning by 5.5 metres.

We carried out a series of studies looking at the various methods of underpinning, and constructing basements, trying to optimise the construction costs with basement size. Local land values being so high meant that normally regarded methods often performed less well than expensive one that yielded more basement plan area. The scheme was eventually tendered on a combination of conventional mass concrete hand dug underpinning, and bored mini-piling within the church.

The nave column underpinning provided the most difficult change. The original foundations were mass concrete founded on dense gravel, and these needed to be extended down 5.5 metres lower. The presence of gravel, and the relatively small plan size of the footing precluded any sort of undermining, especially given the relative slenderness of the stone columns. The final tendered sequence of construction, was as follows;

1.

Four 15 metre deep concrete piles were to be bored around each nave column.
2.

The brickwork at each nave column base was then core drilled and four steel tubular needles were inserted.
3.

A reinforced concrete collar was cast around the column and the projecting needles, to provide strong point of connection.
4.

Temporary steel beams were cast into the pile heads, under the collars, and resin filled hydraulic jacks were inserted between them.
5.

The nave columns were then jacked upwards to transfer load from their foundation bearing on the gravel on the bored piles. This stage was carefully monitored.
6.

Excavation proceed and the mass concrete foundations of the nave columns were removed.
7.

New reinforced concrete pads were constructed below the new basement floor level, and columns built up under the nave columns.
8.

A new ground floor slab was constructed, supported by the new lower section of column, and laterally bracing the collars.
9.

The bored piles and their capping beams were removed, and basement construction was completed.

The successful tenderer, O’Rourke Ltd, proposed an alternative pile type of bored and bottom driven steel tubes, which was accpeted after some investigation. Otherwise the original sequence was used in the final construction.

Both houses were successfully completed after a two year construction period, and each were sold for in excess of £8 million. For us the project will be remembered for the intense working relationship that we had with the contractor, for us an absolute requirement on such a technically complex project.Error processing request