When observers first saw the damage to the medieval church of St Ethelburga 's, in the City of London , caused by a massive terrorist explosion in April 1993, many believed that what remained of the church would have to demolished.
Over ten years later, Purcell Miller Tritton has received Natural Stone Craft restoration award from the Worshipful Company of Masons for its high-quality work at St Ethelburga's in a project which combined reconstruction, repair and new building.
The practice team, led by partner John Burton, won the competition to rebuild St Ethelburga's in 1997, drawing on its experience of dealing with other historic buildings hit by sudden devastation, such as the fire-damaged Norwich Assembly Rooms.
The force of the 1993 bomb caused the entire tower and west front of St Ethelburga's to collapse into a heap of rubble and timbers. Working with structural engineers, the Purcell Miller Tritton team devised a plan to support and repair the standing walls that had survived the blast. The Museum of London's Archaeology Service had identified and stored much of the salvaged wood and stone, and a decision was made to re-use as much of this material as possible. New materials, complementary to the original, would be used elsewhere. So on the west front which faces directly onto Bishopsgate, new Kentish ragstone was sourced to match the 15% which was salvaged. Pieces of recovered Reigate dressed stone were re-used wherever possible while a complementary stone, Chilmark, was found to supplement it. The clock on the west front is a replica but the bell in the tower is the original which was recovered intact. Thanks to the expertise of the stonemasons at St Blaise, the reconstructed west front has a homogenous quality and the similarity to its pre-1993 appearance is striking.
Project architect and Purcell Miller Tritton partner Mark Hammond's philosophy at Grade I-listed St Ethelburga's was to 'touch the building lightly'. This complemented the visionary approach of the Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres who put forward the idea of creating a Reconciliation and Peace Centre at the church in which the 'scars' of the building would remain visible. At the same time as repairing and reconstructing the original structure of the church, we designed new offices and facilities for the Centre within and above what was the south aisle. This involved securing the south arcade and expanding the width of the aisle by incorporating what had been an external passageway to make space for new utility rooms on the ground floor.
The Centre has its own separate glass covered entrance lobby at the east end of the church and a new staircase gives access to offices on a mezzanine level above the south aisle. A glass screen separates the offices from the nave. From his desk, Roland Smith, the Director of the Centre can look across at the altar where the last Cross of Nails salvaged from Coventry Cathedral stands. Prince Charles was present at the opening of the restored church by the Rt Revd Richard Chartres in November 2002. Comparing its scarred beauty to a vase 'once shattered and now restored', the Bishop declared St Ethelburga's was 'a building whose story and recent history has become its future work'.
