A Busy Week at St Mary’s

By Natalie Thomas

Over the last week there has been plenty of activity at St Mary’s, both in the church and behind the scenes in the office. We were delighted to host two work experience students, Rita and Alec, from Newark Academy, who had the opportunity to immerse themselves in the workings of a historic site. Alongside their placement, we have also seen exciting progress in our ongoing restoration project, with visible transformations taking place throughout the building. In this blog, I am thrilled to share our latest updates with you.

The baptismal font on the move.

Work Experience

Rita and Alec embarked on an exciting week at St Marys as part of their Year 10 work experience. Their placement provided a diverse introduction to working at a heritage site, shadowing Chrissie at various events throughout the week. On Monday they started off their placement by volunteering at community café, engaging with the local community serving cake and coffee. Alec found this aspect of the placement especially inspiring and was eager to learn more, asking about additional volunteering opportunities within the Church's community outreach programmes. His interest in this side of the work at St Mary’s was demonstrated in his extra voluntary work that week at a church run youth group.

Throughout their placement, Rita and Alec took part in a range of public-facing activities. They ventured into the town centre, chatting with members of the public and distributing leaflets for our upcoming medieval re-enactment event in April. Beyond community engagement, they also assisted with marketing and administrative tasks, fully immersing themselves in the several aspects of heritage work.

In addition to these activities, Rita and Alec’s main project was underway. Their project is part of getting the Church ready to function as a multi-use space, ready for reopening. They were tasked to create story sacks for children aged 4-6 to go in a kid’s area of the Church. These story sacks will be left out in this section to provide entertainment for young children so that their parents can explore the history of the site and keep their children engaged. These resources are aimed to be themed around artwork and sculptures found around the Church with educational stories suitable for young children.

The story sack Rita and Alec created was themed around a cat found on a 15th century priest seat/sedilia that has carvings of cats, birds, and Mary Magdalene. Rita wrote a story about a cat based around the messages of friendship and overcoming differences. Then they both got to work creating craft activities to pair alongside this, planning out colouring sheets, origami, hand puppets, and a matching game.

We thoroughly enjoyed having them for the week and thank them for all their hard work and creativity.

The historic font is reassembled in its new location.

Restoration Progress

For the last month we have followed a lot of restoration works closely and this week marked significant milestones in our efforts to restore St Mary’s.

Last Wednesday, the final foundations of the font were laid, allowing our site team to carefully reassemble the font in its permanent position. Another element of considerable progress has been the coping stones on the roof. Around the border of the roof there were a number of missing copings which our stonemasons have been carefully working on fixing over the last three weeks. Stone from the quarry was originally sent to the site workshop and the stonemasons have been carefully crafting replicas of the original coping stones. Over the last week they were transported up to the roof and installed. It is incredible seeing the progress happening with the restoration works and these two developments are going to be one of many over the next year.

The relocated font in situ.

It has been an eventful and rewarding week at St Mary’s, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share these updates with you. I look forward to seeing many of you at this week’s Hard Hat Tour, where you will have the chance to witness the restoration progress first hand. Thank you for your continued support and stay tuned for more updates soon!

— Natalie Thomas