St Paul's Wordsworth

Year | 2024

Location | Parsons Cross, Sheffield, UK

Clients | St Paul's Wordsworth Church

St Paul’s Wordsworth celebrates 75 years of faith and community, highlighting its heritage and outlining a bold redevelopment vision to serve Parson Cross well into the next century.

Established in 1949, St Paul’s Wordsworth Church in Parson Cross originally gathered in what is now referred to as the church hall. This temporary structure, initially designed to last only 10 years, remains in constant use today. The current church building which opened in 1959 was designed by the architect Sir Basil Spence whilst he oversaw construction on Coventry Cathedral, and has been designated as grade II* listed. Both buildings are now showing their age and struggling to meet the growing needs of the local community.

As part of a wider strategy looking forward, the church has recently celebrated its 75-year anniversary and launched ‘Project 75’ – looking to modernise the listed church building and redevelop the church hall into a purpose-built community hub. To assist with this, ‘Live Project’ students from the University of Sheffield have partnered with the team at St Paul’s to produce a range of options for redevelopment. These cover refurbishment and interventions within the listed building of varying impact scales, and explore both retrofit and newbuild options for a new church hall. Improvements to the church grounds have also been proposed, with ideas for new planting, community gardens and a reflective amphitheatre drawn up.

To inform the design process, the Live Project team has sought to work closely with local community groups, including users of the current church hall as well as local schools. Multiple engagement sessions between the Live Project team and local people allowed for their needs and views to be captured and represented across a range of different media. Not only has this helped foster new relationships between the church and community, but the resulting information will be invaluable to the future development at St Paul’s.

“Hosting a Live Project at St Paul’s has been a really beneficial experience. It’s helped bring life to our redevelopment programme in ways which we couldn’t do ourselves…or would have taken a while to do so. Seeing potential design ideas on screen has helped the wider church and community visualise what could be, which has been really beneficial to us at the start of our redevelopment project.”

Jonathan Buckley, Redevelopment Manager, St Paul's Church

Credits

Student Team: 

Francesca Wren, Nathan Ottaway, Elsa Mills, Mengzhi Xu, Elena Silverman, Kai Larmour-Jones, Samuel Hewitson, Ethan Mattocks, Esther Yeboah, Quincy Qiao Yi Lo, Shuaichao Wang

Mentor:

Mark Parsons