WELLS CATHEDRAL is fund-raising for a £7-million restoration project: Vicars’ Close (News, 9 August 2024). Sited next to the cathedral, it is the oldest medieval street in Europe still inhabited for its original purpose. Restoration of the Close’s 14th-century terraced houses is scheduled for completion in spring 2027. Recent grants and donations leave nearly £800,000 to be raised.
In post since June 2024, the Dean of Wells, the Very Revd Toby Wright, says: “Vicars’ Close is a truly remarkable place — possibly without parallel anywhere in the world. We have a responsibility not only to protect the architectural site, but also to share its extraordinary heritage and enable more people to engage with it. We are absolutely thrilled that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has made such a generous and significant contribution [£4.4 million] to help us achieve that ambition.”
The construction of Vicars’ Close began in 1348, with the intention of providing the men, who deputised for canons, with homes near the cathedral and away from the temptations of town. A charter for the vicars choral was also granted in 1348. First established in the 1100s, the task of vicars choral was to sing the liturgy on behalf of canons who were away from the cathedral, or who chose not to sing services. Wells’s adult choristers are still called the vicars choral rather than lay clerks, the term used in other cathedrals.
Originally built as two rows of 20 houses, 40 dwellings in total, the two sides of Vicars’ Close mirror each other, with silver-pink stone walls and tall central chimneys. Vicar’s Close still houses choristers and vergers — housing comes with their stipend — and there is also a Wells Cathedral School boarding house.
WELLS CATHEDRALVicars’ Hall Treasury
No. 22 has one of the most intact interiors on the Close, and will be one of the areas newly opened to the public, when the restoration project is complete in about 26 months’ time. Currently home to the director of primary music outreach, Alex Jenkins, the house underlines the difficulties of medieval living. Stone floors and absence of central heating make the originally one-up- one-down house icily cold. Wearing a fleece and fingerless gloves, Mr Jenkins describes the humidifiers in each room as “a key piece of kit”. The ground floor living-room ceiling reveals the Victorian restoration of William Burgess, who added a painted vegetative-motif decoration to the beamed ceiling.
Stepping into the back garden, the strategic projects director, Crystal Johnson, says that centuries of restorations, extensions, and adaptations, to make room for kitchens and bathrooms, are one of the complexities of the project. “Vicars’ Close is a Grade I listed site, but the listings vary to reflect changes over time. We have to be mindful how we treat everything. Every window and door is given a heritage priority.”
Indicating gaps in stonework and leaking gutters, Ms Johnson says that some of the biggest headaches come from restorative work from the 1970s and ’80s. Cement render used to repair cracks has trapped moisture in the stonework, making the interiors damp. Poorly aligned gutters, added as part of extensions, send rainwater running down exterior walls.
A full restoration was costed at £10 million; so Ms Johnson says that the current project is tackling the critical building work and stopping deterioration. “Water ingress is the biggest problem.” Because £4.4 million of the project’s funding comes from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, she says, it provides no money for interiors; so lower-level works will be done by the in-house team.
Currently, Vicars’ Close has no visitor interpretation, and tourists have been known to picnic in residents’ gardens and try front doors, to look around inside. Ms Johnson says that medieval spaces will be brought alive through sound and projection. Non-original building additions will be used for interpretation, letting visitors know that they have moved from one era to another.
No. 12, at the northern end of the Close, near Vicar’s Chapel, built in 1420, will act as a visitor centre. Two houses knocked into one, the property illustrates the post-Reformation expansion of dwellings, as men with families, and sometimes servants, moved into the Close. Meeting inhabitants’ changing needs over time reduced the Close’s original 40 houses to 27 today.
In the Georgian panelled rooms of number 12, visitors will learn about choral music, finding out how a choir works, and tracing music’s development from plainchant to Gregorian chant, and from monophonic to polyphonic.
Immersive audio will provide an audio journey for visitors. They will see a musical timeline in the undercroft, situated beneath the tower next to the cathedral, built by Bishop Budwith in the mid-15th century. The tower also houses Vicars’ Hall, where the vicars choral used to dine as a community. Above the dining hall, the muniments room, which has a deeds filing cabinet, from the early 1300s, will be open to visitors for the first time. From Vicars’ Hall, the vicars choral used to go over Chain Bridge, directly into the cathedral. Today, singers file into the Quire from the Close, dressed in light-blue cassocks, for the 4.30 p.m. evensong rehearsal.
Dean Wright, formerly the Team Rector of Witney, a team ministry covering six parishes, observes that the contrast between a large rural parish and Wells Cathedral is that, in the cathedral, everybody is close at hand.