St. Michael’s Burtonwood
Today’s blog entry is looking at Burtonwood, specifically a little bit of recent history of St. Michael’s Church. We have two images to look at, the first showing the church hall shortly before demolition, and the second showing the church itself being jacked up following mining subsidence.
This first newspaper clipping is taken from the 7th February 1969 edition of the Warrington Guardian. It shows the Parish Hall shortly before demolition and reports that a new hall is to be built closer to the village centre at a cost of £6000. Benches and trestle tables are stacked up in front of the two double doors and the building is looking sadly neglected by this point. Even so, you can see what a beautiful building it had been. With its wide front gable, a stout tower to the side, and the broad flat archways the hall has an Arts and Crafts feel to me. In case the picture here is too grainy, the band across the front of the gable reads “S. Michael’s Church Hall” (so we can at least be sure of where today’s picture shows).
If anyone out there has a better quality picture of the church hall that we could scan in, please let us know, it would be great to add a better picture to the museum collections. Perhaps somebody even has that rarest of things in the archive world, an interior picture?
The second picture today is an article extracted from “Livewire”, no not Warrington’s own Livewire, but the Liverpool Diocesan magazine which bares the same name. The article dates to September 1984 and shows the Reverend Russ Naylor examining hydraulic equipment installed to jack up the church after damage had been caused due to mining subsidence.
If anyone can tell me who the other man in the picture is I would be grateful if you could contact [email protected], so that we can add it to our records.
This article was originally posted on Friday, April 21st, 2017.