CHB, Author at Church & Heritage Building

Texas wedding chapel built with ‘new chapter in life’ in mind

Posted by CHB | Feb 16, 2019 | Christian, Latest News |

Architecture firm Studio 512 has designed a concrete chapel in Texas that rises up on one side to form a pointy volume evoking a steeple. The small, white building is located in Georgetown, a city that lies 30 miles (48 kilometres) north of Austin, where Studio 512 is based. The chapel is part of the Kindred Oaks wedding venue – an 11-acre (4.4 hectares) property studded with oak trees – and is the brainchild of owners Elaine and Steve Lincoln. Trapezoidal in plan, the gabled building has concrete walls that are skim-coated with stucco. The south side of the...

Bid to raise £1.5m to save historic Paisley church

Posted by CHB | Jan 31, 2019 | Christian, Latest News |

One of Scotland’s most iconic structures could be saved from ruin – with an expert team of place makers gearing up to raise £1.5million for its preservation. Coats Memorial, widely recognised as the exclamation mark of Paisley’s skyline, is looking for a new purpose since holding its last church ceremony in August 2018. Now with the support of a new Steering Group it is hoped it will once again become a cherished place where people will enjoy life’s biggest celebrations. Led by philanthropist, businessman and Paisley native Ian Henderson, the revival of Coats Memorial could see the building compete...

Of railways stations and fallen arches by Joseph Kelly, Editor

Posted by CHB | Jan 26, 2019 | Blog |

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t travel to London on business; from the north west all mainline routes terminate at Euston station, the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line to Liverpool Lime Street, Manchester Piccadilly, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central. The fifth busiest station in Britain and the country’s busiest inter-city passenger terminal, with 41.7 million entries and exits a year, Euston is also the mainline station for services to and through Birmingham New Street, and to Holyhead for connecting ferries to Dublin. For those who love to romanticise about railways it is also the...

A lost monastery, and stolen plane parts, by Joseph Kelly, Editor

Posted by CHB | Jan 26, 2019 | Blog |

It looks like a typical picture postcard scene from a British Winter. On a cold November day the River Dee rushes down from Snowdonia, heading busily seaward through the arches of the famous seventeenth century bridge at Bangor Is-y-coed. Built around 1660, almost certainly by Inigo Jones, the charming but extremely narrow structure boasts five arches, each with parapets allowing for triangular shelters for foot passengers. Whilst perfectly adequate for horse-drawn vehicles, farm carts and pedestrians, the coming of the motor car put phenomenal strains on this little bridge, which had been in need of constant repair for centuries....

The abbey that came back from the dead, by Joseph Kelly, Editor

Posted by CHB | Jan 26, 2019 | Blog |

Like so many English towns, Reading underwent great changes from the 1960s onwards. Its traditional Victorian industries were famously ‘the three Bs’ – beer, biscuits and bulbs. The three sprawling industrial sites owned variously by Courage, Huntley & Palmers and Sutton Seeds not only dominated the suburbs from the Victorian era onwards, but employed 90 per cent of the town’s workforce. By the time I moved to Reading in the mid-1970s, these industries had all but closed, and the town was already morphing into the UK’s ‘silicon valley’, as global hi-tech firms began to establish their UK headquarters there....