Sheerness Dockyard Church, Sheerness

The church is reborn as a bustling enterprise centre with café, co-working space, flexible meeting rooms and events space. Members of the Isle of Sheppey’s large local community were consulted throughout the design phase and called upon to provide skills and labour during construction. 

The building also provides a permanent venue for the display of elements of the great Sheerness Dockyard model which dates from the construction in the early 19th century. Critically, the colony of 15,000 ‘Sheerness scorpions’ that occupy the perimeter walls of the dockyard were well protected during the construction. 

The transformative works were made possible by National Heritage Lottery funding matched by other sources, and have merited the building’s removal from Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. They involved the stabilisation and restoration of surviving masonry walls, with the reinstatement of the original parapets, lost in the late 19th century. 

The tower, which was in too perilous a state to repair in situ, was totally dismantled and reconstructed. The reinstatement of only one of the two cantilevered stone stairs is a triumph of craftsmanship and concept, in the context of the fragments of the other still clinging to the walls. 

The original 1828 roof profile was reinstated. Since the damaged cast-iron columns were no longer able to provide intermediate support across its 18m span even when restored, it is now supported on single-span composite trusses. 

This refined contemporary roof structure with timber slatted linings and tapered rooflights is reflected beneath the fluted columns in an unapologetically simple steel frame supporting a mezzanine level and enclosing rooms at ground-floor level. Access bridges skip lightly across voids, seeming not to bear on the limewashed masonry. The partition walls and glazed screens within the vast and simple space can be removed without harm to the structure to reinstate the original volume of the church. 

The space is beautifully light, the acoustics comfortable, and a newly insulated floor and highly insulated roof mean that the building can be maintained at a pleasant temperature. The atmosphere created by the refined and now occupied space is moving, and will no doubt be sustained very well into the future. 

The architects provided the imagination and skills to do more than just validate their client’s belief that a historic building in an extreme state of decay can have a very good future.