WELLS CATHEDRAL is fund-raising for a £7-million restoration project: Vicars’ Close (News, 9 August 2024). Sited next to the cathedral, it’s 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 very remarkable place — possibly without parallel anywhere on the planet. We have a responsibility not only to guard the architectural site, but in addition to share its extraordinary heritage and enable more people to interact with it. We are absolutely thrilled that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has made such a generous and significant contribution [£4.4 million] to assist us achieve that ambition.”
The construction of Vicars’ Close began in 1348, with the intention of providing the boys, 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 within the 1100s, the duty of vicars choral was to sing the liturgy on behalf of canons who were away from the cathedral, or who selected to not sing services. Wells’s adult choristers are still called the vicars choral moderately than lay clerks, the term utilized in other cathedrals.
Originally built as two rows of 20 houses, 40 dwellings in total, the 2 sides of Vicars’ Close mirror one another, with silver-pink stone partitions and tall central chimneys. Vicar’s Close still houses choristers and vergers — housing comes with their stipend — and there may be also a Wells Cathedral School boarding house.
WELLS CATHEDRALVicars’ Hall Treasury
No. 22 has one of the crucial intact interiors on the Close, and will probably be one among the areas newly opened to the general public, when the restoration project is complete in about 26 months’ time. Currently home to the director of primary music outreach, Alex Jenkins, the home 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 among the complexities of the project. “Vicars’ Close is a Grade I listed site, however the listings vary to reflect changes over time. We should be mindful how we treat every part. Every window and door is given a heritage priority.”
Indicating gaps in stonework and leaking gutters, Ms Johnson says that a number of the biggest headaches come from restorative work from the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s. Cement render used to repair cracks has trapped moisture within the stonework, making the interiors damp. Poorly aligned gutters, added as a part of extensions, send rainwater running down exterior partitions.
A full restoration was costed at £10 million; so Ms Johnson says that the present project is tackling the critical constructing work and stopping deterioration. “Water ingress is the largest 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 probably 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 check out front doors, to go searching inside. Ms Johnson says that medieval spaces will probably be brought alive through sound and projection. Non-original constructing additions will probably be used for interpretation, letting visitors know that they’ve moved from one era to a different.
No. 12, on the northern end of the Close, near Vicar’s Chapel, in-built 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 find out about choral music, checking 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 within the undercroft, situated beneath the tower next to the cathedral, built by Bishop Budwith within the mid-Fifteenth 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 probably be open to visitors for the primary 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, wearing 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 big rural parish and Wells Cathedral is that, within the cathedral, everybody is close at hand.