Ushaw fire-damaged chapel in Durham 'may be restored in five years'
Repairs began in June but stabilisation work had to be paused for about four months after owls were found nesting in the roof.It was thought the first phase would be finished by January, however storms caused additional unstable masonry to fall.Historic England awarded £400,000 for emergency repair work to try and protect the buildings from further deterioration.
Lucy Jenkins, Ushaw's co-chief executive officer, said the next phase would be to get a permanent roof on the chapel before deciding on the "conservation strategy"."So much" of the building had survived, she said."Despite fire, despite torrential rain pouring through the ceiling and storms."While parts have been destroyed, it may provide Ushaw with an opportunity to create something "completely new" to go alongside the old by working with contemporary artists."It will tell the story," Ms Jenkins said."It hasn't been used as a chapel in a school for nearly 50 years and then the fire happens and that becomes part of the story."Durham Constabulary said an investigation into the cause of the fire had been closed, pending new information, due to "insufficient evidence".
Ushaw is looking at where the conservation work will start before finalising a plan for the building's future.Ms Jenkins said there was potential for it to host events, concerts or be part of Durham's Lumiere festival.She said she hoped to put on tours of the building in its "half damaged state" so the community can see the conservation work in action and give their views on its future.
Follow BBC North East on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram. Send your story ideas here.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
01-08-2025
- The Guardian
Oracy already exists in schools. Just look inside the drama studio
Why is it that, in all of the recent discussion of oral literacy (Letters, 30 July; Editorial, 27 July; Simon Jenkins, 24 July), there appears to be no mention of the one subject that already exists that has speaking and listening at its very heart: drama? Of course, discussion, debates, rehearsed readings – all of the things that advocates of oral literacy cite – are vital. And all are embedded within the drama curriculum. Debates don't have to be formal; watch a group of children negotiate how to form and shape a piece of drama, and you see vivid debate in action. Rehearsed readings? Surely rehearsed performance is better. So why this apparent dismissal? Perhaps it is distrust of the creative imagination that drama has as its very basis. Or the focus that the subject also has on movement as another vital tool of communication? Or is it a distaste for the apparent unruliness of the drama studio, where children do not sit in rows (other teachers dread covering for drama, in case they are required to oversee such chaos)? Of course, the debating chamber has its place. But what is for most children their most common oral experience, and frequently their most abiding memory? Performing in the school play, whether that be the infant nativity play or Shakespeare or some other challenging text. By all means, encourage oracy in the classroom. But don't forget the drama studio or the school WaltersLittle Ickford, Buckinghamshire I would go further back than school to develop oracy in children. How sad to see so many parents pushing their children in buggies, or even carrying them in slings, but glued to their phones instead of engaging with them. Even from birth, it is so important to interact with the young HamiltonBuxton, Derbyshire Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
New Statesman
14-05-2025
- New Statesman
Modernity has killed the private life
Illustration by Carlo Giamberresi Can any man be a hero to his search engine? We confide to Google our anxieties and confusions so readily, so obligingly, that it is no surprise that its algorithms may know us better than we know ourselves. Should we be so trusting? Asked that question, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, replied with an answer that should chill the blood of any liberal: 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.' Schmidt was unwittingly echoing the menacing words of the 17th-century English preacher who insisted that: 'The murderer and the adulterer are alike desirous of privacy.' Privacy, some feminists have insisted, is equally the last redoubt of the wife-beater. A space set out from public view, and thus from public accountability, wrote the radical legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, 'serves male supremacy'. The tabloid reporter Paul McMullan put it even more pithily: 'Privacy is for paedos.' Really? Tiffany Jenkins's stimulating history Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life is not, despite what its subtitle suggests, a history of private life itself. That would, for obvious reasons, be a difficult book to write. It is, rather, a history of the many competing ideas of private life and its value that we might assemble from the past. It is, as Jenkins nicely puts it, 'neither 'natural' nor universal to have a private life'. That is not to deny that 'all societies draw a line somewhere to distinguish between what is open to view and what takes place in private'. But they do not all draw that line in the same place. Defecation and sex tend to fall on the private side of that line, but there are (alas) exceptions even to that supposed universal. Societies through history have managed to do without our ideas of a private sphere. What constitutes for us – now and around here – the value of privacy is, as Jenkins puts it, 'a hard-won, historically contingent achievement'. Hard-won but always at risk of being diluted. Privacy has, throughout its long history, had formidable rivals: the competing values of openness and authenticity. Jenkins's history raises two fascinating questions: How did our ideas of privacy come to be? What (and whom) are they for? Why (if at all) do we need them? Much of Strangers and Intimates is devoted to a brisk intellectual history of the West since the Reformation. We start, appropriately enough, with the insistence of Martin Luther and – curious bedfellow – Thomas More on the primacy of the individual conscience: My body you may torture, but my beliefs remain my own. Descartes, with his influential dualism of mind and body, is surprisingly absent from the story, but that gives Jenkins space to champion such figures as the Elizabethan judge Sir Edward Coke, who maintained in an age of public conformity that 'No man ecclesiastical or temporal shall be examined upon secret thoughts of his heart.' Abstract ideas of privacy had tangible effects – for instance, on the architecture and interior design of houses. By the 18th century, it was possible for James Boswell to pursue (and write frankly of) casual sexual encounters without fear of the public shamings once risked by fornicators. In the writings of Adam Smith and David Hume, even the most public of virtues had their foundations in the private sentiments. As the practice of letter-writing exploded, we needed new norms to force the Post Office (and our neighbours) to respect the confidentiality of personal communications. 'The sealed letter,' Jenkins writes, 'became a symbol of a self, shielded yet seeking connection.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The 19th century saw the development of the Victorian home ideal – of walls that were 'as much defensive battlements as they were sanctuaries' – as well as its antithesis in radical experiments in communal living. Early feminists, including such male writers as John Stuart Mill, wrestled with the tensions in their thought: privacy was both essential for the sort of liberty they espoused and also the greatest threat to the freedom and security of house-bound women. Virginia Woolf's insistence on 'a room of one's own' was one way to square the circle, by claiming for women the right not just to a private space but to an autonomous one. The room for which Woolf clamoured was a condition not just of non-interference but of imagination and creativity. The influence of Freudian psychology was one of many 20th-century threats to the evolving idea of privacy. Under the psychoanalyst's unblushing scrutiny, 'No part of the inner life was beyond interrogation.' The counterculture of the 1960s, and the political movements that emerged from them, revived romantic ideals of authenticity and self-expression, which came with the corresponding incitement (and pressure) to disclose facts about oneself one might prefer to hold back. The feminist insistence that 'the personal is political' did much to expose the violence that lurked behind closed doors. But politicising the personal risked eroding some of what was valuable about the private sphere, even – especially – for women. The important case of Griswold vs Connecticut established a constitutional 'right to privacy' in the United States. One's interests in having a protected sphere, not open to public scrutiny, now placed others – fellow citizens as well as state institutions – under a duty not to pry. But that duty, like other duties with which the American courts have saddled the state, rested on the goodwill and restraint of the other branches of government and of individual citizens, qualities that could not be counted on. That brings Jenkins to (more or less) the present day. Our social media encourages perverse forms of self-surveillance. Even childhoods are now lived in the public glare, and not only for the ill-starred children of celebrities. We waive our rights to privacy for what can seem, on reflection, trivial benefits. The precious gains of the last few centuries are at risk of being frittered away for next to nothing: a few more followers, a few minutes of wi-fi access. The case for privacy, for the private life, has to be made explicitly to a society that has forgotten why such things might matter. In her altogether too-short final chapter, Jenkins begins to make that case. When and why did we forget the lessons of Orwell and Huxley, the last century's most influential prophets of dystopia? How, after centuries of incremental liberal advance, did we end up in a world where the CEO of Google and a tabloid editor ended up unwittingly echoing the words of a censorious clergyman? The answer may lie in part where it always does, in the development of technologies that enable (in the literal sense) publication and self-exposure with an unprecedented ease. Once openness rather than reserve becomes again our default condition, it becomes harder to maintain a sense of what distinguishes a seemly curiosity from prurience. To resist the enticements of social media and keep some things resolutely offline, to say with conviction that some things are none of anybody else's business, takes guts, bloody-mindedness and the willingness to be thought 'old-fashioned, quaint, even odd'. But more of us, Jenkins asserts, should risk those judgements. Parenthood, friendship and (above all) romantic love are no longer the same thing when they are performed for a social media audience. Sunlight, we are told, is the best disinfectant. Yet the sunlight that is social media is not the gentle light of an English spring but the blazing sun of the tropics: it darkens, it burns, it defaces and it destroys. It denies us many things we all need: a space in which to make tasteless jokes to people whom we trust to know we don't mean them (or forgive us if we do). As the sociologist Erving Goffman put it, even so public a person as an actor could not survive without a space backstage where he might take off his mask and 'be himself', relieved however briefly of the demands of performance and conformity. I would happily have read Jenkins going on in this vein at much greater length than she does. Her book may be evidence of a welcome turn in our discourse, one also represented by the American political philosopher Robert B Talisse's recent monograph Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance. Talisse is pained by the model of political involvement that sees the mass public protest as the only image of 'what democracy looks like'. Democracy, as he conceives of it, calls equally for 'occasions where one can engage in solitary reflection on civic matters' in settings that are 'detached from the fray of partisan political struggles'. Solitude, far from being an occasion for withdrawal from politics, may itself be a requirement of 'responsible democratic citizenship'. A prophetic 1998 essay by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, 'Concealment and Exposure', had anticipated, when such tendencies were first visible, how the growing scepticism directed at the idea of a protected private sphere might develop into something pathological. 'There is,' Nagel wrote, 'much more going on inside us all the time than we are willing to express, and civilization would be impossible if we could all read each other's minds.' Our culture, like all cultures, has a justified place among its values for such things as honesty, sincerity, earnestness and authenticity. Curiosity, even about other people, can be motivated by nothing more ignoble than a simple desire for truth. But to what truths about other people have we a right? And if reticence can sometimes be hard to distinguish from shiftiness, the same is true of the relation between inquisitiveness and prurience, between honesty and what we now call 'oversharing'. Jenkins's history does not deny the difficulty in drawing these lines; it does, nevertheless, make it amply clear how much we would lose if we ceased to draw these lines at all. Nikhil Krishnan is the author of 'A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60' (Profile) Strangers and Intimates: The rise and fall of private life Tiffany Jenkins Pan Macmillan, 464pp, £19 [See more: The lost boys of North London] Related
BBC News
15-03-2025
- BBC News
Durham Ushaw woodland named after 'unsung worker'
A new woodland in the grounds of a historic house has been named after an "unsung worker".The 10-hectare (25 acre) woodland, made up of more than 20,000 trees, was planted at Ushaw Historic House earlier this year and a competition on social media saw it named after one its former Avery worked at Ushaw from 1930, when he painted the gold leaf and stencilling that still decorates the house Avery Wood, the name was suggested by Mr Avery's granddaughter, Maria Wheeler, who said it was a "tremendous honour". Ushaw was completed in 1808 and is a former Catholic seminary, which is now open to the public."Naming the wood in memory of my grandfather Vivian Avery and his parents who also worked at Ushaw is a tremendous honour," Ms Wheeler said."It is a reminder of our family connections and happy memories of Ushaw." Mr Avery worked at Ushaw until he retired, and died in Wheeler added it "also recognises the vast team of unsung workers that kept, and continue to keep, Ushaw alive and running throughout the years".Head gardener, Ady Davis, said the name "celebrates the people who have helped shape Ushaw over generations". Follow BBC North East on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram. Send your story ideas here.
