Church Records is a creative archive and historic record of the Penryn Methodist Church -a Grade II Listed building in the centre of Penryn. 

The Church was built in 1891 to accommodate 1000 worshipers and has served the Methodist community of Penryn for many years. However, with the congregation having declined to just a handful of people, the chapel held its final service in August 2023 and put the building up for sale.  Art Centre Penryn became the custodians of the Church building in 2024 and commissioned Crow Architecture and Small Acts to create a contemporary archive as the building began its transformation from a place of worship to a new creative space for Penryn.

In 2023 we had worked with Penryn Museum to make a digital record of the church interior using a LIDAR scanner to create a pointcloud- a 3D digital model of the space. We describe the process of recording the pointcloud in our article Digital Heritage.  At the time we were unable to record the incredible acoustics of the space and this became a catalyst for the development of the Church Records project. It was included in the Church Records Exhibition in 2025, titled ‘heart strangely warmed’.

The Auditory Plan

A fundamental principle in the design of Methodist Chapels is the Auditory Plan- that every person can see and hear the preacher. We looked for the evidence of the Auditory Plan in the building and in the historic records. The Auditory Plan drawing, was based on a number of documents found in Kresen Kernow archives other formal and material, sonic cues found in the chapel itself. Together this evidence showed how the Auditory Plan was elemental in defining the layout of Penryn Methodist Church. More detail of the findings can be found in the Church Records Gazetteer which is also acts as the catalogue for the Church Records Archive held by the Art Centre Penryn.

Re-Sounding

To record the acoustics of the chapel we made an impulse response, a sonic equivalent of the point cloud with the technical support from acoustician, sound recordist and musician Robin Tyndale-Biscoe. Both the pointcloud and the impulse response are digital models of the visual and acoustic space of the church respectively. Together they preserve an historic record of the acoustic and visual aspects of the auditory plan. 

To collect a complete record of the sounds of the chapel, Small Acts curated Re-Sounding an evening of music, song and spoken word that brought the old and new communities of the chapel and the art centre together. Small Acts also invited members of the community to share memories of the chapel. These oral history recordings, with the recording of the Re-Sounding event form a part of the Church Records Archive.

Church Records Archive and Gazetteer

The Church Records Archive records both the tangible and intangible heritage of the building and in this way becomes a ‘living archive’ holding the stories, memories and material artefacts, of the people who build it, worshiped in it and came together in communion.

The Archive is intended to be a resource for researchers, artists, historians and the wider community, as well as a celebration of the history of the chapel and what it meant to its congregation and the people of Penryn. 

Afterword

In response to the Church Records Archive, Frances worked with David Prior, partner in Liminal, to explore a site-specific response to the Auditory Plan. The resulting work led to a series of photographs and an audio-visual installation. A diptych from David’s photographic series Her Extraordinary Calling and The Hearers, was exhibited as part of the Church Records Exhibition.

The Church Records Archive and Exhibition held in the main church building, was opened on 27 November 2025 and ran till 6 December 2025.