Church Records
An historic record of the Grade II listed Penryn Methodist Church, focussing on the development of the Auditory Plan.
Church Records is a creative archive of The Penryn Methodist Church is a Grade II Listed building in the centre of Penryn.
The chapel 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 church held its final service in August 2023 and put the building up for sale. Art Centre Penryn are now custodians of the Church building which now hosts a public art gallery with associated artist studios and community art room in 2025.
We were commissioned with Small Acts to create a contemporary record of the church, both its physical structure and the memories it holds. Church Records records the building; its former use and the aural histories of the people connected to it, preserving the building’s structure, materials and layout, as well as more ephemeral qualities of atmosphere, sound and light.
A fundamental principle in the design of methodist chapels was the Auditory Plan -that every member of the congregation could see and hear the preacher- this was the starting point for us.
Working with acoustician Robin Tyndale-Biscoe we recorded the acoustic qualities of the main worship space, by recording its resonance and capturing its Impulse Response. We have mapped its auditory plan – a key design aspect of Methodist chapels. In the Kresen Kernow archive we found the Pew Rent Ledger from 1945 to 1965 - this lists who sat where and how much they paid for their ‘sitting’. We also found the specification for the design of the chapel drawn up in 1891 and sent to the Methodist Central Committee for funding. By mapping the relationships we see in these documents we come to understand the relationship between the ‘Speaker’ who stood at the centre of the auditory plan and the ‘hearers’ who sat in the pews and how this defined the overall scale and form of the building.
Small Acts curated the social archive and have worked with members of the community to record their memories in conversation. On 7 September 2024 Re:Sounding an evening of music and song brought people together to celebrate and record the unique acoustics of the building.
The archive will be exhibited in the church and made available online and accessible through the Penryn Museum.
