I visited the Gas Street Church in the former Gas Retort House with a party from the Friends of the Centre for West Midlands History at Birmingham University yesterday. The building dating from 1818 onwards is the oldest surviving gas works building known and was undiscovered until 1992. Basically we were looking around a number of empty rooms but what was interesting in the Retort House itself which was L shaped was to look at the roof structure which was identified as early fire proofing which was a factor in the award of grade 2* listing for the building. The roof trusses were cast iron bolted together with wrought iron tie bars to provide the lateral strength. The slates were then fixed with copper wire. The Retort House was open sided on the south side so the roof was supported on free standing cast iron columns, the brick wall being a later addition.
We started the visit with a talk by Toni Demidovich who was a conservation officer of Birmingham City Council at the time. In 1992 the leases on the property expired and the plan was to demolish all the industrial buildings in that block and build residential property. However the planning officers dealing with the planning application spotted some interesting aspects of the building which they referred to their conservation colleagues. Birmingham City Council took a bold move in placing a six month preservation order on the building pending the assessment for listing. This was a bold move as the City Council would have been liable for compensation if the listing application failed. As investigation proceeded it became clear that the building was a retort house and then realisation dawned that it was a gas producing retort house. An obvious clue was that it was in Gas Street!
The room in which Toni gave her talk was, she said, the Coal Store and looked out on the former canal basin which was served from under the bridge in Gas Street from the Worcester side of the Gas Street Bar. That room had wooden ceiling trusses and the roof would have been ventilated because coal for gas production needs to be kept dry and it also gives off combustible gases which needs to be ventilated.
Also in the floor were narrow gauge railway tracks for the movement of tubs of coal and the coke and other products which result from gas production.
We then had a conducted tour of the church premises including the offices upstairs. The church was founded in 2016 by a husband and wife team, Tim and Rachel Hughes, who came from Holy Trinity Church, Brompton London, known as HTB, a very evangelical church known for 'planting churches' in large population areas. With permission from the Bishop of Birmingham they started from the Winson Green vicarage looking for property in Birmingham that they could use. They say they found the property on Right Move. I know the property was on the internet because I had downloaded the estate agent's particulars purely out of interest some years before that.
Having found the property they then needed to start work. In Church of England terms the property was in the parish of St Luke's Edgbaston. St Luke's church is now a modern church in Great Colmore Street on the housing estate between Bristol Street and Bath Row. Members of this forum will no doubt remember the original St Luke's on Bristol Street just before the Middle Ring Road which was demolished a couple of years ago. The Gas Street Church which also has the name St Luke's is technically a chapel of St Luke's Great Colmore Street and Tim Hughes is listed as Priest in Charge for the whole parish. I did ask if the congregations at the two churches were different and the answer was that St Luke's had the Communion and Liturgy services and Gas Street has more informal 'gatherings' of which there were 3 on Sundays with 300 people present at each. For those of us brought up in the more 'middle of the road' Church of England may be a little surprised at the 'Happi-Clappi' evangelical wing of the CofE but it does get the people into church.
Final comment. I have heard that Gas Street church will be featured on Songs of Praise on Easter Sunday