A partnership of five organisations (Natural England, Church of England, Bat Conservation Trust, Historic England, Churches Conservation Trust) led by Natural England, has been successful in its Bats in Churches project development phase application to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) Heritage Grants funding stream.
Churches are used regularly for a wide range of activities, in addition to worship, and enable people to meet and function as a community. They are also of great cultural and historic significance, not just in terms of their buildings, the majority of which are listed, but also due to the many fixtures and fittings of local, national and international importance.
Bats enjoy strong legal protection because of past population declines. With the continued destruction of their natural habitat, including conversion of previous roost sites into domestic dwellings in many rural areas, some species of bats have developed a high dependence on man-made structures, and churches have been an important refuge. In summer, roof and eave voids can house important maternity colonies. In some cases, these roosts contain several hundred bats. In winter, colder parts of the church can be used for hibernation.
A tension between worshipping communities and the bats roosting in their churches has developed. The upkeep and continued use of churches is potentially threatened by a failure to resolve the issues of bats producing mess, and placing great burdens on the congregations and clergy as well as damaging important heritage. This project is needed to find ways in which both communities and bats can co-exist together.
This is a two-stage HLF application with stage 1 - the ‘development stage’, running from February 2016 and runs for 13 months. Natural England will submit a stage 2 application in March 2018 for a ‘delivery stage’ which will run from June 2018 for 5 years until 2023.
The outcomes of the HLF project are as follows:
- Local communities recognise, understand and have opportunities to experience the value of their historic church and the wildlife that resides in and around it
- Negative physical and social impacts caused by bats at the most severely affected churches are reduced or removed completely leading to a more sustainable use of these buildings for worship and community use and preservation of the historic fabric of the buildings and contents.
- Bat colonies in the most severely affected places of worship are better managed, less threatened and will have space to roost and breed.
- Innovative techniques and systems to manage the impacts of bats have been thoroughly tested, optimised, recorded and made accessible, leading to church buildings and monuments being better managed now and into the future.
- Volunteers and professionals have learned new skills to more effectively assist church communities and safely manage bat populations that roost in places of worship.
- Church communities with bats in their churches are better resourced and more empowered to manage alongside and enjoy or appreciate the presence of bats, they have the knowledge and support to confidently take action to manage their church and bats harmoniously and sustainably and feel valued, supported and listened to.
- People who are concerned for bats and their welfare in churches feel more understood, valued and supported and feel more confident at supporting churches with bats.
- It is widely recognised and accepted that historic churches and bats can co-exist in harmony.
- New groups of people have engaged with and learned about bats, church buildings and their communities.
The project will focus on approximately 104 churches in England where the bats are causing negative social and physical impacts. The project will, through direct interaction and engagement, ensure the negative impact of bats will be significantly reduced or completely removed over the life of the project. This will be achieved whilst ensuring the bat populations remain in Favourable Conservation Status.
Main Responsibilities
Description of the brief:
You will need to co-ordinate with the project manager, project team and steering group to incorporate the significance and impact on historic built fabric & fittings into the round 2 bid. The format for the round 2 submission for an HLF heritage grant will be based on a bespoke version of the Landscape Conservation Action Plan (guidance here: https://www.hlf.org.uk/landscape-conservation-action-plan), so will require both a general description of heritage significance and a heritage impact statement (in Part 1; “the scheme plan”, based on a summary analysis of all 104 project churches), but also more detailed individual descriptions of heritage significance and impacts for 20 churches which will feed into the first set of project plans we are producing (for Part 3; the “Full Project Plans”) . Your method for producing robust statements of significance and heritage impact statements for the 20 project plans should be detailed and costed so that this can subsequently be applied to the remaining 84 churches during the delivery phase.
Items of work:
- Description of heritage significance and heritage impact statement for 20 church project plans:
- Statement of significance
The Statement of Significance should be suitable for use in support of any faculty application that is subsequently made to permit changes to the building as part of the Project. Guidance is available on http://www.churchcare.co.uk/churches/guidance-advice/statements-of-significance-need and http://www.statementsofsignificance.org.uk/
You will prepare a statement of significance for each of the 20 churches for which we are writing project plans in the development phase, developing a methodology and template that can also be used for the remaining 84 buildings in the delivery phase. In addition to giving an holistic summary of the significance of the whole building, based on published information, data on the Church Heritage Record (https://facultyonline.churchofengland.org/churches) and other sources, you will include specific information about the significance of fixtures, fittings and artefacts that are currently being damaged.
It is expected that the statement for each building will include an outline footprint plan marked to show key elements identified in the text and, where possible, photographs. The whole should not exceed four sides of A4 paper and be available digitally in both Word and pdf formats.
Your statement of significance should include:
- Information gathered during a site visit (to ascertain the main fixtures and fittings of historic importance and at risk).
- Any relevant information from the church, diocese, church architect, Church Buildings Council records and ecologists questionnaires.
- Any information gathered from consultation of Historic England regional officers.
- Information from further research of the literature
- Details of the heritage within the church including location, what it is and why it is important with the text keyed to a floor plan and any relevant photographs that will be available from light touch survey outputs.
You will need to identify those areas or elements of the building that are the top priorities for protection and those that are not under threat but are so significant they should not be compromised by any mitigation works.
You should also include the significance of the building as a community asset and the PCC’s own priorities in terms of use of the building for worship and other purposes both now and in the future.
- Assessment of the impact of bats on the heritage and identification of priorities for mitigation and/or protection
The purpose of this is to provide an informed assessment to put the ecological priorities into the heritage context. This is vital to achieve balance between the Project’s management of protected species and conservation of protected historic fabric.
You will review the outputs from the ecologist’s light touch surveys of the 20 development phase buildings and, in combination with your understanding from the site visit and wider research of the published material relating to the heritage and cultural significance of these churches, you will describe how the heritage you detailed in the statement of significance is under threat from bats.
Your assessment of the impact of bats should address:
- How is the presence of bats affecting the heritage (using data from light touch surveys combined with assessment of vulnerability of heritage)?
- What are the elements of heritage most at risk and of most significance?
- What are the elements of heritage which need to be considered as part of project planning and how?
- Any heritage related risks which need to be considered as part of project planning & delivery?
- What are the most important heritage outcomes in this church?
- Sense check the ecologist’s recommendations to ensure they meet the heritage outcomes.
- Add any further recommendations to protect heritage, including indicative costs.
- Overview analysis of the scale of impact
To gain a better overview of the importance of and threat to heritage across all our 104 project churches we also require the following:
- A paragraph of text for each of the 104 project churches describing the principle heritage at risk from bats (which will feed into the bid Part 2 “Non-technical summaries for each project”).
- An initial judgment of impact on a scale of 1-3 where ‘1’ constitutes the highest level of significance.This assessment should be presented in an Excel spreadsheet and you should set out how you have reached your judgement.
This will be a desk based exercise using literature sources, the church heritage record and the ecologist’s light touch survey outputs.
- Method statement
During the delivery phase of the project we will be drafting project plans for the remaining 84 buildings. At each of these churches we will require a church specific statement of significance and heritage impact statement, so that the project managers who deliver these plans are aware and sensitive to features of heritage importance and their specific requirements.
As part of the delivery phase roll out we will need to commission this work. We will therefore ask you to provide a description of the method you used to produce the statement of significance and heritage impact statements for the 20 project plans, including any efficiency saving which can be made and indicative costs. The work required should be described in such a way that it can form the basis of a specification for this work at subsequent churches within the remaining 84 during the development stage.
Format of the quote:
We expect that items 2 & 3 are desk based, but that item 1 will require visits to each of the 20 project churches.
We would ideally let this contract to cover all 3 listed items, but would like you to quote for each separately in case our budget won’t cover all 3 (and we reserve the right to let one or more of these).
Although the 104 churches have been chosen, the only confirmed churches within the 20 at this stage are the 3 pilot churches, Swanton Morley in Norfolk, Braunston-in-Rutland and Tattershall in Lincolnshire. We are in the process of identifying the remaining 17 buildings but for the sake of the quote assume that 2 are in Cornwall, 2 in Gloucestershire, some in Essex and some in Norfolk.
The contract will be with the Church of England but the Natural England based Project Manager will be overseeing the work.
Provisional interview date: 9th November (in London or via phone)
The Ideal Candidate
The project team are looking for a heritage consultant or consultancy to undertake this work on a self-employed contract basis. Knowledge of ecclesiastical heritage and an understanding of churches as places of worship and community use are essential. Experience of writing statements of significance, assessing the impact of change and working closely with churches is desirable.
If you are interested, please apply with a CV and details of how you would deliver the required work with pricing.
