NGMH renovation: rapporteur report #10, December 2019

Words and images by Marcus Duran, New Unity’s project rapporteur.

The renovation of the Newington Green Meeting House is happening with the support of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Date: Monday 9th December 2019

This month’s visit by the rapporteur is particularly exciting. The project now has the appearance of a renovation rather than a construction site, and as a result many of the design features that will be standard for a long time to come are positioned in their final resting places.

Cables running in and out of the corridor leading to the new basement meeting room.

The new lift is framed by the partition wall being installed in the Mary Wollstonecraft room.

After so many months existing only as a blank space, the cavity reserved for the lift shaft now holds a fully functioning elevator. This is a radical introduction that will provide wheelchair users full access to all parts of the building, including the Mary Wollstonecraft room, which has only ever been accessible via a narrow stone staircase.

Kitchen appliances still in their packaging for protection waiting to be installed in the kitchen.

All the way at the bottom of the building the new basement meeting room – which includes the new toilets and wet room – has been partitioned and plastered throughout. Plug sockets and cables remain exposed as the final stages of decoration and electrical work take place. In many ways, now it is almost complete, it is difficult to relate this new space to the rest of the building. It represents such a major reimagining of how the building can be utilised that it takes some nifty conceptual adjusting to wire it back to the place that was first built here in the early part of the 18th century.

A particularly subtle but impactful new feature is the elegant circular ramp that gently leads feet or wheels from the bottom to the top of the new raised stage in the Meeting House. Again, like the addition of the lift and the main entrance ramp, these frictionless elements help to express the ethos of this community to all newcomers - “whoever you are, you are welcome here”.

Four very elegant ring-shaped LED panels now hover gently over the pews like sci-fi halos. These will provide the main illumination for the Meeting House. In the same space and at the complete opposite end, tucked below each pew, are the black condenser tubes that will in the colder months produce the much-needed blanket of warmth across the floor of the Meeting House.

The last moments of open scars illuminated by the red glow of an electric heater.

The curved ramp leading to the top of the new stage.

Four modern circular LED light panels hanging above the pews below.

Sealed radiators in the process of being installed under each of the pews.