St Mary’s Chalgrove February 2016

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Throughout 2015 St Mary’s Chalgrove was subject to a million £ restoration. The bulk of this money has been spent on the fabric and the medieval wall paintings. We were delighted that a small allocation was made for a new digital organ with speakers concealed in the nave roof. When it comes to custom built digital organs this will be one of the smallest that we have commissioned to make. It is far more usual for a church with a large 3 manual pipe organ facing a repair bill of hundreds of thousands to explore the significant savings that a digital alternative has to offer.

St Mary’s is an important medieval church that underwent a vast programme of restoration to return it as far as possible to an ‘original’ appearance while at the same time enabling it to have a modern worship and community function. Critical to the refurbishment was to set the chancel with its wall paintings from 1330 into a simple but functional space leaving the paintings as the star of decoration.

We installed a tab organ of just 23 speaking stops. The speaker system is completely invisible high in the nave roof hidden behind radiant heater panels together with a secondary set of speakers high on the chancel west wall that can be independently switched on or off at the console. The lovely craftsmanship of the console woodwork can be seen in the pictures on our blog post.