CONTEXT 175 : MARCH 2023 35 EAST ANGLIA COAST JANE KENNEDY Conservation skills training in a Norwich church Setting up a volunteer team to undertake the work of cleaning church monuments provides skills training and routes to employment, and so can attract external funding for the project. For the last year and a half, a team of volunteers has been steadily cleaning and polishing ledger slabs in St George’s Colegate. Guided by a skilled conservator, the group has brought together members of the congregation who work in partnership with volunteers from the Norwich Historic Churches Trust (NHCT) and the Matthew Project, a charity based in the parish, which works with recovering addicts. St George is one of nine medieval parish churches which remain open for Anglican worship in the City of Norwich. Of the 63 medieval churches in the city, 31 survive. Eighteen are redundant and in the care of the NHCT, three are in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, and one is in private ownership. The city is rightly proud of this heritage and good work is done to maintain these buildings, nearly all of which have fittings and monuments which remind us of the city’s great trading past. The lives of its merchants, civic dignitaries and local gentry are recorded and celebrated in many fine sculptural monuments and ledger stones, but these rarely attract the attention they deserve. St George Colegate serves the parish of ‘Norwich over the water’, to the north of the river Wensum, and an early settlement. It is now a mixed commercial and residential area. A handsome, spacious building with nave and aisles, largely rebuilt in the late 15th and early 16th St George Colegate serves the parish of ‘Norwich over the water’.
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