shewhomust | It used to go like that...

I have only a vague recollection of St Brandon's Church, huddled below the Castle in Brancepeth, before the fire: what sticks in my memory is the abundance of woodwork, elaborately carved and very dark, almost black. It was the work of John Cosin, Rector of Brancepeth from 1626 until 1640, and included a panel on which his memorial was to be inscribed. Instead, becoming Bishop of Durham, he became entitled to a tomb in the Cathedral. As Bishop, he decorated both Cathedral and Castle with yet more ornate woodwork, including the Castle's Black Staircase, but Pevsner says: "The Cosin style with its fully conscious Gothic Revival in the midst of contemporary C17 elements is one of the most remarkable contributions of the county to the history of architecture and decoration in England, and it can nowhere be studied more completely than at Brancepeth."

All this was destroyed by fire in 1998; today we went to see Christopher Downs, the architect responsible for the rebuilding, awarded the Architectural Commendation of the City of Durham Trust, and hear him talk about the work.

Tomb of Robert Neville in Brancepeth Church

The dominant impression was of light and space; the walls were unadorned white, the windows were elaborate patterns of clear glass, and the high ceiling was pale honey-coloured ash. It didn't look like a modern building: the tracery of the windows survived, odd pieces of tell-tale stonework (including, high in the tower, the previously hidden signs that the construction was pre-Conquest), the tomb of Robert Neville, the Peacock of the North, lying back at his ease with his feet on a miniature lion, some traces of medieval paintork on the walls. But it could have been a church worn down by generations of worshippers to this total simplicity.

In this cool and calm, the story, as Christopher Downs told it, was all the more shocking. The cause of the fire was unknown: but it had raged overnight, with great ferocity, bringing down the roof, cracking the stone, devouring the carved wood, warping cast iron. One of the bells had fallen from the tower, shattering the stone tomb-chest below. The Frosterly marble font exploded, firing fragments as far as 30 feet away (and the pieces have been carefully recovered and the jigsaw rebuilt). The only piece of furniture to have survived is the brass eagle lectern, which stood amidst the flames until one of the fire fighters laid it down for safety.

The extreme plainness of the reconstruction was not entirely planned, and may not last. The architect would have liked to pick up the lozenge shape which was characteristic of Cosin's decorative work (it is still visible in the north porch), and echo it in the floor paving, and in the timber of the roof, but the budget did not permit it. A large number of medieval cross-slabs were discovered to have been built into the church: patterns from these had been worked into the window glass, but it was still hoped that a way could be found to display the slabs themselves in the church. But there was something pleasing about the plain walls and the intricately patterned windows, the play of light and reflections decorating a building that had otherwise been pared back to the bone.