Reconstruction Filming Day 30 Sept 2012

We spent all day today filming a reconstruction of a congregation at George Street Chapel. This will feature within our interpretation video, which will describing the history of the chapel from its construction to the present day. Our 'congregation' was made up of Friends of George Street and Age UK Oldham staff, friends and relatives. Many thanks to you all.
A short video of the filming day will be uploaded to our new 'FriendsofGeorgeSt' Youtube video channel. Link from the embedded video in this post, or the video bar on the right.
                                                          http://youtu.be/V5ahi_HChbk

Claire Duval and Julian Baum filming 'close-ups'.

Nomination for National Diversity Awards 2012

Age UK Oldham were nominated for an award at the National Diversity Awards held at the Midland Hotel, Manchester on 21 September.
The nomination was in recognition of twelve years of inter-generational work in Oldham.
The category we were in was for Community Organisations and split into different sections. Our section was for Age related projects, the others being Disability, Gender, LGBT and Race.
The Age section included two other nominees - the Asian Elders Resource Centre and the Northampton Youth Forum. The winners were judged to be the Northampton Youth Forum.
It would have been nice to have won overall, but, it was fantastic that our project was selected for the final shortlist and is national recognition for the value of the work we do in Oldham. By the end of next year we will be able to develop this work in the restored George Street chapel.

Our work was judged on a 10 week long inter-generational and ethnic project involving older people voluntarily visiting primary school children, sharing their favourite memories.
Maggie Hurley, our Volunteer & Community Co-ordinator praised the project for its success in allowing children to meet older people and boost their confidence.
The children have the chance to interact well with the volunteers on a one-to-one basis by asking them questions about their life and then publishing a brief biography for the school. One child was able to ask volunteer Haravadan Chauhan, born in 1946, about the time he moved to Britain from India and Kathleen Barnes about her famous cousin, Donny Osmond.
The volunteers are able to help show the children what their life was like. Edna Standring, who turned 93 this year, showed children an empty munitions shell like the ones she produced during World War ll.

Maggie Hurley and CEO, Yvonne Lee attended the prestigious awards evening, which was hosted by TV presenter and former Big Brother winner, Brian Dowling.

Extra, Extra - Cast required for filming

We are looking for people who would like to help us recreate the chapel as it might have looked about the time of its first centenary in 1916. Julian Baum and Claire Duval from Take 27 are producing film and 3d graphic sequences to aid  the interpretation of the chapel. The end product will fuse together photographs, live filming and 3d graphics and animations to tell the story of the chapel from its construction in 1815 through to the present day, and Age UK Oldham's work to restore it.
Do you have old clothes in your attic (or wardrobe?) that look as if they date to the first world war?
Do you look like this? -

George Street Chapel Congregation, 1916

Or can we make you look like this?
Cast required between 10am and 5pm on Sunday, 30 September, 2012.
Refreshments provided.
If you would like to be part of this project please book yourself in.
Contact Maggie Hurley to get yourself signed up - maggie.hurley (at) ageukoldham.org.uk

Paintwork choices

Lots of choices are being considered about all sorts of aspects of the chapel's refurbishment.

The current
dark coloured window frame

Artist impression of a
white coloured window frame 

The latest involved paintwork finishes for the window frames. The illustration below gives us an impression about how a light or dark paint colour for the internal window frames might look.

If you follow all the restoration work on his blog you will be see what the end product looks like. By then the organ will have been restored and repainted and the gypsum plaster will have been removed and replaced with a lime plaster.

Oldham - from Above

There are a number of images that remind us of what Oldham looked like in the recent past.
English Heritage have a project called 'Britain from Above' that has air photographs of Oldham.
This  photograph shows the area between St Marys Church and King Street and shows George Street.

Oldham town centre from the south, 1926.
We have picked out George Street Chapel with the red arrow.

Design Team Meeting 6 September, 2012

There were new considerations for us at our 4th Design Team Meeting today.
Progress on the design work is on track, with lots of discussions about everything that needs to be included in our tender documents for pricing.
Today we were able to see more details about the types of light fittings that could be used in the fitting out of the chapel.
Also more limited test stripping has been carried out on the woodwork of the pews and the pulpit, so that we could see the quality of the woodwork below the later over painting.
We were also able to see a decorative detail from the pipes of the organ that had been covered over by later painting. This has initiated further research into the original paint finish, so that we might consider re-painting the pipes of the organ back to their original appearance.

Choices.
Possible light fittings laid out on the chapel floor.

Bare wood of one of the doors of a pew.

The bare wood of the pulpit with over painting in recent black and grey paint
over the earlier wood graining effect.

A detail from of of the organ pipes with red and gold detailing.