COVID-19 pandemic at Rochester Cathedral
COVID-19 pandemic at Rochester Cathedral
September 20, 2021
Simon Lace, Chapter Clerk and Executive Director reports on life at the Cathedral during the COVID-19 pandemic. Featured in The Friends of Rochester Cathedral Annual Report for 2021.
It's difficult to know where to start with a review of 2020. After all, it started so well.
Our programme of events for the year would build on the success of the previous year's Adventure Golf and Knife Angel exhibit in attracting new worshippers and visitors. The first major event was The Museum of the Moon, a touring art installation by Bristol-based artist Luke Jerram which fused lunar imagery, moonlight and a surround-sound composition created by Dan Jones, the BAFTA and Ivor Novello award-winning composer. Measuring seven metres in diameter, the inflated Moon hung from the Nave ceiling and featured 120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface. At an approximate scale of 1:500,000, each centimetre of the internally-lit spherical sculpture represents five kilometres of the Moon's surface.
Museum of the Moon
Museum of the Moon is a touring artwork by UK artist Luke Jerram. Measuring seven metres in diameter, the moon features 120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar surface.
Opening on 12th February and running for just 22 days, the exhibit looked fabulous hanging from the ceiling of the Nave, and was seen by an astonishing 120,000 people, far exceeding our wildest expectations. On one day in the half-term holidays over 12,000 people visited the Cathedral – surely a record number ? The sheer volume of visitors almost overwhelmed us but with excellent support from our wonderful volunteers, the Cathedral's clergy and staff rallied round to ensure that everything went smoothly. The feedback from visitors was incredible and we could all feel the excitement about what was to come. 2020 was going to be a recordbreaking year: well, it was, but not in the way we’d imagined.
The Moon left us on 4th March. Almost immediately Coronavirus was upon us and on 18th March we closed the Cathedral's doors. All planned services, events and activities for the first half of the year were cancelled and our volunteers were sent home. Eventually all activities for 2020 would be abandoned.
Within a few days of the closure, upon the announcement of the Government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, almost the entire Cathedral staff were placed on furlough leaving just a skeleton team of six to keep things going. Chapter continued to meet using Zoom and, alongside the Cathedral's Finance Committee, kept our financial position under constant review. To say our cash flow forecasts looked very worrying would be a massive understatement and our very real concerns about the Cathedral as a going concern only began to ease as grant aid and donations began to flow.
The impact of the Coronavirus has been devastating, causing the longest shut-down in living memory of the Cathedral building, services, and operations, and hugely reducing earned income from visitors, commercial activities, and rents. Sadly, we had to close the Cathedral's shop in the Undercroft and the two shop assistants were amongst four people whose roles were made redundant together with three others whose temporary contracts were not renewed. Tragically, the virus even claimed one of our own: Dave Blenkarn, our Maintenance Assistant, died in May 2020.
We introduced social distancing measures in the Cathedral and in Garth House when it looked like the Cathedral could partially re-open in the summer of 2020, but we had to close the doors again in the autumn.
In November, in partnership with Medway Council, the Undercroft was the base for an asymptomatic Coronavirus testing centre, a facility which stayed in place until the end of March 2021. At one point over 400 people each day were receiving tests in the Undercroft. Other cathedrals gave over space for vaccination centres but we were the only cathedral to operate as a testing centre.
Planning our return to ‘normalcy’ (whatever that may mean in the context of a post-Covid world) has taken up much of our time and has been a frustrating process. Many of us thought that the pandemic might be over in the summer, then perhaps by Christmas or the New Year. This uncertainty made life very difficult as rearranged events were once again postponed or cancelled and managing the Cathedral's diary became a nightmare.
The Cathedral Crypt served as a vaccination centre in 2021, initially run by the Royal Engineers.
There have been some positives. We have all learnt new skills. Some services during lockdown were recorded and made available on our website and others were live-streamed to virtual congregations watching from all parts of the globe, and we have enthusiastically engaged with video-conferencing software such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. These new ways of working and delivering our mission will continue to play a part in our lives after the pandemic is over.
We have also been able to access grant aid from the Church Commissioners and elsewhere to develop new initiatives such as a new Visitor Services Team which we hope will improve our visitors’ experience and lead to increased donations. We also secured funds to appoint a paid supervisor for our volunteer-led Café in the Crypt which we hope will allow the café to be open for more hours each week and for the offer to be improved, so generating more income. Both these initiatives were due to be announced in 2020 but the extended lockdown has meant that they will now be introduced in the summer of 2021 instead.
Pop-up vaccination centre in the Nave.
The lockdown and closure of the Cathedral did allow us to carry out some planned restoration projects without needing to work around services or out-of-hours working by contractors. In particular the restoration of the Quire ceiling (removing the ten-year-old ‘temporary’ netting) and the vaults above and the work to the North-West Transept were completed more quickly than forecast with significant budget savings.
No review of such a difficult year would be complete without a tribute to my colleagues. Clergy and staff have shown immense resilience and commitment to continuing to deliver the Cathedral's mission in the most difficult of circumstances.
The first half of 2021 has continued in a similar vein. Let us all hope that the second half will improve and that we can look forward to 2022 being as near normal as possible.
Simon Lace
Chapter Clerk and Executive Director
Canons, colleagues, volunteers and staff have shared their memories and reflections in many forms over the years.