Tuesday, March 13, 2007

For sale: church with excellent views

The landmark St Cuthbert's Church in Bensham is up for sale after a bid by a Roman Catholic group to take over the historic building was withdrawn.

The building, unused for 16 years was designed by famous North East architect John Dobson and is only one of two churches designed by him to be left standing largely unaltered.

Now Gateshead Council is working with English Heritage and the Church Commissioners to try to find new owners for the building.

Lib Dem campaigner Susan Craig (pictured outside the church) said, "St Cuthbert’s Church is part of the history of the area and it would be terrible to lose it. As a child I used to play nearby and I know how much residents want the building to have a future."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You seem to spend a lot of time with Susan these days, Jonathan.

Lovely church. Pass it every day.

You would be surprised at the amount of empty old church buildings in the Tyneside area. They must be expensive to run, since most Christians seem to congregate in wooden huts now.

The mosques seems to be springing up though and the Lib Dems love to throw money at them. £15K in Newcastle for a feasibility study into building a new one in the West End.

Anonymous said...

Now that they've been ordered not to post on Sturmfront, I'm surprised not to see more fascists abusing Jonathan's hospitality. Must be spending more time in church. Hope they're not pilfering to make up for the cost of Ken's pulped leaflets.

Someone should tell Kev to stop laughing.

George Dutton said...

When people post under "anonymous" I never take what they say seriously. Do you think it is because they have nothing to say (I think so).