Ripon’s ancient cathedral, is to receive grants totalling £303,000 to repair a leaking roof and buy equipment for streaming of services.
A grant of £240,000 from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund, will go towards the cost of mending the roof on the cathedral’s library.
In addition, grants of £63,000 have been received from Allchurches Trust and the Church Commissioners, enabling the purchase of new online streaming and associated equipment.
The roof repair to the library, which was added to the cathedral in the 15th century, will cost £300,000, with the remaining £60,000 raised through the ‘A Wing and a Prayer’ fundraising project run in partnership with Yorkshire Air Ambulance.
During the first COVID-19 lockdown, the cathedral was loaned equipment so that online services – including those during the Easter period – could be streamed to the homes of parishioners and a wider audience.
With the £10,000 grant from the Allchurches Trust and additional grants of £53,000, the cathedral will be able to pay for a new website and IT equipment for better quality streaming and recording of services, plus cabling and staff support costs.
Online streamed services began before Easter and the cathedral provided a daily streamed evening prayer, a weekly reflection and a Sunday Eucharist.
An aerial view of Ripon Cathedral.
The services have attracted a growing audience with more than 600 subscribers, some from as far away as California and New Zealand. Larger services, for such as that for VE Day, received more than 2,000 views.
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Weddings and funerals have also been streamed for people who could not attend because of the strict cap on numbers. These have been seen thousands of times.
The Very Revd John Dobson, Dean of Ripon, said:
“I cannot thank Allchurches Trust enough for the support they are giving us in this essential area of ministry.
“Twelve months ago, this sort of development was on our agenda for the medium-term future. The experience of this year has changed that completely; it is now an urgent matter and an area of our work that is simply indispensable.
“It is particularly valuable at this time as we have big plans for Christmas which this grant will help us deliver, including live streamed carol concerts for people to sing along to at home, organ recitals and other services”.
Looking further ahead into the new year, the cathedral hopes to develop a more extensive range of online services for the congregation and the wider rural community, particularly as the need to socially distance looks set to continue; the new equipment will help to achieve this goal.
