Learning from Buildings

Connelly, Angela ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1040-8678 and Hebbert, Michael (2024) Learning from Buildings. In: Messy Methods in Researching Religion. Oxford University Press. (In Press)

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Abstract

The research project described in this chapter presents the results of a PhD undertaken with The University of Manchester and the Methodist Church Property Office which investigated Methodist Central Halls as a distinct building type. The Methodist Central Halls are large scale places of worship including a main hall suitable for sacred and secular purposes, activity rooms and shop frontages onto main roads. They existed throughout British cities, all of them mixed-purpose buildings in prime locations, many being well-known civic landmarks. Prior to the PhD, they were undocumented apart from unpublished dissertations and a short cyclostyled account published by Rev George Sails for the Methodist Home Mission (Wakeling, 1983; Godden, 2000; Sails 1970). This chapter describes how we went about learning from buildings by considering them from a typological perspective. We recount our research process, which traced buildings from the moment of creation through to their afterlives, using a combination of methods including visual analysis of architectural drawings, local archival sources, and oral history interviews.