Joanna Wane talks to the man charged with saving the church that’s been in his family for generations.
When art adviser Paul Baragwanath was finally given the keys to St David’s Memorial Church, after heading an eight-year campaign to save it from demolition, the scale of what lay ahead must have been almost overwhelming.
Constructed in the late 1920s from Kamo brick and Ōamaru stone, the sprawling building had developed scores of leaks, leaving the ceiling in a state of collapse. It had also survived several arson attempts. Dozens of lintels, corbels and leadlight windows required painstaking restoration work; the old boiler room and the roof needed to be replaced. All the plaster was falling off and everything was well overdue for a coat of paint.
Advocacy by the Friends of St David’s Trust Kāhui Rangi Pūpū and its committed supporters helped secure heritage status for the former Presbyterian church, which was built on Auckland’s Khyber Pass Rd as a “living memorial” to the soldiers who died in World War I.
“Since we finally took ownership [in mid-2022], we’ve been catching up on about 40 years of deferred maintenance,” says Baragwanath, the director and founding trustee. “There have been a lot of miracles. It’s been a hugely challenging project again and again and again. But when it all looked hopeless so many times, something would come through just when it was needed.”
Baragwanath isn’t religious, although he was baptised at St David’s and both his grandfather and great-great-grandfather were ministers there. But he was old enough in the 1980s to witness what he calls the city’s wholesale demolition and couldn’t bear to see the old church knocked down to make way for apartments or a carpark. “So much destruction and disregard for our heritage, which was just thrown away. I thought, ‘Hell, if I don’t stop it … I can’t leave it up to someone else.’ And I did look for someone else, but I couldn’t find anyone.”
That was back in 2004. Now he’s hoping for another Christmas miracle, with the launch on Monday night of a new Art of Remembrance initiative that aims to raise $300,000 to light, heat and illuminate the Great Hall — part of a $4 million transformation of the old church into the Kāhui St David’s centre for music.
Colour Quartet, a new silkscreen-on-brass series by Auckland artist Sara Hughes, will be on display in the Great Hall and the North Chapel until December 14, and will remain on for the next three months. A previous winner of the Wallace Art Award, Hughes’ most recent public commision was the glass art forest that covers all four sides of the NZ International Convention Centre in Auckland.
The first Art of Remembrance project, in 2015, raised $1m for St David’s through the sale of more than 7000 brass quatrefoils by Max Gimblett, becoming the most successful fundraising project in New Zealand history. Baragwanath took an entire year off work to run that. A few years later, jeweller and artist Warwick Freeman echoed the theme, creating a remembrance lapel pin from lacquered brass that helped replenish the trust’s coffers before the historic heritage hearings process that resulted in the building’s Category A listing.
Hughes’ pieces are inspired by walking into the Great Hall and looking up at the light coming through the leadlight windows, and by her memory of light filtering through the bush canopy in Hokianga, where she spent her childhood. “To save heritage, people need to be inspired,” says Baragwanath. “And that’s what art does.”
By next March, phase one of this ambitious restoration project will be complete, with the Great Hall, the Vestibule, the North Chapel and some other shared spaces (including the church’s original music library) fully open and ready for use. An audio-visual system is soon to be operational in the Great Hall, enhancing its natural acoustics and enabling events to be recorded and streamed. A 1905 Croft pipe organ is already in full working order.
The stage (what used to be the altar) has been extended to accommodate large choirs or groups and beautiful tukutuku panels, created by Te Puawai weavers at Ōrākei Marae with a poutama “stairway to heaven” design, have been placed inside oak panelling in the sanctuary.
The Friends of St David’s Trust Kāhui Rangi Pūpū is a charitable organisation with no religious affiliations, but the building will remain a non-denominational Soldiers’ Memorial Church and available for functions including weddings and funerals, as long as live music is played. Phase two will see the development of music rehearsal spaces and recording studios, a whānau room and a spacious area where school holiday programmes could be held.
The name Kāhui means The Gathering, a reference to both the church’s Scottish roots and its role as a community hub in a city that’s made up of many disconnected silos, says Baragwanath. “What we’re creating is a new cultural destination that will be loved like the Civic and St Matthew-in-the-City.
“During lockdown, we learned that coming together as humans is fundamental. St David’s has a timelessness and everyone who walks in the door is affected by it, whatever your background or faith may be. The Great Hall has this sense of deep peace, the soaring leadlight windows, the magnificent ceiling, those beautiful trusses. That energy certainly spoke to me.”
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