Repair work has started at Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral after £115,000 funding has been set aside for essential maintenance.
The Grade 1 listed building received a £100,000 grant from the First World War’s Centenary Cathedral Repairs Fund, and a further £15,000 donation from the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England.
Officials at the cathedral, which is the fifth biggest in the world, will spend the money on repairing areas most needing work, such as the masonry and the Welsford Porch.
The Director of Communications for the cathedral, Stuart Haynes, is happy that they have been able to eligible for the funding.
He told JMU Journalism: “We have paid for work to look on the roofs in various parts of the cathedral. It’s such a substantial piece of work even to get the scaffolding up and to see what’s going on. They can then make assessments and do the repair work that is needed.
“As you can imagine, we’re a Grade 1 listed building, we’re significant for the city, we were built by the people of the city and we owe it to the people to be able to be maintained, but it’s a big challenge.
“One of the challenges for the cathedral is that we don’t receive any funding from the government – we don’t get anything off the taxes or anything like that. So, apart from the grant funding that we’ve got, we’ve got to raise money ourselves.”
Mr Haynes does not know when it will be finished and hopes for everything to be complete in ‘a few weeks [or] a couple of months.’
However, despite the renovations already beginning, Mr Haynes assures tourists that it will not affect their visit.
He said: “We’ve got other ways in and out of the cathedral. We’ve made sure that disabled visitors can be accommodated and have appropriate access. We’ve also got rules for the contractors so they’re not making too much noise.
“Everything that we can do we have done. For a large part of the visit you wouldn’t notice anything [is] going on. We’ve done it the best we can to assure people that they can still enjoy the facilities.”