St Thomas Parish Church And 800 Years of Dust
One of the oldest churches in the area, St Thomas Parish Church in Stanhope is a beautiful building of stone, stained glass and wooden beams.
But, like all buildings with hard-to-reach places, dust and cobwebs can quickly accumulate. When the church staff came to us, they’d decided that the accumulated 800 years worth of dust had to go. In recent months, small avalanches of dust had begun to fall on parishioners during Sunday services. Add to that the recent building works they’d completed, and a really deep commercial cleaning service was the only way forward.
The church’s architect who knew of us by word of mouth very kindly recommended us for the job. And we of course accepted.
The brief was to conduct a full deep clean of the whole building. Including ground level, we were charged with applying beeswax polish to all wooden fixtures and fittings, and to remove the best part of a millennium’s worth of dust from the exposed stone walls and window lead.
With only a limited time frame available we had to organise ourselves with maximum efficiency. The cost of erecting scaffolding inside the church wasn’t covered by the budget, so we had to come up with an alternative. Using high-powered industrial vacuums and long extending poles, we tackled the job from the ground.
