This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Gloucester city centre church and schoolroom with links to Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson have been given a new lease of life by a £2.1m restoration project.

The St Mary de Crypt church and Old Crypt schoolroom had fallen into disrepair and disuse. A two-year restoration project has finished and the buildings have reopened as a place of worship as well as a creative and community centre, heritage attraction and events venue.

Buried in the church is James “Jemmy” Wood, the owner of the Gloucester Old Bank, who was known as the Gloucester Miser. He is said to have worn ragged clothes despite his great wealth and once hitched a lift in a hearse to save money, lying down in the space normally occupied by the dead.

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Wood may have been in the inspiration for Dickens’s character Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. And a character called Dismal Jemmy appears in The Pickwick Papers.

The Victorian poet William Ernest Henley, known for his 1865 poem Invictus, attended the school. His left leg was amputated below the knee as a result of tuberculosis. A friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, Henley became the inspiration for Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

The church’s congregation had dwindled partly because of the decline of city-centre living, and was at risk of being declared redundant. The schoolroom was dilapidated and not fit for use.

A £1.36m grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, as well as donations from many other trusts, organisations and individuals, funded the restoration. The works were managed by heritage-led regeneration specialists the Prince’s Foundation.

Nicola Dyer, a senior project manager at the Prince’s Foundation, said: “This amazing building is now ready to extend its welcome to a wider audience and reclaim its role as both an ancient place of worship and an important new part of Gloucester’s cultural as well as physical cityscape.”

It is expected that 20,000 people a year will use the restored building.