The restoration of a church hall in West Penwith, Cornwall, is Luke’s new personal project. The rugged region of West Penwith is steeped in ancient mythology. Its dramatic granite moors and coastline are famously tied to the legend of the sunken land of Lyonesse, and stories of fearsome giants and mischievous spirits.
“The building was a wreck when we turned up. A hall, almost bothy-like, had been built, records told us, in the mid-nineteenth century. One large room with a small stone lean-to and another concrete room attached to that. The hall started life as a school, before being bought by the church and then sold in the 1990s. Between then and our arrival it had been lived in, on and off, by a handful of owners in a very rudimentary way.”
Church Hall, Cornwall
“We first visited in October 2023. I remember it all so clearly – the nervous waiting in a pub car park, the ecstatic clifftop walk afterwards, Duncan and I talking it all over at a hundred miles an hour. If this building was going to be habitable, it needed a lot of love. Not just love, but serious restoration. There was electricity, just about, but wires were on view, coiled up and hanging all over the place. There was a septic tank somewhere in the field next door, but nobody seemed to know quite where it was, or if it even worked. Three large sash windows along one side of the hall were boarded up, the three on the opposite side were clearly beautiful, a jumble of panes, but broken in places, their timbers rotten. Through the grime and the ferns and the smashed glass we glimpsed fields, a green and mauve tapestry of hills and moorland, the squat tower of the hall’s corresponding church. The roof was in desperate need of repair, the biggest predicament of them all.”
Photography by Luke