Getting Started!

Dear Readers,

First, we would like to welcome you to our blog!  This blog will be following the journey of our team, comprised of four students, as we explore the religious heritage of the United Kingdom, and the access barriers surrounding it.  We will be working on this project in London, along side our sponsoring organization, Art Alive in Churches.  This project will be the team’s Interdisciplinary Qualifying Project (IQP), which is a graduation requirement of our school, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, located in Worcester, Massachusetts USA.

For the past 8 weeks the team has been researching topics such as the current state of religious heritage in the United Kingdom, promotion and curation of religious heritage art, artifacts and architecture, and access to the churches of the UK for individuals with and without disabilities.  This research has been done in order to prepare us for the 7 weeks we will be spending in London.  While we are in the UK, we will be collecting and analyzing data relating to our project topics, with the overall goal of creating a list of suggestions to help better the way that the religious heritage of the UK is being represented.

Yesterday marked our first day on the job, where we visited our base for the next two months, St. Mary Abchurch.  St. Mary Abchurch is a beautiful Anglican church located on Abchurch Lane here in London.  This small church was built in the mid 1680s, and contains some very interesting artifacts, as well as woodwork from the artist Grinling Gibbons, who also worked quite a bit on St. Paul’s Cathedral.  While at St. Mary Abchurch yesterday we interviewed two individuals who gave us some very valuable information, starting us off with a bang!

For the rest of this week we will be conducting more interviews, along with visiting a few key sites for data collection!  We look forward to continuing our exploration of the religious heritage sites of the city of London and can’t wait to see what the next 7 weeks has in store for us!