Connelly, A., Hebbert, M., 2024.

Learning from Buildings

The research project described in this chapter presents the results of a PhD undertaken with The University of Manchester and the Methodist Church Property Office which investigated Methodist Central Halls as a distinct building type. The Methodist Central Halls are large scale places of worship including a main hall suitable for sacred and secular purposes, activity rooms and shop frontages onto main roads. They existed throughout British cities, all of them mixed-purpose buildings in prime locations, many being well-known civic landmarks. Prior to the PhD, they were undocumented apart from unpublished dissertations and a short cyclostyled account published by Rev George Sails for the Methodist Home Mission (Wakeling, 1983; Godden, 2000; Sails 1970). This chapter describes how we went about learning from buildings by considering them from a typological perspective. We recount our research process, which traced buildings from the moment of creation through to their afterlives, using a combination of methods including visual analysis of architectural drawings, local archival sources, and oral history interviews.