Cornerstone Centre St Johns Development

Cornerstone Centre St Johns Edinburgh Development. When I lived in Birmingham and I was studying photography I really got into photographing 360 degree panoramics. One of the tasks we had to do on the course I studied was to photograph the interior of both the Town Hall and Symphony Hall in central Birmingham. Most people did stills images (single shot images) but I thought I’d do something different and had a go at creating my first ever 360 degree panorama. It looked great (although I’d like to reshoot it at some point).

For my final course show I photographed a series of locations around Birmingham and one of these was Lichfield Cathedral which is really beautiful inside. I sold a few prints in my final show and when I moved to Edinburgh shortly after graduating I wanted to carry on shooting more of these panoramas. I contacted a few locations and one that replied was St John’s Episcopal Church and they replied. I turned up, took a couple 360 degree panoramas and this in turn generated some work with them.

One of these jobs was creating panoramas all around the church for display on their website but several years ago after many years of discussion it was decided St John’s would have a renovation which would incorporate a £3.5 million development which would remove the old cafe and the main hall and replace them with a modern structure. Something that surprised me about St John’s was how many events they host. They host anything from soup kitchens to welcoming groups for foreigners who want to learn English, brass band rehearsals and all kinds of other things.

A couple years ago I spent a week at the church photographing some of these events for their promotional materials and then in 2016 I was asked if I could come back and photograph a timelapse. The timelapse would involve setting up my camera is half a dozen or so locations and documenting the build. While it’s going to be impossible to stand in the same location each time due to it being a build and the building itself will completely transform, I should get pretty close but the purpose of this article is to show you how different sections of the build are progressing. It’s pretty cool working on this project.

Finally it transpired that they wanted a website building. I haven’t really documented it before but over the years I’ve built quite a few websites which have all been geared towards the creative industries so it’s fun and interesting building a website for something completely different. I’ll write more about this below.

The whole site surrounding the main hall is really busy. The path that ran through the graveyard has been dug up to install gas lines and both the East and West walls of the main hall have been demolished. The pictures above are for the East wall which overlooks Princes St Gardens. The top picture is how it looked originally then they started demolishing the wall then finally it’s been knocked down.

These are photos inside the main hall. The photos show how the site has developed so far including knocking down the walls. The floor is about to be knocked through and the kitchen that was there has long gone. You can also see the grand piano that was in there and at the bottom of this article you can see what’s left of the piano. Apparently a lot of people talked about collecting the piano but when push came to shove no one was willing to go on site and collect it. I believe some people asked if the piano could be delivered to them but this wasn’t possible so sadly the piano was destroyed.

The cafe that was formerly in the basement of the church was a fairly popular venue and I myself ate in there a couple times in the past.

As with the east wall the whole west wall has been knocked down but different so far is the west wall is being rebuilt with many of the stones that were knocked down and reshaped into a modern entrance.

Apparently the above remaining part of the piano was nigh on impossible to cut through so this for the moment remains.

This is really exciting for me as I’m also building a website for the Cornerstone Centre development. I’ve been building websites for a number of years now and for the Cornerstone Centre I’m building a website with a booking system, sliders, lots of information, links for supporting the site and all kinds of other things.

The website is still under development but it will be launched to the public by the end of February.

The Cornerstone Centre website can be found here.