Join us on Good Friday when we'll be joined by Chris Rose CEO of this year's Lent Appeal charity, Amos Trust.

Visit our free lent exhibition by Mexican artist, Chantal Meza, focusing on environmental destruction, and the decline in biodiversity.

A short history of the west nave window at St Mary Redcliffe.

A fun new sign g group for children aged 5-7 years old!

Join us this autumn for a series of free lunchtime recitals.

Preached by Rev Teddy Kalongo, Superintendent of Bristol's Methodist Churches

Preached by the Revd Simon Goodman

Project 450 is St Mary Redcliffe’s major facilities development initiative. The project, which has been in process since 2013, will create a new visitor welcome, cafe and shop at street level alongside new spaces for exhibition and interpretation, improve access to the historical church and open up currently inaccessible areas to the public, revamp the visitor experience and make the church a more attractive place to visit for a wider range of people. A significant heritage component of Project 450 will be to provide a new home for William Hogarth’s St Mary Redcliffe altarpiece, which is currently stored in St Nicholas’ Church. The overall aims of the project are to present the church and its history to as wide an audience as possible, support the worshipping community, promote music and cultural events in church, provide opportunities and support for local people, and achieve long-term sustainability, helping to secure one of England’s finest churches for future generations. Project 450 is overseen by the P450 Project Board - a committee of individuals with professional experience in areas pertinent to the project, such as planning, fundraising, architecture, heritage and project management that reports to the PCC (Parochial Church Council). Since 2020, planning for Project 450 has slowed down to take account of changing financial and social conditions caused by Covid. During this time, work has focused on testing the projects main financial components - the business plan and fundraising strategy - to ensure that the project is realistic and realisable. Project 450 has made significant progress during the last six months, a period that began with the appointment of Alex Notay - Placemaking and Investment Director at Thriving Investments (formerly PfP Capital) - as Chair of the Project Board. Alex, who is also a member of the congregation and PCC, brings significant international experience of planning, project management and placemaking to achieve tangible benefits for communities. Since 2020, when a planning pre-app for was submitted to Bristol City Council, the project team has been engaged in a process of iterative consultation with Bristol Planning Office to ensure that the Project 450 scheme that is eventually presented for planning is consistent with planning policy, responds to feedback from statutory stakeholders such as Historic England and has the best chance of achieving planning consent. During 2022, to support this process, Avison Young was appointed as planning consultant for Project 450. Since then, Sally Davis, Associate Director at Avison Young, and has been offering advice on planning policy, arranging consultation with stakeholders and representing the church consultations with the planning department that will inform Bristol Local Plan. During autumn 2023, the project team visited City Hall to meet with Bristol City Council’s new Director of Planning, Simone Wilding and Pete Insole, Head of Urban Design and Principal Historic Environment Officer at the council. During this meeting - which was very positive - a series of next steps were agreed, including a geo-spatial archaeological investigation of the churchyard to inform planning for the new buildings. Also involved in this meeting were Kate Newnham and Julia Carver, curatorial representatives of Bristol Museums - owners of Hogarth’s altarpiece - with whom the P450 project team is working to plan for the rehousing of the work. Discussions are also taking place about displaying some of the many other items from Bristol Musuems’ collections that are pertinent to the history of St Mary Redcliffe, such as the Braikenridge collection of images and archival documents. A further outcome of the workshop at City Hall was that the museums team would support the P450 project team in producing a study that will measure the potential impact on the church’s core and target audiences of plans to improve access to the heritage of St Mary Redcliffe. These findings will inform P450 planning and support funding applications relating to the project. Since Christmas, The Fundraising Practice, a team of experienced fundraising consultants, has been working on behalf of the church to provide a detailed analysis of the local, national and international funding landscape that will help the church determine a realistic budget for Project 450. This work will form an updated Fundraising Strategy and Plan that will be delivered in March. In a parallel process, members of the staff team, James Rodliff (Head of Operations), Rhys Williams (Heritage Development Manager) and Ellie Bowes (Visitor Services and Commercial Manager) have recently been working on an updated version of the Project 450 Business Plan, the first iteration of which was completed by Glevum Consultants prior to Covid. Building on Glevum’s work, this document will be key in providing a firm foundation for the development of activities during the coming years as we build towards the creation of our new facilities.

In amongst the array of wonderful things happening in Redcliffe it’s sometimes hard to pick out one highlight. However, our community cook-up is providing a huge amount of satisfaction now – not least for Andy (our Community Development Worker)’s stomach! It combines all the best of what we do through our Youth and Community work. We have nearly 350 of our neighbours living in the Mercure Hotel that are desperate to cook. At St Mary Redcliffe, we have an underused commercial kitchen in the Undercroft. By simply connecting the two it has created something truly inspirational. We work with the hotel management to form teams from the same region of the world who then cook a meal for up to 40-50 from the hotel to enjoy. So far, we have had Afghan, Indian/Pakistani, Kurdish, Caribbean, Georgian/Ukrainian, Southern African, Brazilian teams cooking dishes that astound us with their restaurant quality taste and presentation. It is not just about the food though. As the teams come together from different parts of the world you can feel the strength provided by the connection to their culture and the pride in sharing something that they have created. We provide simple activities for parents to do with their children. Families gather around the table and eat, play, and talk together. A feeling of home.  As a simple analogy it beautifully represents what we want to do as a community team at St Mary Redcliffe. When we see people who are hungry the most obvious and natural thing is to give them a meal. However, when we give the ingredients to cook, we are giving them the power to feed themselves.

A new calendar year also heralds a new financial year, where usually the team would draw a line across old finances and start to work from fresh new year budgets. This year’s budgeting has been particularly challenging, as the pressures of the cost-of-living crisis, inflation and general cost increases we are all facing on a day-to-day basis is also being felt within the church’s finances. This has meant a delay in getting the budgets approved, as the budget had to be reworked several times as we seek to find the balance of providing great services for the St Mary Redcliffe community and to strive to make this a great place to live and worship; but are mindful that the church only has finite resources and so need to ensure every pound is being spent wisely. This time of year also means we are busy reflecting back across 2023 and producing the final management accounts of the year, the financial statements and the Trustee’s Annual report (TAR) in preparation for our annual audit in March. Once audited the TAR and financial statements will be available for circulation at the AGM and will also become a public document celebrating the successes of St Mary Redcliffe.  All the above could not be achieved without the help of our fantastic finance volunteers Dominic Hewitt, Temi Garrick and Pat Stevens whose efforts and assistance are invaluable. Breaking News! We welcome Janine John, as finance assistant, who will be with us for a year, one day a week, due to the Parish Administrators maternity leave. Janine will assist with managing the high volume of transactions and allow time to ensure processes and policies are in place for the future.

Watch a presentation on the church's North Porch by Dr Helen Lunnon.

Watch Bristol writer and historian, Michael Manson, tell the fascinating story of Redcliffe, Temple and St Thomas from the Middle Ages to today.

Watch 'The Real Thomas Chatterton' with Professor Nick Groom, the first in a series of talks about the history and heritage of St Mary Redcliffe.

Watch award winning writer and poet Rebecca Tantony read 'Thomas', a work that was inspired by the boy poet Thomas Chatterton.

Read J. Chilcott's 1848 Handbook to St Mary Redcliffe Church