The scaffolding construction is moving ahead at a good pace. The 60’ tower in the garden is almost complete.

It contains the stairs by which the craftspeople will get to the roof from the first floor of the Parish House.

The wall of the Museum of Modern Art is behind it on the left.

There will be a hoist in the scaffolded area between the stairs and MoMA to lower the windows down from the roof.

From the top level of the stairs, the craftspeople will walk to the right to the north-aisle roof.



On the north-aisle roof, the window scaffolding is going up.

This is the exterior tower on the western-most window.

The window itself is just visible through the pipes in the lower left corner.

The scaffolding tower for each window sits between the buttresses that support the walls and roof .

These scaffolding towers will be enclosed with plywood sheds before removals start in January.



We have also removed a section from the chancel windows behind the reredos in order to see how we can get to them for removal. There is no access to them behind the reredos, which is attached to the west wall of the church.






The removed section being crated. All of the windows come out in sections about this size.






A view of one of the reredos windows looking upward from the sill.

A detail of the reredos at the top of the window – notice all the little faces looking down at me!

In order to get the panel out of the chancel window, we had to remove some of the glass. The photos above show the contrast in thickness from one piece to the next. The glass in the right-hand photo is a hair less than 1/8” thick. This is the usual thickness of hand-made stained glass, which is called “antique” glass. (This term does not mean the glass is ancient – antique glass is still made today. It refers to it being hand-blown, which is an ancient process.) By contrast, the glass in the left-hand photo is almost 1/4” thick. This is called “Norman slab” glass. It was made by Powell’s of Whitefriars (the manufacturers of the window – they also made glass) by blowing the glass into square mold, then separating the square at the corners into small slabs that were about 6” x 8”. Slabs are very thick in center and thinner at the edges. Norman slab glass is made by only one or two companies today, and is very difficult to replace.