Salford Cathedral Reopens — Heritage Tiling Contractor ABM Was Part of It

Salford Cathedral — the Cathedral Church of St John the Evangelist on Chapel Street — is set to reopen its doors on 4 July after three years of closure and a £20 million restoration. It is one of the most significant heritage restoration projects completed in the country in recent years, and ABM Tiling was appointed as the specialist tiling and natural stone contractor at its heart.

The Restoring the Glory project, led by Cathedral Architect Christopher Cotton, project architects Purcell, and main contractor Simpson of York, set out to achieve two ambitions at once: returning the Victorian cathedral to something like its original splendour after decades of unsympathetic alteration, and making it the most sustainable historic cathedral in the country. Those two ambitions meet most completely in the floor.

The entire 1950s concrete floor was lifted and replaced with a new heritage floor built over a Jupiter dry underfloor heating system — the first time the cathedral has been continuously heated since 1850. Above that hidden infrastructure, ABM Tiling installed a floor that has already moved its first visitors to tears: handcrafted encaustic tiles by Craven Dunnill Jackfield of Ironbridge, set within contrasting Grub and Thornback Purbeck limestone quarried by Haysom Purbeck Stone in Dorset, fixed and grouted with ARDEX and BAL tiling systems.

We have been working on a full content package to tell this story properly, and it is nearly ready. In the coming weeks we will be publishing our detailed written case study, with the full technical story of how the floor was delivered — the challenges of pattern alignment across enormous expanses of a building where no wall is square, the precision required to coordinate underfloor heating, power and data beneath the tiles, and the collaboration between five specialist contractors that made it possible.

That case study is accompanied by an editorial feature in Conservation & Heritage Journal Issue 52 — the first time the project has been covered in the heritage trade press — and a full-length video case study bringing together on-camera interviews with the architect, main contractor, tile manufacturer, quarry supplier, and tiling systems provider.

In the meantime, you can read Salford Now's coverage of the cathedral reopening here, or visit our Salford Cathedral project page for more on our scope and approach.

More to follow shortly.