Going inside the Upminster Tithe Barn Restoration project

Last week, it was announced that one of London’s last thatched roofs was being replaced, and this week, there was an invitation to see it up close.

The Upminster tithe barn is a short walk from the tube station and sits down a side road. On the day of the visit, the road was exceptionally muddy and wet, but at the end of the road, a long rectangle of protective scaffolding loomed over the visitor.

Built between 1620 and 1640, the barn is now about 400 years old. Although its thatched roof has been replaced several times and there have been some repairs, it’s substantially the same barn that its original builders would have recognised.

Although called a Tithe Barn, recent research suggests it was probably just a local barn for the abbey that owned the land around here, not for collecting taxes. However, the idea that it’s a Tithe Barn has been ingrained for so long that mere facts don’t really matter now — it’s always going to be the tithe barn.

Due to the deteriorating state of the roof, the barn was put on Historic England’s Buildings at Risk register a couple of years ago. While being put on a register saying your building is in a poor state of repair sounds like a bad thing, it can be a blessing in disguise as it raises the profile of the problem and can help to unlock funding grants for repairs.

In this case, Havering Council and Historic England, working together, were able to secure £650,000 of central government funding via the National Highways Heritage Fund. Rising costs saw Historic England top up the funding with an additional £97,664, and also provide advice on the restoration work.

After several years of preparation, conservation work finally got underway last year. However, only after a bat inspector found a bat and moved it to a new bat box in the nearby woods.

While the roof restoration is visually the most obvious repair, a lot of work has been carried out to stabilise and repair the barn timbers and undo some of the bad decisions of the past. Probably in the 1960s/70s, some of the timbers were mounted onto concrete posts, which was thought to protect them from rot. However, as the concrete is impermeable, it actually stops water from soaking away. That increases damage rather than prevents it.

After nearly a year of work in the barn, the roof was removed late last year so that the replacement could arrive.

The reeds used on thatched roofs are fairly waterproof as that’s what makes them so good for roofs, but because of that, they are really bad at rotting down when removed when their lifespan is over. So what do you do with 17 tonnes of 50-year-old thatched roof?

Fortunately, if shredded down, it makes for very good mulch to put around plants, and if you visit one of Havering Council’s public parks and see fresh mulch added recently, it’s probably the shredded remains from Upminster Barn’s roof.

Sadly the British weather was particuarly British last year, and the reed harvest was poor. With time tight to get the work done, they couldn’t wait to see what this summer might be like, so took the pragmatic decision to import 17 tonnes of thatching reeds from Turkey.

The reeds arrived on 6th January, and within a few weeks, the team of six thatchers have managed to pretty much complete the job. At time of the visit they were working on the top ridge and finishing off the detailing work.

Something else to go in the top before they finish though will be a time capsule being supplied by local schools. That will stay up there until the 2080s, which is roughly when the roof will next need to be rethatched again.

Apart from the appearance of the newly thatched roof, there’s the smell — of a very clean horse stables where there’s loads of hay around but none of the muck.

An initial thought was to not cover the barn in scaffolding to cut costs, but stripping off the old roof would have left it exposed to the weather for a few weeks, and that was considered too much of a risk. As it happens, with the torrential storms late last year, that was a wise, if expensive, decision to make.

To hold the scaffolding in place, 100 huge water tanks dotted around the barn, each weighing about a ton, are used to prevent the weather from blowing it away. Inside the barn there’s ever more scaffolding, to hold up an internal floor and give the timber restorers access to the upper areas.

Generally, they’ve tried to be minimally invasive, only replacing whole timbers where repairs are not possible. In some places, new pegs are used to secure the posts in the traditional way, which has led to a debate about whether the pegs should be cut flush or left proud. It’s the sort of debate where there’s no correct answer, but it can provoke lengthy debates about the merits of both.

The barn has chosen the expressed pegs option, and the craftspeople working on the site will be encouraged to leave their “masons marks” on the new timbers.

Sourcing the replacement timbers nearly proved a problem, as the restoration of the Notre Dame in Paris used so much of the ideal long thick timbers they needed that there’s been a bit of a shortage of the right sort to use for this restoration. They found some eventually.

It’s also a slightly surreal experience to be inside the barn just underneath the roof while the thatchers outside thump away with their mallets, delivering dull thumps just above your head as you walk around the scaffolding. Up here, they are also installing some modern lighting to replace the old incandescent hot bulbs and a new lightning conductor will provide necessary protection that the barn has long lacked.

In a few months time, the craftspeople who have been working on the barn will leave, the scaffolding will come down, and the Museum of Nostalgia will prepare to move back in again.

Hopefully, it will be reopened to the public this springtime.

(update – they’ve just announced it’ll be closed for the rest of 2025, opening in 2026)

The restoration has been carried out by Lexden Contracts, specialists Essex Oak Frame, Simply Thatch and design team Purcell, Conisbee and Stace.

The new thatched roof should also pave the way for the tithe barn to be removed from Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register later this year.