Harrison & Harrison's new workshop was specially designed for organ building. Its site is only two miles from the old factory (an eighteenth-century former paper mill in the city centre), on the edge of a village outside Durham. It has a cemetery on one side and a church on the other (which, appropriately, contains an unaltered 1882 Harrison organ), and looks out over the Durham countryside, with a glimpse of the London to Edinburgh railway line. Harrisons moved in on 2nd December 1996.
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The workshop is built around a glazed courtyard which provides a source of natural light in the middle of the building. The wood- and leather- working areas are on three sides of this, with adjoining sections set aside for console and bellows work.
A large machine shop runs the length of the building along one side, and opens directly on to the great space of the building room. This was designed to allow enough room for working on two organs at once, with plenty of height, and occupies the fourth side of the courtyard.
The two voicing rooms are at a strategic distance from one another, and the noises made by the voicers (Peter Hopps and Duncan Mathews) filter out on to the shop floor. The metal shop is conveniently situated between them. It has an en suite casting room, equipped with a granite casting bench.
The new building has allowed the introduction of better facilities in many areas. Harrisons now have an overhead crane for the building room, a spray booth, drive-in delivery areas and a proper archive room for the firm's extensive records.
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| (Photo by Alan Woolley) |
Storage space is a major need for organ builders working on restoration projects. Experience has already shown that the new factory has enough room for one cathedral organ of 56 stops, one new organ of 40 stops, four smaller church organs and the new 12 stop organ which we plan to sell - plus space for timber, pipes and spares - just!
Apart from the mezzanine storage deck, the workshop is all on a single level (a considerable improvement on the old Harrison factory, which was on three uneven floors, with complicated outbuildings). But the factory had to have at least one high section because of the size of the building room, and it seemed an efficient and elegant step to use the height to accommodate the offices on three floors.
The drawing office, where Alan Howarth and John Richardson work, communicates directly with the workshop floor. Above that is the archive room. And on the top floor Mark and Katherine Venning, some twenty feet up, command heady views over the factory. The administrator's office can be reached directly from the shop floor by means of a vertiginous spiral staircase, a Victorian relic of the old workshop.
The old Harrison factory was a wonderfully characterful building. But after 124 years of organ building it was worn out. For a firm with a long history it was an attractive idea to look for an old school or chapel, but nothing appropriate was on the market in the Durham area. One of the difficulties in designing the new factory lay in balancing the desire to create a building of character, and one that would last, with the need to keep the costs within the firm's relatively slender means. These aims have been stylishly achieved - though alas without a glass wall for the building room. With its 'hole in the middle' and its pagoda-like silhouette, its dramatic observation deck and the elegant cream and blue colour scheme which unites work spaces and offices, the new workshop is a fine building and should fulfil Harrisons' needs into the twenty-second century.
