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The At Your Service column attends the opening of a church in a village once condemned to death

DOWN at the bottom end of Witton Park, down where the all-consuming ironworks belched and blazed and where the furnaces were at their fieriest, lay an area called Paradise, as improbable as it was inexplicable.

Though Bolckow and Vaughan's iron age is long spent, the signs still point to Paradise. Today's column, happily, is a story of Paradise regained.

Witton Park is near Bishop Auckland, the village that when Durham County Council in the 1960s announced its blackcapped Category D policy became the fulcrum of the fight for all 121 communities thus condemned.

Though its heart was forever in the right place, it had suffered long decades of neglect - a village of long, lachrymose terraces and unmade roads, with none seemingly willing to come to the aid of the clarty.

When they did, when the famous fight finally was won, it was too late for Carwood Methodist chapel. The handsome old Victorian church closed in 1989, its remaining flock unable even to afford the insurance.

For six years the residual congregation met in the former railway station, for 13 years after that in the community centre.

On the 29th and last day of February, however, on a day that may have suggested a prodigious leap of both faith and imagination, Witton Park's new chapel was formally opened. Among much else, the D was probably for determination.

No matter that the new place wasn't even the size of the old Sunday School room, that the plumbing and the electricity weren't yet connected and that the Witton wind would have blown the red ribbon away, for Evelyn Swinbank and friends it was far more than just half way to paradise.

It was a night, beyond doubt, that God was in his heaven.

Evelyn had been there when Carwood closed, mourned its passing but knew that it was inevitable, resolved that they would keep a Methodist presence in Witton Park.

"I can't explain it, really, but Witton Park has always been different, we even worshipped in our own way," she says on the great night. "We explored the ecumenical road, it didn't matter where we met, but it just didn't work out.

"We knew there was going to be new housing eventually. This was just something we had to do."

That afternoon she'd followed the builders into the new church. "I just sat for ten minutes and I couldn't believe we'd done it at last," she says.

"I'm here now and my stomach's still churning, but I know it's going to be all right. I always believed that it would be all right."

For reasons of size, the congregation is invitation only. It includes ex-Witton Park lad Ray Gibbon, a former mayor of Durham who just that week has been made an alderman but, since we're old acquaintances, says it'll be all right just to call him Sir.

Ray recalls when Witton Park had six or seven places of worship, probably even more pubs, and when saints and sinners met half way.

"Every Christmas and every chapel anniversary we'd go singing round the village, with a piano on a flat wagon. We always got invited into the pubs, they insisted.

Though we were Methodists, if we hadn't gone in there'd have been war on."

The new chapel - they decline to call it a church, as if knowing their place - cost around £180,000. The regular congregation of 25 or so, many from outside the village, raised getting on two-thirds of the cost themselves.

Among the principal fundraisers is Bob Wolff, who lives in the old engineman's cottage at what was Jane Pit and, seven years previously, had hosted an open air singing marathon to raise funds.

He had a dog called Ernest, said in the column at the time to be the size of a suburban sideboard, and a killer parrot called Walter. Ernest's no more; we forgot to ask about Walter.

As well as working for Witton Park, Bob has also helped build a church in Thailand - "650 there, if you don't clap and jump around, don't bother coming"

- and raised almost £100,000 towards a care centre in Sri Lanka.

He'd been there at the time of the tsunami. "We saw things I never want to see again," he tells the congregation.

With the accompaniment of piano, three guitars and a generator, the opening service proceeds joyously. Keith Pearce, Bishop Auckland's superintendent minister, says they're welcome to use the Portaloo but best to borrow the torch - and to bring it back, because it's his.

Evelyn reads from the 24th psalm, the bit about the earth being the Lord's and the fullness thereof. It incorrigibly calls to mind the doggerel beloved of public transport users in the Scottish highlands.

The earth belongs unto the Lord

And all that it contains,

Except for the kyles and the Western Isles

And they belong to Macbrayne's.

The dedication is performed by Graham Carter, chairman of the Darlington district of the Methodist church, who tells them that their church mustn't be confined within those four walls but taken out to where people are.

"It isn't a clubhouse that we've built, it's the focus of a Christian community."

Jimmy Simpson, the builder who'd demolished the old chapel and helped erect the new one, hands over a framed copy of the Lord's prayer taken from Carwood.

In the new place there's even one of those electronic boxes of tricks that projects the hymn words onto a screen, a bit more sophisticated than the Kozy Kinema.

Cake cut, Evelyn concedes that Witton Park - still small, but now much more agreeably formed - won't ever be the same. "You'll never again be at the point where everyone left their doors open, where you just knocked and walked in, but there's still something special about this place.

"I'm just so glad we saw the journey through."

■ Comedian Bobby Ball appears in an evening of entertainment and witness at the Gala Theatre, Durham on April 29-30 in aid of Bob Wolff's Sri Lankan appeal. Yarm School choir and local musicians will also appear.

Tickets are £10 and £8 from the theatre, 0191-332-4041.

10:41am Saturday 15th March 2008

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