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Church of St. Peter Mancroft: Lighting Upgrades

The Church of St. Peter Mancroft is the largest Church in Norwich (aside from its two Cathedrals). With beautiful architecture dating back to the 15th Century,  it boasts such visually impressive features as a 1463 font and a Flemish tapestry dating from 1573. 

Of course, such a beautiful setting deserves to be shown in the best light, and the Church decided to contract Enlightened to help them design and install a new lighting system throughout the building to highlight its wonderful features and provide essential safety enhancements and upgrades. 

As well as the visual benefits, the project forms part of a forward-thinking and ambitious net-zero project to reduce the carbon footprint of the church, combined with heat pumps, battery storage and solar panels, with the aim of making an 84% reduction in carbon emissions. 

 

Enlightened designed a comprehensive LED lighting system, replacing the previous sodium-based light sources. Each fixture was fully dimmable with individual fixture control via a brand new Pharos Designer based control system, with wireless tablet control from anywhere within the Church walls. The installation project took 7 weeks for our team of technicians on site, with the Church remaining open to the public throughout the install. Maintaining public access required 2.5 tonnes of temporary production lighting to be installed, and our team made use of portable access equipment to save space as opposed to bulky and obtrusive scaffolding structures. 

Overall, the design made use of 355 x lighting fixtures mounted on custom designed and manufactured plates, and while most of these were sourced new to make the most of industry-leading efficiency improvements, the team did manage to repurpose some low-voltage lighting units that were just too good not to keep! We also installed over 4.2km of brand new, energy efficient cabling. 

Inspired by the low-carbon ambitions, we put extra care into our waste management on this project, and recycled all metal, class, cardboard, and timber components used in the project. Overall, we sent less than 150kg of waste to landfill, which for a project of this size represents an excellent result. 

We finished the project off with our standard handover and in-depth training with the client, ensuring they had all the tools needed to control and operate the lighting for decades to come. 


Enlightened were a pleasure to work with on our extensive internal relighting lighting scheme. This was part of a much bigger, complicated,  project involving solar panels and heat pumps and we were delighted with the way the Enlightened team slotted into the various tricky aspects we were needing to coordinate. They were polite, timely and very efficient in everything they did, and we would have no hesitation in using them again ourselves, or recommending them to others. – Chris, Head Verger


St Peter Mancroft, Norwich is a large and busy grade I listed city parish church that attracts over 50,000 visitors a year and is well used for both services and secular performances. We were looking for a new lighting system that could provide enhanced architectural lighting of the medieval building, performance lighting for a wide variety of concerts and events and day-to-day lighting for regular visitor opening and weekly services. We needed a system that was both easy to use and flexible. The lights themselves would be visible and needed to have a low visual and physical impact on the historic building.

Enlightened understood our brief and exceeded our expectations on all counts with a high-quality system that can provide over 20 lighting scenes at the touch of a button but where we can also control the lighting through a DMX lighting desk to produce an infinite variety of effects for special services and events.

The new energy efficient LED lighting also formed an essential part of a major Net Zero Carbon project for the church – alongside solar panels, battery storage and new air-source heat pumps – with the new lighting expected to reduce our lighting electricity consumption by around 80%. Enlightened were patient and supportive during the long process of gaining permissions and securing funding, but also highly efficient and considered during the complex implementation phase. The church remained in use throughout the installation and the project was completed safely, on time and on budget. I would have no hesitation in recommending Enlightened for similar projects.”

– Nicholas Jackson, Fabric Officer of St. Peter Mancroft and Conservation Architectural Designer