St Helen's Bishopsgate

SFL equip St Helen’s Bishopsgate with a brand new audio and visual system

Bishopsgate is home to London’s financial sector and some of the tallest, most iconic buildings in the Capital. Hiding in the shadow of the Gherkin and the Lloyd’s Building is St Helen’s Church, a conservative evangelical Anglican Church whose worshipping life embraces both traditional and contemporary musical styles. In 2010, SFL equipped St Helen’s with a brand new audio and visual system to meet the demands of their busy weekly schedule.

Dating back to 1204, the Church building is unusual in design as it houses two parallel naves separated by four significant arches that split the space into distinct north and south sections. This room geometry posed significant challenges in the design process compounded by the ever-changing room orientation which is dictated by the needs of each individual meeting.

SFL’s Tim Horton, picks up the story; “The building is essentially two spaces combined into one. The Church has adapted to this architectural complexity by turning the building through 90-degrees and making the Pulpit on the South wall the focus for the Sunday services. Midweek, the Church then rotates to face the North wall and take advantage of the increased floor space to host more informal prayer suppers, Bible studies and Christianity Explored events. Not only that, but in both orientations the room is landscape in layout resulting in the pulpit protruding forward and being surrounded on three sides by the congregation. Of course, this created some very interesting design challenges for us to overcome.”

At the heart of the system is an Allen & Heath IDR8 matrix mixer & DSP device. This feeds the main sound system for the South-facing Sunday services; whilst the driving a handful of the Church’s pre-existing speech reinforcement speakers on the North wall for the midweek events. An A&H PL4 remote control wall plate provides the ability to mix four inputs for these North wall orientated services where only a pair of radio mics, audio playback and additional local iPod input is required.

The main system comes courtesy of thirteen L-Acoustics 8XTi speakers distributed throughout the Church to provide even audio coverage to every seat. Two L-Acoustics LA-4 Amplifiers power the system and provide all the processing needed for the setup. The proprietary L-Acoustics SoundVision modelling software was used to confirm the design ideas.

The heart of the audio-visual control lives atop the balcony where a single Roland S-1608 stage box is fed with a variety of playback devices and radio mics. A second S-1608 lives on the floor against the South wall taking the various inputs from the band and providing outputs for the powered spot monitors and an L-Acoustics SB15P sub-woofer that is only employed for sub-carrying instruments such as the bass guitar.

St Helen’s have the privilege of being the first UK users of an installed Roland M300 digital console which mixes up to 32-channels of audio. The beauty of this Roland REAC multicore system comes into its own when we are able to plug the console into any one of three sets of Cat5 sockets around the building according to the needs of the Church’s busy service schedule.

The video system is run throughout the Church on Cat5 lines to feed various wall-mounted plasma displays, removable screen, TFT monitors and a Christie LX-Series projector. A Kramer VP-724 switcher seamlessly handles all the camera and PC inputs, whilst a pair of Kramer TP-210 distribution amplifiers provide outputs not only inside the building, but also to a variety of meeting rooms and Crèche facilities that augment the main Church building.