These days, you have to wear a white hard hat and an orange safety jacket to visit the cloister garden at St Francis’s. Once, this was a place of tranquillity and reflection, enclosed by the church and the friary that Edward Welby Pugin designed for the Franciscans at Gorton, east Manchester, in the 1860s. In recent years it has been the scene of vandalism and neglect. The gothic windows of the cloister have long since lost their glass and been boarded up. The three-storey friary that enclosed the garden exists now only on two sides, and even that is in a state of dereliction. The cloister itself is a wilderness of straggly grass and builders’ rubble, dominated by five trees that have outgrown the space. But St Francis’s is undergoing a renaissance. A trust run by local people has won £6m from the Lottery Heritage Fund to restore the church and the friary as a much-needed community focus in what is a run-down area overlooking Manchester’s city centre. The builders are in, the friary is being re-roofed and the church restored. Next May it will reopen. There is much for Tony Hadley to show me. The church is considered by many to be Edward Pugin’s masterpiece: a majestic, soaring church of cathedral proportions. Tony, training and enterprise director of the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust, has steeped himself in the building, examining every detail as the restoration has been planned and conducted, and he demonstrates a remarkable knowledge – and a fascination – with what was created here. We have begun our tour in the cloister garden for a very good reason. What Tony’s investigations have convinced him of is that this garden is at the very heart of Pugin’s creation, and that the architect imbued it with a hidden significance every bit as great as that of the high altar itself. I’m intrigued to learn how Tony has reached this conclusion. As he says: “Pugin left no plans, nothing to go on. I wanted to find out the secrets of the place; how it was planned, how Pugin’s great design, all dedicated to the glory of God, was manifested in it. To do that I had to learn to read the building.” “What I discovered early on is that Pugin used symmetry in almost everything he did, so when I found something that knocked that symmetry out, I knew it was telling me something.” He points to a bay, five sides of an octagon, which juts out from the cloister into the garden. But instead of being placed centrally along the cloister, it is set five eighths of the way along the cloister wall. “I looked at that and I puzzled as to why Pugin would break the symmetry here, when it is so carefully observed everywhere else in the building.” To find out we must go inside. Treading carefully along the gloomy cloister with its boarded windows, holed roof and puddled floor, we come to the jutting bay. Tony has discovered two intriguing things about it. One is that it is actually located at the very centre of the church and friary complex. “Every building has a starting point, a place in which the builder drives a stake and from which all other measurements are taken. By drawing lines to the south, following the two faces of this hexagonal bay that are angled at 45 degrees, you come to a point in the cloister garden from which everything else is measured. From this point everything else – the church and the friary – was plotted. The other intriguing thing is a link between this bay and the high altar of St Francis’s. Whereas the floor tiles in all other areas of the building are six inch black and orange squares laid alternately in a chequer pattern, here in this bay and on the high altar the tiles are distinctly different. In these two places Pugin used two inch oblong and triangular tiles in a mix of blue, green, red, black and gold, arranged in a complex pattern of crosses and diamonds. It seemed to Tony that Pugin was telling the observant something about this building. “It meant that this cloister bay was a very special place indeed. There is no sign of an altar, a statue or anything else in this bay - it seems it’s simply a place from which to observe the cloister garden.” There is one other intriguing thing Tony has to show me. We walk around to the main west entrance of the church, looking up at the towering, slender, red-brick building - like a Gothic space rocket ready for launch - and in to the nave. It is clear that his church was built as a statement, aligned north-south in a dominant, elevated position - rather than east-west - so as to be broadside on to the city of Manchester below. In this staunchly Protestant area it said the Catholics are back, and as the industrial revolution brought Catholic immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere, its congregation grew and grew. The nave is bare, stark and incredibly dramatic. A modern-dress version of Macbeth was filmed here for television, and you can see it would make a perfect setting. There is scaffolding, and builders crawling everywhere. Tony had wanted to show me the high altar, but it has been boarded off for restoration. He tells me what he found there, and demonstrates later with a photograph. If you were to draw a line on a plan of the church, right up the centre of the nave, and then extend the line that follows the eastern angle of the cloister bay, they would cross at the altar. At the point where the lines intersect, you notice a contradiction in the floor pattern. Two of the diamond quarters in the design have been turned through 90 degrees, breaking the symmetry. What might have seemed a mistake struck Tony as something much more important. There are no errors with Pugin,” he says, “all is meticulously planned to the glory of God.” He found that, taking the two reversed tiles as his guide, he had uncovered a scale representation of the church, cloister and friary laid out here in this pattern. Tony knew the building as a boy in Gorton, and its renaissance clearly means a great deal to him. “I always thought of it as that big black place on the hill – for some reason I remember it as black not red. I didn’t really think much about it then.” By that time it was in almost terminal decline. As heavy industry closed, slums were demolished, and the congregation evaporated, the church stood in a sea of brick and rubble. The last mass was celebrated in 1989, and the friars sold out to developers who planned to convert it into flats, but went bust. They stripped out and sold anything of value, including an 18ft pitch pine crucifix and alabaster figure of Christ that once hung from the chains I see dangling above the altar, and left the building open. Many who had worshipped here took things for safe keeping. The Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust was established in 1996 by Elaine Griffiths and husband Graham North, once an altar boy at St Francis. Tony, who had been running a scheme to give young unemployed Mancunians a year’s paid experience in the building trade, joined and brought that strategy to the restoration of St Francis’s. The local community has rallied to the project. The items they rescued are being returned - a four foot Madonna had just come back when I visited – and the missing crucifix and 12 life-size statues of Franciscan saints that once stood on ledges high up in the nave have been bought by the trust. A building that was once at the heart of the community is becoming so again, albeit in a secular role. It will be the focus of community events, conferences, product launches and weddings. And the wedding photos will be taken in the cloister garden, which we return to at the end of my tour. Tony leads me to a laburnum, the trunk of which has split into quarters. He invites me to place my hand, palm down, above the bowl of the tree. He tells me I will feel heat, and a tingling energy – and I do. It seems that researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University investigating ley lines traced one running through this garden. Whether it’s the ley lines, or being at the epicentre of Pugin’s glorious creation I couldn’t say – but there is most certainly a powerful force present in this cloister garden. | 
