How a historic church made its way to Mudgee from its original home in northern NSW

The church that appeared on the west end of Market Street set heads turning and tongues wagging when it appeared in late 2022.

It took three years of hard work to get to its new home, but for Kim Stanton and her mother Faye Crook, realising their dream of buying and beautifying an old church was all about patience.

St Aidan's Anglican Church began its life in 1914 near the small northern NSW town of Blackville in Yarraman. There it lived until was it moved on the back of a truck in 1966 from its original foundations up the road road where it remained before going on the market after the diocese made the decision to sell the old building.

Kim and Faye had been on the lookout for a church to buy and after missing out on a handful of Mudgee area churches began to look further afield when they saw that the diminutive timber church in Blackville was for sale.

"My mum doesn't use the internet at all, so each night she would pester me to see if any churches had been listed," Kim said.

"This one particular night we found this one from a tiny little place called Blackville which I'd never heard of, about 50 minutes out of Quirindi, it was just a dot on the map."

Soon the mother and daughter duo were signing over a deposit, but the building would not arrive in Mudgee until three years later. So began the long process of approvals, council sign-offs, heritage reports and finding a suitable block in Mudgee.

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"We had a lot of the [Armidale] diocese there to interview us to make sure that we were suitable candidates to purchase their church. We got interviewed quite stringently... I still remember it, it was about 46 degrees," Kim joked.

"We sourced, I think, one of two heritage consultants in NSW that would work with a heritage building that was a deconsecrated church. So we employed Ian Rufus who is from Lithgow and he was really passionate about churches. He's done a lot of heritage buildings and quite unique buildings around Australia, so he put together a very comprehensive heritage report."

After getting the thumbs up from all the necessary parties, the church was cut into three large pieces before being trucked to its new home on Market Street in Mudgee by McDonald Contracting.

The building sits on 57 piers and its owners intend to keep as much of the original building as they can, even opting not to paint over any part of the blue interior. The Blackville area had been in drought for a number of years so the interior was covered in a well-established layer of red dust when it arrived. The interior is all open plan save for the bathroom which is inside the old minister's quarters.

Kim and Faye hope to retain the building's charm and heritage while bringing up to the necessary standards for living.

"We want to keep it authentic, we want to keep it very open. We have antique and vintage furniture that we've been collecting for many years...," Kim said.

"We want - when you open those doors - that you get that intensity of the space...

"Our plan is to do it as a residence, which probably gave us a bit more to do but it gives us the options that we could resell it, rent it out permanently, we could live in it ourselves or we can do it as self-contained accommodation. And the latter is what our intention is."

Kim was hesitant to put a finish date on the project, but was confident that it would be complete some time in 2023.

"I look at people's Airbnbs and I love them because they're minimalist and they're clean and they're taupe and white or whatever the fashion is at the time and I think 'how lovely', but I know it's not us," she said.

"...we did want a church that we could do up in a vintage, authentic style and still have it look like a church with the features that a church offers.

"Hopefully that will be enough of an attraction."