Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan on fulfilling their friend Joan Charnley’s final wish to turn her home into an ‘art house’
It was a week after the funeral of textile artist and teacher Joan Charnley, who died, at 84, in the summer of 2016, that her solicitor got in touch with her neighbours, Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan, to tell them she had left them her house – a tall, listed Georgian building in Uppermill, on the edge of Saddleworth moor outside Manchester – and that she would like, although she understood it might not be possible, for it to be turned into what she quaintly called an “art house”. She described the two men, in her will, as her “soulmates”. In her lifetime, she referred to them simply as “the boys”. I meet “the boys” – both middle-aged – before the opening, on 6 April, of the Weavers Factory and at the end of more than two years of devoted slog during which they have made their neighbour’s dream come true. The gallery got its name because these houses were once a pre-industrial weavers’ factory. Their windows look on to a former steam mill. The houses’ window frames are painted black (originally to hide the soot). “Even the soot here is listed,” Bovis laughs.
Over lunch in their own house, Bovis and Durkan reminisce about their relationship with Charnley. What I want to know is: did they have any idea she was leaving them her house? None, they say. They were busy organising her funeral when the news came through and too grief-stricken to take it in. Durkan recalls every detail of the funeral (Bovis wrote the eulogy, Durkan oversaw refreshments). Two huge Saddleworth pies had been ordered, with “JO” the decoration in pastry on one, and “AN” adorning the other. But once they had recovered from all the work that follows a death, surely they must have hesitated before taking on the daunting transformation of her house? “No – we’d have been scared not to do it,” Bovis says. Charnley, they imagine, must have been waiting for the right moment to tell them about her plans, always believing there would be more time. Her aunt had lived to 104, she had told them she hoped to do the same.
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