Earlier this month I was honoured to be asked to give the annual lecture for the Churches Conservation Trust, about how best to look after the 12,000 or so listed buildings – 8,500 of them medieval – that are currently in the custodianship of the Church of England. When such churches are no longer able to be sustained by their parishes, they often pass into the care of the CCT, which manages 356 such buildings that are no longer required for worship.
The pandemic has struck a double blow to the CCT: it has hampered its fund-raising activities, but it has also rendered many other parishes vulnerable, and made it probable that the Trust will be called upon to look after many more buildings. It is regrettable, too, that an institution as hell-bent on its own destruction as the Church of England appears to be should be responsible for such a rich architectural and artistic heritage, but that is another story.
To raise awareness of some of the gems in the CCT’s care, and to raise money, the Trust is launching CCTdigital.com, an online service broadcasting short films of some of its churches, narrated by the ecclesiastical historian Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch. The series of films is called Churchcrawls in Solitude, and is inspired by the hobby of “church crawling’ so beloved by Sir John Betjeman. The CCT hopes it will become a “Netflix” for churches.
The CCT’s chief executive, Peter Aiers, has said that if Betjeman were alive today and made his 1974 BBC documentary A Passion for Churches again, the CCT would seek his permission to run it on their website. The film follows Betjeman around various churches in Norfolk (a county the Pevsner guide tells us has 659 medieval churches) as he celebrates not just the buildings, with their stained glass, bells, monumental brasses, carved oak, screen paintings and three-decker pulpits, but also the way of life that they generated in the communities they served – the parochial church council, the Mothers’ Union, the bell-ringers, garden fêtes at the vicarage, Sunday school for little children and christenings, weddings and funerals.
Even at the time Betjeman made that programme the way of life it depicted was peculiar only to the most distant parts of the rural country, and there were already signs that it was changing. He laments, for example, the loss of the medieval vicarage and its replacement by the functional “villa”. Even by 1974 secularisation had taken a toll on church attendances and community participation in all aspects of church life; since then congregations have shrunk and the numbers of people who consider themselves Anglicans have collapsed.
