As part of the current enquiry into Britain’s built heritage, the chair of the culture, media and sport committee in the House of Commons, Caroline Dinenage, has given the government a warning about the state of the nation’s church buildings—and the funds needed to keep them alive.
In a letter to Baroness Twycross, the gambling and heritage minister, Dinenage outlined evidence the committee has gathered, in particular on the recent changes to the grant scheme for listed places of worship.
Introduced 24 years ago, this scheme is the only regular stream of government funding available to England’s churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, allowing them to reclaim VAT spent on restoration. But in April, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) set a cap of £25,000 per building on projects costing over £125,000, and cut the overall budget from £42m to £23m. If that total is reached before the end of the financial year, there will be no money at all for applicants.
A thousand buildings at risk
Anyone aware of the herculean fundraising efforts needed to fix an old church roof or bring its heating up to modern standards will probably be thinking: whoever thought even £42m would do the trick? A single parish church in east London, the Grade II*-listed St John at Hackney, required £6m to complete its recent seven-year overhaul. Historic England currently lists just shy of a thousand churches, chapels, meeting houses and cathedrals as “at risk”.
The change has obviously given several vicars and congregants a turn. Giving evidence to the committee, Becky Payne, the development director at the Historic Religious Buildings Alliance, said: “We came across a Methodist church the other day that has to find another £400,000. When you have been fundraising for five or six years, that is a headache.”
When he was the arts minister, Chris Bryant understandably cited “a tough financial background” and “a wide range of competing priorities for expenditure within DCMS” as reasons for the cuts. Dinenage, meanwhile, points out that restricting funds will only hamper the sector’s ability to do the kind of urgent repair works that listed buildings always need more of. Along with the Church of England, she has called on the government not just to remove the cap but to make the scheme permanent.
“Our biggest heritage crisis”
That it hasn’t been removed, all this time, says something about priorities. As many have pointed out, nearly half of England’s Grade I-listed buildings are churches, built treasures that are rivalled only by the treasures that reside within them—artistic, liturgical, musical. The chief executive of the National Churches Trust, Claire Walker, calls the future of church buildings “our biggest heritage crisis”.
Beyond heritage, though, I can think of some very basic reasons why ensuring they stay open—as many are, much of the time—matters.
I’ve found refuge in church buildings from rain, heat, exhaustion and noise. I can’t, in fact, think of any other kind of space where you can access a quiet seat, for free, no questions asked. And in the countryside too. To walk, drenched, up through a field, then down a cobbled path between hedges and headstones green with moss to push open an ancient, studded door and sit down on a creaking pew—well, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s like drinking from an old fountain or sitting under an even older tree.
Rural and urban refuge
But what actually makes this beautiful is that I am not alone in my appreciation. Emily Gee, the Church of England’s director for cathedral and church buildings, told the committee that church buildings have a crucial social purpose. “Often, particularly in rural areas, they are the only building around. Even in urban areas, they have an important function in the neighbourhood.”
I’ve chanced on empty central London churches in the middle of the day only to realise there’s snoring coming from the back. Church pews obviously aren’t an adequate solution to homelessness. But that a church should offer anyone quite so literal a moment of respite—be it as a foodbank, a night shelter, a community hub, a GP extension, a coffee morning, a mother and toddler group—feels about the most congruent outcome for a place where one underpinning principle has, from the outset, been “Come to me all you who are weary.”
So much has been done throughout these buildings’ histories to contradict the basic messages at their core. Yet the needs they underline have never diminished. If, in our overheated, underfunded, amped-to-the-max times, churches can now offer this kind of bald moment of rest to anybody who needs it, simply by virtue of staying open, I’d say that’s worth a little more guaranteed public spend.
