Church buildings: they’re a wonderful asset, though they only work for us if they’re constantly responding to our needs. God, faith, love, and community are all there. Why don’t Wimbledon churches offer “champing” and cafés during the season?
I’m delighted to see the Church Commissioners’ new £11-million Buildings and Mission Fund. I wish the Church would get on with simplifying its systems for granting permissions. There’s been very slow progress in recommending some of the changes of the 2015 Inge Church Buildings Report. Until there are loos, running water, and electricity, it’s difficult to host activities. One year we found government funding for two churches in each diocese to install these.
The Church Buildings Division supports dioceses, cathedrals, and churches in managing change, representing their interests to government and outside bodies, major fund-raising, and giving training and advice. It’s supported by the Church Buildings Council and the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England [CFCE]. Everything should be locally led, but sometimes it helps to have strategic national support, more flexible approaches, and less legislation.
I was director for Cathedrals and Church Buildings, and secretary of the CFCE from 2008 to 2016, when we approved the Hopkins-designed refectory and hostry in their pre-Reformation refectory footprint at Norwich Cathedral, the reburial of Richard III at Leicester, and the first very discreet cathedral lift: to access the “Kings and Scribes” exhibition in Winchester.
I focused on strategic matters, like developing policy, and practical support to reduce churches’ carbon footprint, negotiating with the Government on funding and legislation, for example, to prevent metal-theft, or managing the impact of HS2 on all 26 churches in its path.
We ran competitions to find the best new church chairs, and unsung heroes of rural churches; simplified the faculty system, creating lists A and B, which can be undertaken without a faculty; and put the application system online. We created the first online Church Heritage Register of all our 16,000 churches, synched with Heritage England’s listing database; raised over £110 million in new funding for cathedrals and church buildings; and brought about a Private Member’s Bill with the communications and transport sectors to reduce metal-theft.
I read history and history of art, but even before that, I believed in the benefits of beautiful, inspiring, as well as functional buildings. I loved the stained glass at King’s College Chapel, where two tiers of large, early-16th-century windows link New Testament stories to their precursors in the Old Testament. At Rushton Triangular Lodge, everything’s in threes, subtly referencing its late-16th-century recusant owner’s belief in the Trinity. I love Tracy Emin’s pink neon “I felt you and I knew you loved me” over the west door of Liverpool Cathedral.
I’m also a qualified chartered accountant with corporate finance experience, and worked for ten years at Sotheby’s; so I’m strong on sustainability and churches having a viable business plan.
I’m amazed by how well most communities care for and develop their cathedrals and churches, despite the cost, the need to fund-raise, and the time-consuming permissions required.
The Church should seek at least match funding from the Government, in the light of the community and heritage value of our churches. In England, they’re 45 per cent of the Grade I listed buildings. My own church now hosts 27 non-church regular activities; and the National Churches Trust put the social and economic value of these activities across churches in the UK annually at £55 billion. If this is all left to the care of sometimes tiny congregations, this heritage will be jeopardised.
The national Church does need to ask itself how it can best serve those supporting church buildings, and take lay members more seriously. I lecture regularly, but I’ve never been asked to give a sermon in a church. The Church’s slow recognition of women in senior roles is depressing. Appointing Sarah Mullally as Bishop of London was a brave, well-considered decision, but there’s still work to be done.
My first book, Director’s Choice: Cathedrals of the Church of England, was written after the Church Buildings Division secured £40 million from the Treasury for essential repairs to our cathedrals in the light of the centenary of the commemoration of the First World War. I wrote another book on churches, selecting one church from each diocese to tell the story of England’s churches.
For my most recent book, Deans’ Choice: Cathedral treasures of England and Wales [Diary, 15 December 2023], I asked deans and cathedrals to choose a treasure from their cathedral.
The 50 treasures chosen span 1350 years, and include manuscripts and sculpture, kneelers and silverware, and even a pair of 15th-century leather pilgrim boots — all on view to the public. Canterbury selected a highly readable, portable tenth-century sundial, the size of a pencil eraser, presumably to get a monk to the seven daily services on time. The Apple Watch of the 900s?
Only nine English cathedrals and a few churches charge entry. I firmly believe visitors should contribute to the costs of maintaining these buildings, ideally through donations and sales, so these buildings can remain open to all. If major churches and cathedrals must charge entry, I’d like to see scaled pricing, and there should always be free entry for people to worship, and, at times, for local residents.
If pushed for a favourite, I might choose St George’s, Trotton, in West Sussex: c.1300, with its glorious west-end wall painting and exceptional early brasses. The complete 14th-century Last Judgement painting depicts in red monochrome Christ sitting on a rainbow above Moses with the tablets of the law. Underneath is evil man, surrounded by the seven deadly sins issuing from the jaws of dragons, and good man, surrounded by roundels of the seven acts of mercy. The church also houses the earliest known full-length brass of a woman and a double brass of Sir Thomas Camoys — a great leader at the battle of Agincourt — under an elaborate canopy beside his wife.
My brother and sister and I attended All Saints’, Woodford Wells, which ran an excellent Sunday school, and I also went there to Brownies. I went to two Christian secondary schools, one run by the Clergy Orphan Corporation, and then Haileybury, where the chapel remains physically and spiritually at the centre, and where great emphasis is placed on service. I’m now a governor.
I questioned my faith at university. It was buildings and music that slowly brought me back to God. Attending services takes oneself out of one’s own social and emotional bubble.
Our children were christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields, where I loved to worship. Our great-grandparents times five and six had been married there: the Mr and Mrs Edward Goughs of 1795 and 1830.
I’ve been a churchwarden at St George’s, Holland Park, where we’ve just been awarded Silver Eco Church status. In our benefice, at St John the Baptist, Holland Park (of the architect James Brooks), we’ve hosted three Luke Jerram installations. These attracted over 10,000 visitors, including children, who posted images on Instagram; and I saw a picture of Mars in our church in a Britain is Great poster at Heathrow. We have two weekly drop-in after-school activities for children since January, and lots of young people come.
Churches are missing a trick here, though there are some wonderful initiatives to include young people, like the recent silent disco in Canterbury, or the helter-skelter in Norwich in August 2019. Norwich also had yoga mats and a labyrinth. You could see lots of children and grandparents enjoying the cathedral and respecting the prayer-on-the-hour. Why aren’t we doing more of this?
After giving strategic support to five churches in the diocese of Bangor, the Bishop of Bangor made me a canon of Bangor Cathedral. We installed new Luke Hughes nave furniture, and developed superb bilingual choral liturgy. We’d like to install a children’s treasury, using the best techniques secular museums use. We nimbly responded to Levelling Up and secured funding for a regeneration of Holyhead, with St Cybi’s Church built into the Roman walls.
Thoughtless bureaucracy makes me angry. Laziness. Accepting second best. Turning a blind eye.
Beautiful buildings and thought-provoking art make me happiest. Friends, family and dog. The great outdoors. Tennis, piano, reading, learning, being sociable.
I’m an enthusiastic hymn-singer, most recently “I, the Lord of sea and sky”, which I first sang in a tree-lined, open-air amphitheatre beside a lake at our son’s American summer camp. (My husband is half-American.)
Whenever I feel depressed about terrible conflicts or deprivation on the news, I think of the longevity and values embedded in our best buildings, and not only church buildings. Look at the newly revealed polished tiles of the former ticket hall to Knightsbridge Station.
I pray about a lot of things, from personal, family, and friends to social and international matters; and I run my church’s intercessions rota, including encouraging new people to have a go.
I’d like to be locked in a church with one of those brave master builders or church architects, maybe the 13th-century Meister of Naumburg Cathedral, who created inspiring architecture and peopled these with extraordinary naturalistic figures and deeply carved leaf sculptures. We believe he came to Southwell Minster and filled the capitals and bosses with carvings of leaves, animals, and people — an incredible celebration of creation, with, arguably, some political messages.
Janet Gough was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
Deans’ Choice, published by Scala at £14.95 (Church Times Bookshop £13.45), has been shortlisted for Best Monograph in the Architectural Book Awards 2024.