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Keeper of the purse-strings
By
Prudence Fay
Simon Thurley, of English Heritage, spends state money
on churches. There should be more of it, he tells Prudence Fay
SIMON THURLEY is awe-inspiringly fluent when he’s in full
flow on the subject of changes to church buildings. And since he is the
chief executive of English Heritage, one of Britain’s most powerful organisations,
and one that gives millions annually to maintain and repair parish churches,
we’d do well to listen to him.
He’s not, he says, against change: "The 1950s, ’60s and
’70s saw some very creative changes in churches, and I’d be disappointed
if that didn’t continue. Because one of the defining characteristics of
English parish churches is that they are a repository of local history.
"In France, for instance, you find village after village
with complete Romanesque churches, but you’d never get that in this country.
Successive generations have always wanted to leave their mark on our churches,
and that should continue to happen.
"The key issue, for us," Dr Thurley goes on, "is a question:
‘What capacity does the building have for change?" Some Grade I buildings,
he says, are listed principally for their "landscape value": it is the
exterior that is important, whereas the interior arrangements were long
since swept away. "Such a church could bear a great deal of change. And
there are thousands of them. Equally, there are thousands of others you
wouldn’t want to change too much. Most churches are in between."
This question of the building’s capacity for change is
at the root of the Statement of Significance that all churches must now
draw up when applying to make alterations. On the subject of these, Dr
Thurley opens the throttle. It’s clearly something he has explained many
times, and is a concept that he loves.
"I want there to be this virtuous circle. If a PCC understands
the church’s historic surroundings and assets fully, they will value them.
What you value, you care for. What you care for will be kept in good condition,
and you’ll enjoy it. What you enjoy, you want to learn more and understand
more about. Which completes the circle."
The point of drawing up the Statement of Significance,
he has said, is to help daily worshippers and users of the church understand
just what it is about the building that they cherish and enjoy. "As I’ve
said, churches are repositories of local history. Take pews, for example
— often a contentious issue. Maybe the pews in a particular church were
made by a local joiner. Maybe they were made out of local oaks blown down
in a storm. If parishes come to recognise the pews as a link with their
past, then deciding whether or not to remove them might be easier to do."
IN HIS new book, Lost Buildings of Britain, Dr
Thurley says that uncovering the legacy of the past has always been an
obsession. He describes how, as a child, he dug a trench in his parents’
garden in Godmanchester, and by lucky chance struck a rubbish pit in the
Roman settlement on Ermine Street, where it crossed the River Ouse. "Full
of pottery, bones, nails, oyster shells and other discarded domestic waste,
it was a treasure trove for a nine-year-old," he writes. The young Simon
Thurley was set on his life’s path.
During the summer, still boyish-looking at 42, he made
a television series for Channel 4 with the same title as the book that
has followed it, considering such varied vanished treasures as Whitehall
Palace, Glastonbury Abbey, the Millbank Penitentiary, and Garrick’s Theatre
Royal in Drury Lane.
He combines a lively reconstruction of the look of the
building, and life that went on inside it, with the erudition of a historian
who has been, during the past decade, Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces,
and Director of the Museum of London; and it makes for a good read.
He sees now, he says, a "horribly close" link between
his passion for lost buildings and his present job. "If English Heritage
[EH] doesn’t do its work properly, we’ll end up reading about more lost
buildings."
What he’s after is the balance between conserving what’s
there now, and dealing with the present and future needs of the individual
church. In a vast number of cases, he says, the changes needed to allow
for more varied use of the building are not drastic: converting a side
chapel, inserting a mezzanine floor in the west tower. "These are all quite
small changes in the history of a church."
The C of E, he says, has proved itself generally to be
"a very good custodian of its buildings". The Department of Culture, Media
and Sport is presently reviewing the issue of ecclesiastical exemption,
one of the options being to do away with this and apply secular planning
laws instead.
"I regret the use of the word ‘exemption’ in that title:
it gives the impression that the Church is exempt from planning controls.
And that’s not the case at all. The draconian faculty system, far from
giving churches leeway, applies to the smallest of changes and is infinitely
stricter than anything that English Heritage or the secular system would
advocate.
"So I very much hope that the Church will be allowed to
maintain its parallel system, because I do think looking after churches
is different from caring for secular buildings. But I equally think that,
as the relentless tide of regulation covers more of all our activities,
it’s wise to help local planning authorities, who have not generally dealt
with ecclesiastical matters, to have some appreciation of what’s going
on."
As he told the annual conference of diocesan advisory
committees last year, any external agency with regional, national or European
government money to spend will want to be assured that the democratically
elected local authority is behind a project.
Now he says: "If you don’t manage to convince environmental
health officers that you know what you’re doing, you may suddenly find
they want to do something like stop you serving tea and coffee after the
service."
It is partly because of English Heritage’s confidence
in the faculty system that the future-approval condition attaching to its
grants has been withdrawn. This condition, which often aroused resentment,
meant that churches that accepted a grant from English Heritage for one
piece of work were obliged, for all time, to get EH’s approval of any future
work, whether or not EH was funding it.
Relations between English Heritage and those caring for
churches seem easier now than they have been in the past. Michael Henshaw,
for the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers, for instance, says he finds
"the people at English Heritage are more inclined to help find solutions.
Where there are problems, it’s often been because they were consulted too
late."
Dr Thurley appears genuinely gratified to hear this. "I’m
glad they think we’re not obstructive, because it’s important to me that
we communicate in reasonable language, and have a reasonable way of looking
at things."
One problem mentioned by Dr Henshaw, though, was that
of some inconsistency in decision-making around the country. How did Dr
Thurley deal with that?
Consistency, he concedes, is "really important"; he has
made changes accordingly. "The most important thing is that those empowered
to make decisions on the ground should have nationally agreed guidelines
and thoroughly discussed and understood policies to refer to. Too often
it has been left to the individual judgement of inspectors and others."WHEN
WE come to the subject of money, Dr Thurley pours out facts and figures.
He says more than once that EH and the Heritage Lottery Fund give between
them £30 million a year to help churches, and that that is a great
deal. But figures put out recently by the Churches’ Heritage Fund show
that this sum, together with reclaimed VAT, meets less than 30 per cent
of churches’ repair cost.
So, does EH lobby the Government for more funding?
"Of course we do," Dr Thurley says. "We spend a lot of
time doing that. We would very much like to be treated in the same way
as, for instance, sports, the museums, or the Arts Council, and be given
the kind of increases in funding that they are. Sports, for instance, this
year received a more than 100-per-cent increase; the museums got 50 per
cent; we’ve only had three per cent. We are shocked at this; we think it’s
a scandal. But that increase represents the importance that the general
public puts on the things we look after.
"So, in making the Church’s case, it’s not enough just
to ask for more money. It may be the established Church, but, as Bishop
Richard Chartres has said, compared with other countries in which the state
looks after places of worship, it’s actually the most disestablished Church
in Europe.
"The case I think we need to make is that, while, of course,
churches are about Christianity and the cure of souls, they’re also about
communal focus, communal identity, and communal memory. And these things
are important in a society that is increasingly fractured and rootless.
If you want to help restore a sense of belonging, you often need look no
further in a community than the parish church.
"We have to make the point that parish churches are for
everybody." He refers to an opinion poll in 2003 which showed that nearly
nine out of ten adults, 86 per cent, had been into a church or place of
worship in the previous year — and that included 80 per cent of
non-believers. "If we start to think about churches as being also for all
those people — and though there are lots of churches that do, there are
some that don’t — we’re getting closer to being able to make a case for
state support."
A last question: what, for him, when he visits a church,
makes for a good experience? Dr Thurley doesn’t hesitate for a second.
"A good experience is when you find the church door unlocked.
Lost Buildings of Britain is published by Viking
at £18.99 (CT Bookshop £17.10; 0-670-91521-1)
To place an order for this book, email details to CT
Bookshop