Church starts Netflix-style history channel

A “NETFLIX for churches” has been launched in an effort to save historic places of worship from crumbling.

The Churches Conservation Trust (CCT) has developed a paid streaming platform to help fund the preservation of neglected Christian sites.

Heritage experts have billed the new site as a “Netflix-style platform” which Sir John Betjeman, a former poet laureate, “would have loved”.

The first show to debut on the streaming service will be a “church crawling” series inspired by the poet. It is hoped the £3.50 per month subscription for the site, named Cctdigital, will help the charitable trust tackle its £5million annual repair bill and £500,000 maintenance costs for England’s disused churches.

Peter Aiers, CCT chief executive, said: “If Sir John Betjeman would have made the TV programme A Passion for Churches today, we hope that he would have allowed us to stream it on Cctdigital. I think this Netflix-style platform is something he would have loved.

“It is a great opportunity for people to share in the joy of church buildings and save them at the same time.”

With its poetic script, Betjeman’s 1974 BBC programme A Passion For Churches led viewers on a tour of Norfolk’s places of worship, and the CCT’S new production will follow his example on a new streaming site modelled on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney +.

Prof Diarmaid Macculloch, an Oxford University historian, will explore the stories behind churches on a tour of sites in Norfolk, Suffolk, Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire in the series, Churchcrawls in Solitude, starting on Dec 6.