An ideal marriage
IN 1818, there came into being two bodies that would, in unintended partnership, transform the ecclesiastical face of Britain. Both groups were created to help the Anglican Communion compete more effectively with rival denominations in the nation’s burgeoning industrial cities and to supply the shortfall of seating available within its churches. In Manchester, for example, there were only 10,950 pews available in a city with a population of 79,459.
The Church Building Commission (CBC) was the first of these bodies. It was constituted by Act of Parliament and granted £1 million ‘for building, and promoting the building, of Additional Churches in populous Parishes’. The commission, further endowed in 1824, would be involved in the erection of 600 new churches before it was wound up in 1856.
Less familiar is the Incorporated Church Building Society (ICBS), the fascinating story of which is told in a new book, Free Seats for All, by Gill Hedley. This was a private initiative, backed by rich donors and local funding campaigns. During the lifetime of the CBC, the ICBS contributed to the construction of 500 new churches and the reconstruction or enlargement of 1,500 others. This patronage, incidentally, played a formative role in the Gothic Revival.
A driving concern of the ICBS was to make new church seats freely available; the rental of church pews was, by long convention, a source of revenue. In the same period, it created nearly one million new seats, of which 700,000 were free. The ICBS also outlived its counterpart— indeed, it survives today within the National Churches Trust—to contribute to a total of 3,508 new churches, alteration to another 10,314 and the provision of 2.4 million pews (80% of them free).
The story of the CBC and the ICBS has a particular resonance at this moment in time, when our churches again require reinvention if they are to survive. It’s a task that neither private nor public interests can accomplish alone, the former for want of resources and the latter for lack of commitment or resolve. By bitter irony, each is rich in precisely the qualities that the other lacks and for that reason, both need to operate in concert.
That indeed, was the approach effectively advocated in the Taylor Review on churches (Athena, January 24, 2018). It’s one, moreover, recently backed, on the review’s recommendation, by a Government grant of £1.8 million towards twoyear pilot schemes that will explore the ‘sustainable future’ of churches in Manchester and Suffolk. Athena hopes that this initiative will thrive. To do so, however, it needs to draw strength from the desire of many private individuals who take responsibility for these buildings that they be open and available to all.
It’s worth remembering that in different circumstances and for different reasons, that determination was also the mainspring for the ICBS’S remarkable success.