Flogging the ecclesial silver: sale of pews to pay for repairs
St Nicholas in Newcastle is the latest cathedral to sell off its furniture in a bid to halt ‘terminal decline’
CATHEDRALS are selling their historic fixtures and fittings to cover maintenance costs, it has emerged.
St Nicholas Cathedral, in Newcastle upon Tyne, which dates back to the 1400s, is to sell 35 of its Victorian oak pews to raise money ahead of a £6million renovation.
Project chiefs say the decoratively carved benches, made in the 1880s, could become garden furniture or be used in hotels and restaurants.
They will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis for upwards of £450 each and it is hoped the sales will raise up to £20,000.
Their replacement will be “plain, simple benches and chairs” that can be moved about easily for concerts and community events. Pews in the choir area will be left in place.
It comes after Durham Cathedral raised £125,000 by auctioning off 85 weather-beaten pieces of stonework which dated back to the mid-1800s.
The Right Reverend Dr Gavin Ashenden, former chaplain to the Queen, said the cathedral auctions are a sign that the Church of England is in “terminal decline”.
“I think the difficulty the Church of England faces is that it no longer believes … It has run out of beliefs, money and people. That is a devastating combination,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
The former Anglican clergyman fears there is “no solution” for Anglican cathedrals struggling to cope with dwindling public funding and expensive running costs.
Lindy Gilliland, who is managing the St Nicholas Cathedral project, said “many” churches and cathedrals in the UK are selling items to raise money for maintenance.
She told the BBC: “Christmas is the cathedral’s busiest time, so we will only have a short period to take them out before works start in mid-January. The pews are mid-Victorian era, from approximately 1882 when the parish church became a cathedral, and are very solid with beautiful decorative carving at the ends.
“It’s a shame to lose them, but we will keep six decorative ends as a record as well as documentary photos.”
The cathedral was awarded £4.2million of lottery funding this year, which will go towards an overhaul that church leaders say will “revitalise” the medieval building.
Catherine Pepinster, former editor of Catholic publication The Tablet, has also complained that vicars “who are fretting about money” believe the only solution is to “chuck out the benches” and replace them with a “pile of stackable plastic”.
In a column for The Daily Telegraph
‘The difficulty the Church of England faces is that it no longer believes. It has run out of beliefs, money and people’
last year, she said: “This focus on secular fundraising surely risks not only alienating people like me – heritage-loving believers – but also those who the sociologists call ‘believing not belonging’.
“Statistics for regular worship attendance may show steady decline, but plenty of people still find meaning in choral music and solace, not only in the soaring fan vaulting of a cathedral, but also amid the well-worn stone of the humblest ecclesial building.
“I’m not convinced that when St Peter’s or St Mary’s seems more like a pub or a shop, with a set of spindly chairs with names like Gunde or Bernhard from Ikea and a glass meeting-room pod where the pews used to be, it is really going to offer that same spiritual ambience.”
English Heritage, the guardian of the country’s historic buildings, previously gave its support to a new design of lightweight “stackable” pews to appease those who were unhappy with the traditional fixtures being replaced with plastic alternatives.