Gutting Our Heritage: When Trendy Vicars Should be Gutted!

There seems to be a craze these days for ripping out the interiors of the Norman stone rural churches. Today's Countryfile on BBC1 waxed lyrical about the "advantages" of ripping out pews to put in "comfy seating" and inserting coffee shops and similar in ancient churches.

Left: A modern church, which trendy vicars think is "relevant" to people and "in tune with the times." Am I alone in finding it soulless, non-inspirational and having nothing to offer the interiors of our Celtic, Saxon, Norman and later churches.

One only has to read Piloti's column in Private Eye every fortnight to read how our ancient buildings (secular and religious) have their hearts ripped out. Piloti argues that listed buildings should, in many/most occasions, have their interiors listed too.

How many times do trendy vicars, "priestesses," councils and busybodies go into buildings and rip out Victorian, Gothic, Medieval and other internal architecture and fittings simply on a whim?

I may be an old-before-my-time fuddy duddy, but it seems to me we are repeating the mistakes of the 1960s, when fixtures and fittings of churches, public buildings and homes were ripped out to be replaced by formica surfaces, sliding doors, serving hatches and flat roofs - none of which have served the test of time.

20 years from now we will wonder why on earth the beautiful pews, sanctuaries, choir stalls and pulpits were ripped out of our Medieval churches to be replaced by plastic tat which does not last.

We often chide Americans for many things - culture, diet etc. - but when it comes to their heritage, being a young "nation," they have learnt to be appreciative of artifacts and buildings even just 2-300 years old.

If you "discovered" a 1000-year-old stone church with buttresses, beautiful stone pillars and interiors that are often 2-300 years old (or older!) themselves, not least some of the awe-inspiring flooring that is often ripped up in the cause of "modernity" would your first act be to rip out its insides?

Right: This building is modern, yet it isn't an eyesore. Read on to see where it is and who built it, with a minimal amount of materials.

Chesterton said that modernism disenfranchises our ancestors and is a form of arrogance by the living, and one has to wonder what the many millions who passed through our grander city and town churches, but also the many thousands that lived their lives in and around the small, semi-forgotten country churches, would have to say at the sight of some buffoon deciding to tear out everything they knew and one more link to our past, to our forefathers and - very often - to the communities our people were ripped from in order to provide the indentured slave manpower needed to man the factories and mines that made the merchant classes their fortunes.

E Michael Jones wrote a book about modern architecture reflecting the degenerate nature of modern man and I think that is intrinsically true, because they seem to either create awful buildings, or do what they can to gut and ruin existing ones, even those that have stood for generation after generation!

But it needn't be this way!

Left: One of the beautiful group of historic Churches around Lastingham in North Yorks. It includes a former Celtic monastery from the 7th century and a Norman Abbey, but this church is from the 19th Century Gothic revival when the 'Oxford Movement' was at its height. For more info click here.

Why can't we have a government that puts our heritage at the forefront of communities? Let the Church(es) put the local buildings at the forefront of local history, start tours and visitor days. Let the local community and others use them for guest speakers, suitable conferences and suchlike. Then there are the various community groups... but you get the point.

If the will is there, on the part of politicians, clerics and community leaders then there is no need to wreck our heritage for short term "gain."

And that is the nub of the matter: if the will is there.

It is not the fashion, and hasn't been for at least four or five decades, to protect and defend our heritage nor to keep and conserve our historical buildings (outside of castles and manor houses), and it is a stain our national character that this is the case.

60 odd years ago a small group of brave men proved it doesn't have to be this way, and sad to say it took 'foreignors' to prove this point. They weren't rich men, they weren't powerful men, they weren't - believe it or not - even free men!

Yet these brave band of men, ripped away from their homeland, forced to carry out back-breaking manual work in a very unforgiving climate, created - out of the most basic of materials available to them - something of such intrinsic beauty that people flock there from right across the world to visit their creation (despite it having a lot of competition in the guise of natural and man-made wonders throughout the 'region' where it is based.

If you ever have the opportunity to visit this breath-taking place I would strongly urge you to do so. I refer, of course, to the church known as the "Italian Chapel" on Lambholm, one of the Orkney Islands. Located just south of one of the (anti-U Boat) Churchill Barriers which the Italian PoWs were made to construct, the Chapel is made of two corrugated "Nissan Huts" - commonly used for air-raid shelters, yet inside the men created such a beautiful altar, altar rail, sanctuary and even a sanctuary light made from a "bully beef" tin that it is known worldwide.

The craftsmanship and beautiful paintings adorning the Chapel make it feel as if you might be in Renaissance Rome rather than a metal hut on the windswept Orkneys.

Just outside the chapel is a statue of St George slaying the dragon, again created by the Italian PoWs.

Such things of beauty, of workmanship, of faith and of such an inspirational nature are still achievable! After all this was only 20 or so years before the "swinging 60s" when Masonic and Marxian thought and social trends brought about grey Soviet style tower blocks and flat-roofed modernist monstrosities (including churches that look more like doctors surgeries or roller-discos) as those controlling things sought to be "more relevant" but in effect ruined hundreds if not thousands of years of culture and heritage (which just a couple of generations before had undergone the Pugin-era Gothic revival).

Right: The truly breathtaking altar and sanctuary of the Italian Chapel on Lambholm, Orkney. Created just 20 years before the 1960s and the barbarianian reign of the "modernists" who ripped out altars, sanctuaries, pews and statues. For more images visit here.

If those Italian PoWs can create something of such beauty out of nothing, is it really beyond us to merely conserve - internally and externally - the buildings our forefathers have left to us before some trendy vicar called Brian (or, male or female, called Tricia) decides to rip it all out to put in a coffee shop and a disabled toilet.

The sad fact is that if we are not careful, buildings created a thousand years ago and used continuously before and since the Reformation, could be ruined in just a few years in a short-sighted attempt to make them more "relevant."