Taking off one's hat

Spectator, The, Nov 20, 1999 by Gardam, Jane

Taking off one's hat

Jane Gardam

ENGLAND'S THOUSAND BEST CHURCHES

by Simon Jenkins

Penguin, 25, pp 822

This book is lavish and beautifully produced. It began as a series in Country Life, photographed by Paul Barker with short notes by Simon Jenkins. Now there are the same serene, full-page photographs, a glossary of terms, a run-down on church architecture through the ages and good simple maps showing the parishes. It's very easy to read.

From 16,000 churches Jenkins has looked at 2,500 and chosen his top thousand, awarding them stars, one to five, like hotels. Twelve, the Claridges of the Faith, get five. It's a dotty idea, but quite fun. He says he knows he's not in the same league as the three learned 'ghosts' who haunt the arcades of our English churches - Betjeman, Clifton-Taylor and Pevsner - but he hopes to fill a small gap.

I'm not sure what gap. Jenkins is, I was about to say, 'an enthusiast', but the OED says an enthusiast is 'characterised by the fervour of ill-regulated religious enthusiasm'. He has no religious sense at all, and tells us so, several times. To him the parish churches are 'the Museum of England'. One of them he praises as 'an antique shop', and some of our sculptured effigies he thinks 'worthy to be placed in a national collection'. Not for him the sense of wonder, the 'holy dread' or the beauty that, in Betjeman's phrase, 'can bring you to your knees'. Jenkins says he feels no awe in a theatre or other fine building, so why in a church? He quotes Larkin on the obscurity of purpose of the church in the 20th century, but has no sense of the depth of Larkin's regret. It was Larkin who said that the most awkward of us will take off his bicycle clips on entering a church (our ranting, atheist gardener in Wimbledon always removed his hat when we lugged the parish Christmas tree together into St John the Baptist: 1875, redbrick, no stars). I don't think that Jenkins is one for bicycle clips, but if he were, I don't think he'd remove them.

Churches, he says, are dying. There are no congregations now. There he is wrong, for there are still two million of us but he is right that we share the fabric now with other people - the clattering churchfanciers who go round lecturing us and each other, in raised voices, about ogees and lead fonts, and seldom put any money in the box at the back. They are hard people to love. Jenkins does care, desperately, that the churches should survive as museums but gives little instruction about how it's to be done, except to quote a jingle on an old church board about each 'giving a pound'! He has one curious idea that maybe the Church could look after its chancels and the State look after the naves - which actually mightn't be too bad, until the State starts carting away the sculptures into national collections.

I should hate to go church-visiting with Jenkins but he's had some lively times, including colourful encounters with difficult vicars. (Maybe he told them he wanted their church for a museum?) There has been trouble about 'getting in'. Key at Mrs Hookaneye's, etc. (It never is.) If a church was locked, after the third attempt Jenkins left it out. But whyever didn't he write? Yet this book brings us some lovely churches, and some of Paul Barker's photographs are of paradise. Brentor on its Dartmoor rock. The Quaker Meeting House (strictly, not a church) at Come-to-Good in Cornwall. The backstreet church of Langley Marish with a family pew like 'the ladies' gallery of a harem' and private library for boring sermons. He calls it 'the jewel of Slough'. And Escomb, England's oldest complete church in the middle of a modern housing estate. And St Aldhelm's, Worth Maltravers, where the waves crash against the Isle of Purbeck as if to grab it for the sea, its interior 'like the Byzantine water-cistern, dripping wet'. The only church I did find like a museum-piece was St Thomas A Becket, Fairfield, which Jenkins loves. Once it was only to be reached by boat, now it's marooned on Romney Marsh like a tiny Noah's Ark in fields of sheep. It is sealed like a doll's house in a glass case. The unused box pews are restored, with at least three undercoats and a gloss. No mention of services. Tourists peep in at each other from either side, through opposite windows. I wish Jenkins had gone the extra mile along the marsh to Newchurch where St Peter and St Paul, a real mess of a place, is crumbling away behind its wonderful wide porch. White dust hangs in the icy transepts but there are tea-cups and trestles and children's paintings and damp boxes full of decorations, notices about the weekly service and the Third World, hanging askew. A working church. Doomed of course. Well, maybe.

Jenkins says he's not quite the same man who started out. One summer night at the little church of Up Marden (one star) on the Sussex Downs he felt the air 'filling up with the ghosts of villagers climbing the hill for a thousand years'. It's not Langland's field full of folk, or Blake's Jerusalem, or Fox's white angels resting on Pendle Hill, but it's not nothing. 'I could not be immune from the spirits of this place,' he says. One could wish he had said 'spirit', but it's a start. When I read this I stopped thinking of him only as a man delighted by musical instruments but who has never heard music.