111.6 FUTURE OF THE CITY °HUHU:U.S. T HE . Commissioners appointed by the
Bishop of London to consider the future of the City benefices have naturally excited much indignation by their proposal to demolish nineteen out of the forty-seven churches, including eleven which were, in whole or m part, designed by Wren. The Commissioners, who include Lord Philore, Bishop Browne, Sir William Collins, Mr. A. F. Buxton, and other cautious and experienced men, cannot, however, be dis- missed as a set of ignorant Vandals,, and, instead of abusing them, it is well to consider the question that they had to face.. To begin with, we must distinguish dearly between the standpoint of the Church and the standpoint of the educated laity in regard to this difficult matter. The work of the Church is to provide for the spiritual needs of the people. If there are too many clergymen in one place and too few in another, she is bound to do what she can to redress the balance. As the population shifts, so the clergy must shift with it. The Church cannot continue to pay large salaries to rectors who, through no fault of ' their own, have little or nothing to do, while a few miles away, in new and densely crowded parishes, hard-working parsons strive to keep body and soul together on a couple of hundred a year. The layman, on the other hand, • thinks first of the beautiful buildings which are threatened with destruction. He looks on the City clergy primarily as custodians of the masterly works of our greatest modern architect, which enshrine the historical traditions of London since the Fire. He regards the City churches as national monuments, the removal of which would deprive us as Englishmen of part of our heritage. These two views are not, of course, wholly antagonistic. The °Lurch is bound to attach value to her antiquities. We cannot conceive, for example, that she would consent to a proposal to sell Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, or a Norman church like St. Bartholomew the Great, which testifies, to centuries of Christian teaching. The intelligent layman would not insist on the maintenance of services in a church whose congregation had long since disappeared, on the ground that it presented features of architectural interest. Still, in the special case of the City churches there is a sharp conflict between the religious and the secular interests which cannot be ignored.
The Bishop's Commissioners have considered the matter from the religious point of view. They point out that the forty-seven City benefices have a resident population of thirteen thousand, nine thousand of whom live in four parishes. The net income of the benefices is 140,000, after deducting payments for Church purposes outside the City. All the churches have Sunday services, which are, as a rule, sparsely attended. The Commissioners naturally infer that there is a superabundance of clergy in the City. They propose to reorganize the square mile into four" Quarters," named after Bishops Gate, Alders Gate, the Black Friars, and the Tower ; to assign to each " Quarter " or parish a rector with four assistants ; and to provide also ten " lecturers " for pastoral work in Greater London. Thus, at a cost of 116,000 a year, the spiritual needs of the City - would be properly cared for, and the surplus income of £24,000 would be available for new and poor districts of London. The Commissioners go on to say that if weekday services were held in eighteen churches and Sunday services in eleven of the eighteen as well as in St. Beast's, the Welsh church, there would be room for all probable worshippers. They would assign nine other churches for special purposes, such as the meeting of the Dean and Chapter. Thus twenty-eight out of the forty-seven -churches would be regularly used. The nineteen others should, in the opinion of the Commissioners, be demolished, though they would retain seven towers, including those of St. Magnus, by London Bridge, St. Vedast, St. Dunstan in the East, and St. Michael Royal, which are famous examples of Wren's genius. The Commissioners estimate that the sites of these churches could be sold for £1,695,000, and that their parsonages would bring a further large sum, and they would assign the capital and the surplus income to the Church's Central Board of Finance, which could find very good use for it. We may sum up the Report as indicating that the Church, by rearranging her affairs in the City, would have the equivalent of about two and a half million pounds free for developing her activities in the many new working-class suburbs which sorely need more churches and more clergy. The Commissioners, looking to the spiritual welfare of the Church, feel that the preserva- tion of nineteen beautiful and historic buildings is of less importance than the good work which might be done elsewhere with two and a half millions. Who will dare to say that, from their point of view, they are wrong ?
Nevertheless to any one with the faintest historic sense or with the most elementary love of architecture the pro- posal to demolish these fine churches must be Inexpressibly painful. The City churches are an integral part of our civic and our national inheritance. They are a source ci pride, not only to Londoners but to all nnglishmen because they represent the best work of great English artists and enshrine many historic memories. To any lover of archi- tecture the proposal to destroy, say, All Hallows, Lombard Street, or St. Michael, Cornhill, or St. Mary, Aldermanbury —to name three exquisite churches by Wren—is just as deplorable as a proposal to take Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I. from the National Gallery and burn it in Trafalgar Square. These churches, delightful without and within as examples of the master-builder and his attendant craftsmen, are works of art the loss of which we could never cease to deplore. The City without them could never be the same. All these churches, too, have intimate associations with eminent men of the past. In St. Magnus there is the tomb of Miles Coverdale, the early translator of the Bible. St. Michael, .Cornhill, is the parish of John Stow, though he died, of course, long before Wren built the present church. In St. Mary, Aldermartbury, the editors of the First Folio of Shakespeare lie buried. We might cite innumerable instances to show how the City churches illustrate the history of London and of England. It is the plain duty of every one who has any communal sentiment, and who feels that he is but part of a great community which existed ages before he was born and will continue long after he is gone, to do his utmost to hand on unimpaired to his children the noble works of his forefathers. Yet when we have said all this and more, the plain question remains unanswered. Can we as citizens seek to evade our own obligations in the matter by imposing on the Church of England an onerous task which, she says, prevents her from fulfilling her true function as a religious body engaged in saving souls ? It seems to us that, if the public desires to preserve the City churches, it must give some positive assistance and seek a practical compromise between the claims of history and art and the claims of religion.
The French method of dealing with the problem would of course be simple enough. The Ministry of Fine Arts would decide whether the churches should be ranked as historic or artistic monuments and Fould. take over and maintain any that could be ranked in this category. But neither our Government nor the Corporation can be expected in these hard times to assume the solo responsi- bility for nineteen churches, even if it were right to deprive the Church of England of the two millions of money which the site values represent. It is useless, we fear, to expect the public to subscribe such a large sum for the preservation of the churches, all the more because the Church of England regards them as no longer necessary for her work. A church that is disused loses much of its character, and a church that has been converted to secular purposes is too often a melancholy sight. The desecrated churches that one sees in old Norman towns, for example, are pitiful to behold. They seem to suggest that the Age of Faith is over and past. But there remains one possibility which deserves consideration. Wren's churches, no longer needed in the City, might conceivably be moved elsewhere. Nothing is impossible to the expert modern architect and engineer. Every one knows that Crosby Hall, the frag- ment of a famous mediaeval City mansion, was taken down some years ago and re-erected at Chelsea on a site that once formed part of the estate of Sir Thomas More. Wren's Temple Bar, again, was removed to Theobalds Park by the late Lady Meux. The writer remembers to have seen at Swanage the front of an old City company's hall, which was carefully transferred. from London to Dorset many years since and which looks very imposing in its new surroundings. It is not extravagant, then, to suggest that a Wren church might be taken down, stone by stone, and put up again in some new parish of Greater London. We may be told, no doubt, that the cost would be excessive. But in these days when building materials are scarce and dear, it may be that the expense of demolition and recon- struction would not greatly exceed the cost of erecting an entirely new church. At any rate the suggestion, which has been put forward in the Morning Post, deserves serious examination by qualified persons. The City's loss would be great in any case, yet it would at least be a con- solation to know that an architectural masterpiece had not been utterly destroyed but was still fulfilling, in another place, the purpose for which it had been designed by Wren. The Church of England, on the other hand, would be able to reconcile her plain duty to use her endowments to the best advantage and her natural desire to preserve the fine buildings in her charge. A few Wren churches, trans- planted to new suburbs, would excite great interest, and might perhaps raise the standard of suburban architecture.
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