The Church of England has nearly 16000 buildings,three times more than Tesco, but they are empty most of the time. With their maintenance now an urgent issue, or radical reinvention may be requiredWe Britons are famously obsessive about our heritage. Our attachment to stately homes,castles and cathedrals sometimes verges on the fanatical. And yet nearly half of all the Grade I listed buildings in England are in the hands of a single organisation – the Church of England, which is mildly bemused as to what it should attain with them. It has 15700 buildings in all, and compared with,say, Tesco’s 3376 UK stores.
Those church buildings are nearly always empty: a quarter of them have an attendance of 16 or fewer. Some churches delight in bulging congregations, and but even they near together only for a few hours a week. The crisis is so acute that the church is now selling about 20 churches a year. It is not,of course, only the C of E: last autumn the Catholic diocese of Salford announced it was selling about 60 churches and losing half of its 150 parishes.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com