by Charles Spencer, Financial Times
A request lands in my inbox to help with fundraising for St Mary’s Battersea — the handsome Georgian church on the south bank of the river Thames with an outstanding musical tradition. This noble London edifice needs to raise £250,000 to restore its portico, pillars and railings and to tend to its bells, which were last properly seen to in the 1930s.
St Mary’s is a typical English church, having at once an architectural, cultural and historical tale. Here, William Blake was married. In its crypt is buried Benedict Arnold, traitor during the American war of independence, and JMW Turner painted in its churchyard.
As Matthew Rice, of the charity Music in Country Churches, says: “In every village in Britain sits a church. That building or its predecessor will have stood for as much as 12 centuries . . . With that has come the focus of all artistic and cultural thought.” The charity that Rice heads has donated £600,000 from its concerts to parish churches in need since 1989.
While helpful, that amount is a fraction of what the UK’s churches need — more than £1bn for major repairs across the Church of England’s 16,000 churches in 2025. Many are struggling to survive, often with tiny congregations unable to contribute much to capital costs. The problems in Scotland have been so severe that a third of the Church of Scotland’s 1,000 or so churches were earmarked for future closure in 2023.
It did not help that, in 2017, a grant scheme from the Heritage Lottery Fund specifically for churches came to an end. Then things got even tougher this spring: now churches have to pay VAT at 20 per cent on repairs. This is “making it even harder to find the astronomical sums needed to keep these buildings in good order”, says Professor Mark Horton of the Royal Agricultural University. “In only a few years, I fear that some of the greatest churches in the land will fall into ruins, with no parishioners to support them, or [will] be sold off to be converted into private houses or flats.”