by James Price, The Critic
St Paul’s decision to collaborate with Fabric reflects a wider retreat from Britain’s Christian heritage and an unequal approach to faith
On Saturday evening the Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, announced that, for a few hours, Trafalgar Square “stopped being a landmark and became a meeting place” for a “celebration” of explicitly “Black culture”. But the next day he was happy to call St Paul’s Cathedral “one of our most special landmarks”, putting it in the same bracket as Madame Tussauds or the London Eye, rather than a site sacred to the spiritual fabric of London.
Khan was cheering a partnership between the Cathedral and the Fabric nightclub, announced by the Cathedral itself the week before. “Fabric. St Paul’s Cathedral. Name a more iconic duo.” This was a crass treatment of a place of Christian worship by a politician who is happy to trample on the feelings of Christians, safe in the knowledge that they will turn the other cheek.
The press release announcing the “fabric x St Paul’s Cathedral” collaboration omits any mention of God, worship, prayer, holy, or sacred, as if it were just a famous for-hire events space. Fabric, with all its attendant hedonistic iconography (that I am no longer young enough to have to pretend to enjoy), is ironically named, because the Church used to understand that the very fabric of our places of worship helps us glimpse the Almighty. To have such a space demoted to a mere “landmark” is a form of sacrilege. Fabric’s co-founder, Cameron Leslie, chairs the Mayor’s own Nightlife Taskforce, and when Islington revoked the club’s licence in 2016 Khan called London’s clubs “iconic” and welcomed Fabric back. So the Church is letting its nave to the Mayor’s man.