THE CHURCH AND TOWN PLANNING.[1]
By Canon Barnett.August, 1912.
By Canon Barnett.
August, 1912.
1From “The Guardianâ€. By permission of the Editor.
1From “The Guardianâ€. By permission of the Editor.
Everyyear we are told that so many churches have been added to London. Every year a volume is published by the Bishop of London’s Fund with pictures of these churches—buildings of conventional character, showing in their mean lines and sterile decoration the trail of the order to limit their cost to £8000 or £9000. Every year we see London extending itself in long straight ranks of small houses, where no tower or spire suggests to men the help which comes of looking up, and no hall or public building calls them to find strength in meeting together.
Town-planning is much discussed, and the discussion has taken shape in an Act of Parliament; but meantime the opportunities are being lost for doing what the discussions and the Act declare to be necessary for health and happiness. Hendon is probably the most highly favoured building land nearest to London. It has undulating ground, where gentle hills offer a wide prospect towards the west; it has fine trees whose preservation might secure grace and dignity to the neighbourhood; and it has also a large sheet of water, the reservoir of the Brent, whose banks offer to young and old recreation for body and for spirit. A few years ago town-planning might have secured all these advantages, and at the same time provided houses andbuildings which would have helped to make social life a fair response to the physical surroundings. But while talk is spent on the advantages of variety in buildings, of the importance of securing a vista which street inhabitants may enjoy, and of the value of trees and open spaces, straight roads are being cut at right angles across the hills, trees are being felled, and nothing has been done to prevent what will soon become slum property extending alongside the lake. Willesden, as it may be seen from Dollis Hill—a chess-board of slate roofs—is an object lesson as to the future of London if builders and owners and local authorities go on laying out estates with no thought but for the rights of private owners.
What, however, it may be asked, can the Church do? “Agitate—protest?†Yes, the Church, familiar with the lives of inhabitants of mean streets, can speak with authority. It can tell how minds and souls are dwarfed for want of outlook, how pathetic is the longing for beauty shown in the coloured print on the wall of the little dark tenement, how hard it is to make a home of a dwelling exactly like a hundred other dwellings, how often it is the dullness of the street which encourages carelessness of dirt and resort to excitement—how, in fact, it is the mean house and mean street which prepare the way for poverty and vice. The voice of joy and health is not heard even in the dwellings of the righteous. The Church might help town-planning as it might help every other social reform, by charging the atmosphere of life with unselfish and sympathetic thought. But the question I would raise is whether the Church is not called to take more direct action in the matter of town-building. Its policy at present seems to build a church for every 4,000 or 5,000 persons as they settle on the outskirts of London. The site is generally one given by a landlord whose interests do not always takein those of the whole neighbourhood. The building itself aims primarily at accommodating so many hundreds of people at a low cost per seat, and outside features are regarded as involving expenses too great for present generosity. This policy which has not been changed since Bishop Blomfield set the example of building the East London district churches, is, I believe, prejudicial to Church interests, as it certainly is to the dignity of the neighbourhood in which they stand.
The Church might help much in town-planning if it would change its policy, and, instead of dropping unconsidered and trifling buildings at frequent intervals over a new suburb, build one grand and dominant building on some carefully chosen site to which the roads would lead. The Directors of the Hampstead Garden Suburb as a private company have shown what is possible. They have crowned the hill at the base of which 20,000 people will soon be gathered, with the Church, the Chapel, and the public Institute. This hill dominates the landscape for miles round, and is the obvious centre of a great community of people. The Church by adopting a like policy would at once give a character to a new suburb, the convergence of roads would be marked, and order would be brought into the minds of builders planning out their different properties. The architects would be conscious of the centre of the circle in which they worked, and the houses would fall into some relation with the central building. Every one would feel such a healthy pride in the grandeur of the central church that it would be more difficult for things mean and unsightly to be set up in its neighbourhood. The church buildings in the City of London, or those which are seen towering over some of the newer avenues in Paris, or those familiar in our country towns and in villages, often seem as if they had brought together the inhabitants and were presiding overtheir lives. They look like leaders and suggest that the world is a world of order. The Bishop of London’s Fund, or the authorities who direct the principal building policy, and spend annually thousands of pounds in its pursuit, have thus a great opportunity of giving direction to the expansion of London. They might by care in the selection of sites, and by generous expenditure at the direction of a large-visioned architect, do for the growing cities or towns of to-day what the builders of the past did for the cities and towns of their time. The Church by its direct action might thus give a great impetus to town planning, the need of which is in the mouths of all reformers.
But it may be asked whether the Church ought to contribute to the making of beauty at the cost of its own efficiency. Has not the State one duty and the Church another? Without answering the question it is I think easy to show that a new policy would cost less money, and be more efficient in promoting worship. It is obviously no more costly to build one magnificent building for £25,000 or £30,000 than to build three ordinary buildings at £8000 or £9000 each, while the maintenance of the three, with the constant expense of repairs, must be considerably greater.
And if it be asked whether one grand and generous and dignified building will attract more worshippers than three of the ordinary type, my answer is “Yes, and the worshippers will be assisted to a reverent mind and attitudeâ€. I speak what I know as a vicar for thirty years of a district church in East London. The building was always requiring repair, its fittings were oppressively cheap, and there were twelve other churches within much less than “a Sabbath day’s journeyâ€. There is no doubt that the people preferred and were more helped by worship in the finer and better served parish churches. I used to feel what an advantageit would have been if the parish church, endowed and glorified with some of the money spent on the district churches, could have been the centre of a large staff of clergy, and have offered freely to all comers the noblest aids to worship. A feeling of patronage is incompatible with a feeling of worship, and the district church, with its constant need of money and its mean appearance, is always calling for the patronage of the people. The grandly built and imposing building, which gives the best and asks for nothing, provokes not patronage but reverence. There is, I believe, great need for such places of worship, as there is also need for meeting halls where in familiar talk and with simple forms of worship the clergy might lead and teach the people; but I do not see the need for the cheap churches, which are not dignified enough to increase habits of reverence, and often pretend to an importance which provokes impertinence.
The Church has been powerful because it has called on its members to put their best thought and their best gifts into the buildings raised for the worship of God. It owes much to the stately churches and sumptuous cathedrals, for the sake of which men of old made themselves poor; and to-day the hearts of many, who are worn by the disease of modern civilization, are comforted and uplifted as in the greatness of these buildings they forget themselves. The Church is as unwise as it is unfaithful when it puts up cheap and mean structures. It is not by making excuses—whether for its members who keep the best for their own dwellings or for itself when it takes an insignificant place in the streets—that the Church will command the respect of the people. It must prove its faith by the boldness of its demand. But I have said enough to show that the Bishop of London’s Fund would serve its own object of providing the best aid to worship, if it would respond to the call of thepresent and seize the opportunity of taking a lead in town-planning. Church policy—as State policy—is often best guided by the calls which rise for present needs, and if our leaders, distrusting “their own inventions,†would set themselves to assist in town-planning it might be given them to do the best for the Church as well as for the health and wealth of the people.
Samuel A. Barnett.
Samuel A. Barnett.