THREATENED CHURCHES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 258, 30 October 1926, Page 13

THREATENED CHURCHES.

IN THE HEART OF LONDON. NINETEEN MAT BE DESTROTED. RE-GROUPING THE PARISHES. The long controversy over London's churches will be Tevived shortly, when Parliament will discuss the matter again. It. will be remembered that during the last session it was suggested that some of the nineteen threatened churches should be sent overseas and re-erected in the colonies, but the project did not get past the suggestion stage. Few controversies of contemporary London have aroused as much interest as that of these churches. Just before the end of last session, the House of Lord, passed a motion by the Bishop of London "that the union of churches (metropolis) measure, 1926, be presented to His Majesty for the royal assent." A motion of this sort has to pass both houses before, the royal assent can make it law. From the House of Lords it went to the House of Commons; and the Corporation of the City of London, exercising its peculiar right to communicate direct with the House of Commons rather than through one of the city's M.P.'s, entered an immediate protest at the bar of the Commons. At that point Parliament rose. The Commons is to vote on the measure when Parliament reassembles. This is the measure which London in general regards as condemning nineteen of its city churches to destruction. The fact that the Bishop of London is behind this measure has caused him to be described as a vandal. It is not necessary to be a partisan of the Bishop of London to believe this. For the most part, the measure proposes a regrouping of parishes in the city, a project whose interest is purely ecclesiastic. For tbe rest, it institutes machinery far more complicated than any that now existß for the disposal of churches not utilised in the regrouping. That is all that appears in the text of the measure. Its text, however, is by no means the measure- whole story. To understand the volume of lay protest this ecclesiastical measure has aroused the report of Lord Phillimore's commission in 1919 needs to be recalled. That commission recommended the destruction of nineteen city churches, and its report provoked such a storm that it was dropped like a hot potato. London has never recovered from the shock the Phillimore report gave it. The Bishop of London's friends urge his new measure with the statement that "The Phillimore commission is dead and buried." District Now Commercial. The City of London, as distinct from the County of London, consists of a single square mile in which the finance and shipping, not only of the metropolis, but of a large part of the world are concentrated. It is the most historic area in the entire metropolis. A few centuries ago the City of London was full of wealth and fashion on Sundays, and the spires of its churches pierced the skyline on every hand. Today the City is empty on Sundays, and its churches, always excepting the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, are hidden from sight in little lanes and courts. Eighty years ago, after a Sunday morning tour of the city, Dickens wrote of what he saw, in "The Uncommercial Traveller," He entered one church and found 20 people inside. In another church he found 14 worshippers, mostly women. Manners in the City, he concluded, were changing, and Wren's churches were slowly dying. There are now 47 churches in the City's square mile. Eight of them survived the great fire of 1660. A large number of new churches were built after the fire, out of the proceeds of a tax on coal entering the port of London. Thirty-two of these new churches were designed by Sjr Christopher Wren.' Although the coal tax was paid by every hearth and furnace in the »city, the churches it built were, and still are, the property of the established church —a fact that explains Parliament's part in their administration. A Parish of Janitors. That not all the 47 churches are needed for parochial work is generally admitted. One little circle in the City, not 500 yards in diameter, encloses eight of them. St. Mary's, Aldermanbury, and St. Mary's, Broad Street, are only 50 yards apart. The cost of maintaining the 46 churches, not including St. Paul's Cathedral, is between £50,000 and £60,000 a year, and the resident population to which they minister consists of some 13,000 janitors and charwomen. Add to these considerations the fact that the Church of England is desperately poor, and the urgency of the problem of the churches becomes plain.

The Bishop of London's present measure recommends no churches for removal. It does no more toward destroying city churches than to institute machinery for the reception' of destruction projects. It is this machinery which has subjected the Bishop's proposal to such violent opposition.