Churches for a Secular Society

Baroness Warsi, Alain De Botton, Dave etc everyone seems to be getting in a bit of a lather about religion recently and It has made me stop and consider the most obvious manifestation of Christianity in our towns and cities; churches.

Look across the skyline of my home city of Belfast or my adopted home of Glasgow and you will see a vast array of spires and steeples and there are plenty of more modest places of worship without the phallic skyline announcers. Now consider how many of these churches actually have a congregation rather than a small handful of attendees; how many of these churches actually positively contribute to their locale with culture, employment or even use of the space.

It seems a great waste of such a wonderful architectural legacy that communities that surround these buildings don’t get any use out of them unless they sign up for whatever ideology attached to the church. More pressing is the fact that many of these architectural gems are under serious threat due to very poor stewardship by the churches. One needs only to look at the plight of Greek Thomson’s St Vincent street church, The Lansdowne Church on Great Western Road or Carlisle Circus church in Belfast to see what years of dwindling congregations and donations does to expensive to maintain buildings. Although there are plenty of examples of well maintained but seriously under used churches – my personal favourite is the Wellington Church opposite Glasgow University. A stunning piece of classicism that could be so much more than a sparsely attended temple.

So what can we do? It seems perverse to be struggling for funding to build new community centres and cultural venues and the like while these building remain empty. However there is no avoiding the facts that it takes quite a lot of money to maintain these buildings and that for them to flourish they need to have a commercial heart that draws people to them to either spend or give money. Turning them all into superpubs is a regressive step in many people’s eyes , including mine. However both Cottiers and Oran Mor have lively theatres, restaurants as well as pubs – both are social and cultural hubs. Maybe not quite in the way that Alain De Botton extols in his new book “Religion for Atheists” - Agape Restaurants these places certainly are not. However a warm summer evening outside Cottiers sees children and dogs running around and people socialising and having fun. Oran Mor’s “A Play, A Pie and A Pint” lunch time theatre shorts are quite rightly lauded as giving an extra cultural dimension to theatre. The simple conclusion that cannot be avoided is the two best examples of re-used ecclesiastical architecture in Glasgow are both licensed premises. The attraction of a cold libation in a warm social environment is undeniable and thus these wonderful, dramatic pieces of architecture are brought back to life. The statutory authorities should more easily grant entertainment, drinks and catering licences and relax certain change of use planning issues to these buildings if the applicant includes a sizeable and meaningful social and/or cultural dimension to the project. A truly public/private initiative. Surely this is not beyond the grasp of the various city councils with lots of vacant and/or under used ecclesiastical properties under their jurisdiction.