Lord Lloyd-Webber
Main Page: Lord Lloyd-Webber (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Lloyd-Webber (Con)
I agree how phenomenal it is to have an opportunity to debate the English parish church in the House of Lords. I thank my noble friend Lord Cormack. I freely admit that I came to this debate without a prepared speech. I love churches, buildings and architecture, and my greatest thought is of an awayday when I can escape, look at buildings and enjoy them for what they are. I think it is important to bring us back to one point that should be repeated, which is that we must not forget how unique and priceless is our heritage not just in England but all over the British Isles. It is tremendous to be able to discuss it.
Noble Lords may know that 20 years ago I founded a charity called the Open Churches Trust. Its aim was to keep churches open. About five years ago, I decided that it might be the moment to apply the charity’s resources elsewhere. It was for two reasons. We had the most phenomenal administrator, who I did not feel we would be able to replace, and when we started we found that probably only one or two in five churches were open, but initiatives since we began suggested that our work was, in a way, done.
I came to this debate with an open mind, and I am glad I did not have any prepared thoughts. I completely share the extraordinary views about how churches can be used. That is one of the things that we passionately tried to promote. From the very beginning, we tried to promote the idea that the nave was a place of business. Today, many modern vicars—I am not sure I necessarily approve, but that may be because I am a Tractarian at heart—will bring the church forward in front of the screen. Of course, the purpose of the screen was to keep the nave, where business was done, separate from where the church business was done. Times have moved on. We can see that.
That makes me think how wonderful it would be if we could take that idea further. I was thrilled to hear what was said about using the building for everything from a gymnasium to a school. That was what naves were about. We should have wi-fi in churches because you could have an app, and that app could say, “This is what this building is about”. Also, any wise church will know that by having an app, it has a captive audience because somebody has used the app. Anything we can do to further the use of churches as the centre of the community, and as a place where people feel they want to come to, has to be good.
I shall share with noble Lords my last trip. It is the only thing I have made notes on. I shall not try to follow the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, and speak about Wales, but a lot of the trip was in Wales and although my name is Lloyd I am not Welsh, and I am afraid my Welsh accent is not good enough to do some of the names. However, I started in Tamworth at—again, my pronunciation of this will be wrong; some noble Lord will correct me on this—St Editha, is it? It is an extraordinary building—ruined by six huge 15-storey blocks of council flats along its reach, but a most wonderful building. Here I found something that I would like to share with your Lordships, because it is very important. It is about the contents of the churches and, in this case, the church windows. I am a great lover of Pre-Raphaelite art, which is now recognised in a way that it was perhaps not 50 or 60 years ago. St Editha has some of the greatest windows you will ever see, by Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown. I was concerned that the Burne-Jones windows are not protected. That makes me feel that there must be a role, which we might discuss in a moment, for the Government in giving a little help to buildings for which it is perhaps beyond their custodians even to appreciate the value of what they have.
I was very impressed by the fact that St Editha has a bookshop, which keeps the church open. It is doing everything it can. I was unable to talk to the vicar because St Editha does not have a present incumbent, but many things that it was doing there struck me as pretty extraordinary.
I then moved on to—I cannot say “Shrovesbury”; it is “Shrewsbury”, is it not?
Lord Lloyd-Webber
I apologise, but I was told in Shrewsbury that it was “Shrewsbury”. There I visited St Mary’s. It is a very interesting place for stained glass, now run by the Churches Conservation Trust. I was very impressed by the fact that they said that they had more visitors to the church than when it was a church—although there was something slightly sterile about it, I have to say. However, they had a break-in and one of their Dutch windows was badly damaged. You begin to think again that we must work out what we are going to do to protect the treasures within these buildings, which people do not necessarily immediately understand. There was an eccentric vicar at St Mary’s in the 19th century, who collected glass from all over the world. It is therefore, of course, a treasure trove of glass that is not specifically English or British.
I contrast that with a church that I went to in Gresford, All Saints’ Church, in Wales. How wonderful it is when you find that a diocese has a dedicated scheme to make churches available and open, as its diocese has. Here comes the mea culpa: a volunteer said, “Would you like to come and see the mural of the mine disaster?”. Now, I freely admit that I am afraid that I did not know that there had been this catastrophe at Gresford. Nor would you realise today, really, that it had been a mining community because the mining has long since ceased. I saw one of the most moving pictures that I have seen outside the Stanley Spencer memorial chapel in Burghclere. It is a much smaller picture than that, a tribute by a local artist to those who had died—of whom I admit I had no idea.
I suddenly thought, “That is what these buildings should be about”. I come back to the idea of an app or something: if there has been such an app, would it not have been wonderful if somebody like myself had actually known about it? Now I have come away with something that I have learnt, and that is entirely due to the volunteer who showed me around.
If there is any one thing that I would suggest to the Government, it is only a thought but it might work: through the National Heritage Memorial Fund something could be created that draws attention to the works of art in buildings and churches, and ensures that they are somehow protected. It may well be beyond the resources of many churches to do that. A simple thing like protecting the glass of the church in Tamworth could save a Burne-Jones window of incredible importance. Goodness, a Burne-Jones watercolour sold for £15 million. What is that glass worth? Who is looking after it? Who realises what it is?
Finally, I saw four kids playing around outside in the rather empty market square in Tamworth. They were following me around, and I said, “Do you know that that window in your church is by Burne-Jones?”. While they thought I was terminally mad, or on some strange thing, I managed to say, “Why don’t you come in and have a look?”. Their reaction when they saw something in their own town which they had not even dreamt of seeing makes me feel that we must fight passionately for the future of our parish churches.