How to Close a Cathedral

A couple of years ago I was on holiday in Norfolk and went to a village called North Elmham. In the eleventh century this was the seat of the Bishop of East Anglia, before the conquering Normans decided that it was a ridiculously small place to be the episcopal residence and moved the bishopric to Norwich, as they did elsewhere in England too. The Anglo-Saxon cathedral eventually vanished, to the extent that all that remains now are its footings. Nowadays, however, we invest rather more in the maintenance of cathedrals – financially, socially and emotionally as well as spiritually – and the idea of closing one boggles the mind a bit.

That, apparently, is what faces our diocesan cathedral at Guildford.

A few days ago the cathedral chapter’s application to Guildford Borough Council for planning permission to sell off a portion of the land around the building for housing was turned down, and turned down decisively – only three councillors voted in favour. Despite worries about increased pressure on local roads and facilities that might be caused by the 134-home development, the real issue lay with the balance between social housing and more commercially-priced property and housing density within the proposed estate – the ‘Cathedral Quarter’, as the chapter grandly refers to it – and the overall idea of developing the green if rather overgrown slopes of Stag Hill. This presents the cathedral with a problem: it runs at a loss each year which varies between £50K and £100K, and without the endowments that older cathedrals enjoy there’s only so long this can go on. Selling the land for development would provide a fund that might, given a favourable wind and stock market situation, make up the difference. Bishop Andrew told the planning committee meeting ‘the cathedral faces the real possibility, in fact probability, of financial failure, of closing its doors, if this planning permission is not granted’. 

Not many people are very sympathetic to the cathedral’s plight. There were allegations that the cathedral was being allowed to plead special treatment for a development which broke the provisions of Guildford Borough’s Local Plan: the word ‘blackmail’ was thrown around. The chairman of a local residents’ association said 'The Church of England has assets of almost £8bn, and in 2013 they made more money than McDonald’s. It is for them to bail out their own institutions'. Others doubted that the threat that the cathedral might close was a realistic one. ‘Are we really meant to believe that they are going to bolt the door and walk away?’

It seems unlikely, but we live in an age of the monstrously unlikely coming true. The new Diocese of Leeds was created in 2014 out of the previous dioceses of Bradford, Ripon and Wakefield, essentially because the Diocese of Bradford was bankrupt; once upon a time the idea of an Anglican diocese actually ceasing to trade for lack of money would have had archdeacons and bishops blinking in disbelief, but those days are past. In Leeds, all the previous cathedrals were in fact retained, stripped of their chapters and administration, but then they are historic buildings: Guildford’s history goes back to the 1930s, and that’s it.*

One correspondent to the independent online newsletter The Guildford Dragon commented: 'So what was the plan to fund the continuing maintenance and running costs of the building as a place of worship [when it was built]? It’s inconceivable that there wasn’t such a plan.' Well, in fact it’s completely conceivable. The Church of England in the 1930s was on the rise, confident, embedded in the establishment and national life. Guildford Cathedral was started then and completed and consecrated in 1966, just as the great 1960s collapse in organised religion which changed the spiritual face of Britain began. The idea of not enough money coming in to support the place just wouldn’t have occurred to the people who built it. Nobody would have imagined that £1.5M per year would be needed to run it; nobody would have thought it would need to be stripped of asbestos and re-plastered inside within fifty years.

It must have looked like such a coup, the Earl of Onslow giving Stag Hill as the striking location for the new and last cathedral the Church of England would ever build. It dominates the landscape for miles, even if its redbrick exterior is hard to love; architecturally it’s the very last flower of the Gothic Revival. When the foundations were first laid, and half the building completed before the outbreak of the War, it stood in isolation on the hilltop. But, after 1945, the tide of building began to lap closer and closer, leaving it an island in a sea of houses. To the north, the 1960s blocks of the University of Surrey occupied acres more. It’s actually an awkward position to be in, however grand it looks.

Couldn’t the cathedral charge its 90,000 annual visitors a fee of say £2 a head like other cathedrals do, asked one correspondent to the Dragon? But I doubt that figure: it’s the kind of thing institutions claim when they want to emphasise their importance to the local community, but Guildford Cathedral isn’t the greatest tourist draw in the country. Its interior is striking, but Il Rettore once astutely described it as looking ‘like a set for Wagner’s Ring’- matching the somewhat Wagnerian politics of its architect, Sir Edward Maufe – and it has none of the warmth and detail of its older peers. A lot of those 90,000 visitors attend as part of civic and other functions such as the University degree ceremonies the cathedral hosts each summer. Ask the staff, too, and they will tell you how many ‘visitors’ arrive in coach parties – who come, not to marvel at the architecture, but to break their journey down the A3 to the Isle of Wight, and who very commonly pile off the coach, have a wee in the restaurant toilets, pile back on again, and drive off without so much as darkening the door of the cathedral itself.

I’ve been told in the past that when the cathedral was built the original plan was, indeed, to set aside some of the site for housing; but it never happened, partly because it never needed to happen, and partly because the green land around the building seemed more useful to the town. Holy Trinity church in the town centre fulfilled the cathedral role before the cathedral itself was built, but it’s much too small to house many of the events which now take place on the top of Stag Hill; so here we have a cathedral which, realistically, can’t survive, but which must.

In the 1960s, the Church of England rationalised the income of its parishes. In each diocese the parishes agreed to pool their endowments and revenues and clergy were paid from that central pot, whereas before the income of different parishes had varied massively. Is it time to do that with cathedrals? Would the cathedral chapters – none of whom are exactly rolling in money – agree to it? Particularly, would the medieval cathedrals which cost so much to maintain be willing to bail out redbrick Guildford?

[*And, while it occurs to me, the three demoted Yorkshire cathedrals are in fact overgrown parish churches that were bumped up to cathedral status in the 19th century: they had an existence before they were cathedrals, and can potentially revert to that. Guildford was purpose-built.]