When writing about architecture, it can be easy to forget that most buildings have a purpose – people. It’s a brave move, therefore, to write a book about a global religion and base it entirely around buildings. The temptation to be like other books on churches, which can be dry or pious beyond belief, is a risk hinted at by the dust jacket of Twelve Churches: An unlikely history of the buildings that made Christianity, which depicts a technical drawing of a church.
Thankfully Twelve Churches is a different beast. The wider historical details crowbarred into each chapter take up the lion’s share of the prose, but the author Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie excels at anchoring the origins of each building in the people that built it, used it and were inspired by it.
