Think of England and you think of her cathedrals: great hulking battleships of stone that tower above our landscapes, offering us the reassuring solidity of permanence. A new report from the think tank Theos, Living Stones: English Cathedrals as Sacred Spaces in Changing Times, examines the roles, perceptions and challenges the Church of England’s cathedrals face now more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
The England of the 2020s is markedly more secular than 50 or 100 years ago, but cathedrals seem to be maintaining a hold on the public. According to the surveys commissioned in this report, 74 per cent of the public had visited a cathedral at least once in the previous three years. Thirty-eight per cent visited as often as two or three times a year, and 15 per cent every one to three months. “Cathedral visitation,” the report rightly points out, “is therefore not a niche behaviour.” Figures from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport show that only 41 per cent of the public visited a museum or gallery in person in the past year, and 30 per cent attended an in-person live sporting event. Cathedrals, then, remain one of the biggest physical interfaces between Christianity and the English public.
