Use It Or Lose It - Church of England's 1,600 empties

[Gerrard Winstanley]

"Nor is the issue solely the decision as it now stands: the deletion 
of 1,600 Church of England and 300 Methodist churches from the maps of 
England - even as I type this, incredulity hums in my ears. The larger 
question is what happens in the future. As the worship of God vanishes 
from the shires of England, more and more churches will be 
deconsecrated: and thus they too will vanish from the maps, perhaps to 
be replaced in the cartographical cultural hierarchy by out-of-town 
shopping malls and motorway service stations."

http://www.warmwell.com/2may11maps.html
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/
2003/05/11/do1107.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/05/11/ixop.html

Rise up, England, and save the map churches

By Kevin Myers
(Filed: 11/05/2003) 


The decision of the Ordnance Survey to remove out-of-use churches from 
their maps of England is one of those little signs, like a dog barking 
at water, which you should take very seriously indeed. The dog could 
get over its silliness, and not turn rabid, and attack your children. 
But the moment you see the sign, you're right to be worried.

So the decision to remove some 2,000 deconsecrated churches from the 
maps of England might be nothing, a mere bureaucratic silliness, like 
the dog not liking the smell it gets from the water. Or it could be 
the prelude to organisational and cultural rabies, a cultural 
revolution which lays waste all around it. For if Ordnance Survey gets 
away with this, where does it all stop?

Perhaps the most sinister and telling clue Ordnance offers for its 
policy is its explanation for retaining a deconsecrated church: if it 
is a landmark with navigational significance. Which boils the whole 
business down nicely to: is it helpful for drivers, one of those 
little bonuses with which the Middle Ages assists us in our nav-sat 
peregrinations around the English countryside? Actually, jolly useful 
things, the Middle Ages.

Ordnance argues that because these churches are no longer churches, 
they should not be listed as such. Has it applied the same logic to 
castles? Can it name a single castle in England which is used as a 
defended fortress? Does it say the same of Roman roads, which have not 
been Roman in 1,500 years or so?

And does it say the same of itself? National Ordnance has no right to 
call itself by that name. For "Ordnance" is a military title, 
essentially the same word as "ordinance", and was inherited from the 
days of industrious army sappers. For maps were originally means of 
conducting campaigns: they provided an economical and efficient way of 
moving armies about unknown landscapes.

But we do not insist today that maps show only objects of military 
importance. Over the centuries, they have become two-dimensional 
accounts of the landscape, a narrative of about the people who once 
lived here: the mill which is no longer a mill, the tumulus, the rath, 
the henge, the old coach-bridge which has been by-passed, and which no 
longer serves as bridge.

It is a savage who cannot draw pleasure from a good map: one can 
divine from the bridle-ways and old tollgate a sense of travellers on 
palfrey and in coach centuries ago. Maps allow a small communion with 
history, with habits and mores which are long gone: but they have left 
footprints in the landscape, and in those representations of the 
landscape which we calls maps, and which only a barbarian would not 
think worthy of retaining.

Nor is the issue solely the decision as it now stands: the deletion of 
1,600 Church of England and 300 Methodist churches from the maps of 
England - even as I type this, incredulity hums in my ears. The larger 
question is what happens in the future. As the worship of God vanishes 
from the shires of England, more and more churches will be 
deconsecrated: and thus they too will vanish from the maps, perhaps to 
be replaced in the cartographical cultural hierarchy by out-of-town 
shopping malls and motorway service stations.

I write this from Ireland: and I write it in some anger. Because for 
any visitor to England, one of the joys there is not just the 
landscape, but the maps by which you can read the landscape. Not 
merely do they lead you to where you want to go; they guide you to 
places and pieces of history you knew nothing of before the map told 
you of their existence.

Methodist churches, for example, tell you of a spirit of freedom, of 
the courage of poor people who were already paying tithes to the 
Church of England, yet were prepared to go to the expense of building 
a dissident church of their own. Architecturally, they are usually 
undistinguished: but as structural statements of independence, they 
tell you vast amounts. You can follow the movement of the industrial 
revolution through the spread of Methodist halls: a history lesson on 
a map.

Moreover, maps are works of art, a meeting-place of science and 
draughtsmanship, where precise topography meets the abstract symbol. 
They are not simply utilitarian street-guides: though the desire to 
create beauty out of the strictly utilitarian is one of the defining 
characteristics of the human species, from the elegant hand-napped 
tools of the paeleolithic to the map of the London underground.

So maps are meant to be beautiful: and of course, one facet of beauty 
is that, strictly speaking, it is functionally redundant. And though 
we cannot compel people to go to church or maintain the empty churches 
of England, we can compel public servants to guard the beauty that 
they have inherited. Ordnance Survey proposes to diminish that legacy, 
a priceless legacy of England: and I pray England shall have none of 
it.