Supporting Norfolk's churches

The Norfolk Churches Trust, which grant-aids church repairs and sustains a portfolio of 13 historic churches through direct care, will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2024.

Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen at Lynford.

Norfolk has more historic churches listed Grade I and Grade II* than any other county; its identity is inextricably bound up with this great legacy. Most lie in the Diocese of Norwich, while the county’s famous Marshland churches, the recently fire-damaged church at Beachamwell and others are in the neighbouring diocese of Ely. It is at these buildings that innumerable communities have direct access to much of the most eloquent, beautiful, and valuable material evidence of our history and culture.

Their future is far from assured. Individually, their repair presents fundraising challenges that would daunt a well-organised national public charity, let alone an ageing congregation with a handful of regular attenders. The main purpose of the Norfolk Churches Trust is to provide these congregations with advice and grant aid for their buildings. Parish morale can be more vulnerable than the building fabric. Listening, advising and encouraging emboldens communities to unlock local generosity and the contributions of national funders. Our staff and others spend time in parishes, assessing problems and helping with applications for the grants that we give out at three meetings each year. These rarely run to more than £10,000 per church but they are sometimes the first significant external contribution to a repair project and can be a catalyst for the engagement of other bodies.

The trust’s income is generated through events and by personal and institutional charitable giving. Concerts, lectures and visits to churches, houses and gardens are frequently oversubscribed. In the past year the Norfolk Churches Bike Ride has raised £131,000, one athletic 70-year-old cyclist visiting 70 churches. In May 2022 our latest triennial Stately Car Boot Sale at Sennowe Park made £83,000 in a single day. These are striking achievements but what they raise must be seen against the £300,000 recently needed to save a single church tower at North Tuddenham. Here we funded, among other things, a structural survey that confirmed its perilous condition and helped Historic England to make an emergency heritage-at-risk grant of £280,000.

The appalling condition of St Peter’s, Corpusty, was one of the factors that prompted our foundress, Wilhelmine Harrod, and a group of supporters, to establish the Norfolk Churches Trust in 1976. The building was eventually to become one of a group of churches leased to the trust and once referred to in some circles as ‘the diocese of Lady Harrod’. The church occupies a commanding position above a valley close to the B1149 from Norwich to Holt. In 1982, the years of abandonment, vandalism, and theft came to an end when it was taken on by the Friends of Friendless Churches, made secure and partially repaired. It passed to us in 2009. In our care, and after further repair campaigns, it has recently found a new role as home for part of the Lettering Arts Trust’s collection of carved and lettered stones. This is now a place where people can come to experience the uplifting qualities of tranquillity and beauty that epitomise the remote rural church, and gain inspiration for the commissioning of good quality memorials. This is a comparatively rare example of a sympathetic new use for a rural Norfolk church, but it is in no sense economically self-supporting and will always be dependent on charitable giving and grant aid.

For most Anglican churches formal redundancy, which can be legally instigated only by individual congregations, raises more questions than answers. Responsibility for maintenance and repair are transferred to the diocesan board of finance for an indeterminate period if a suitable new owner has not already been secured. Scale, historic significance, complexity, isolation and repair liabilities make a challenging commercial proposition for potential buyers. Even without any of the legal processes, informal abandonment followed by decay, of the kind exemplified by the tribulations of St Peter’s, Corpusty – a church that was not formally made redundant until 1975 after years of disuse and vandalism – remain an ever-present threat.

We are quite unusual among English county trusts in caring directly for our leased churches, 12 from the Diocese of Norwich and one from the Roman Catholic Diocese of East Anglia. In the early days an understanding that the predecessors of Historic England would fund the high-level repairs was critical to the practicality of their acquisition and care. It is because this epoch of active state support ended in the early years of this century that we can not comfortably contemplate further acquisitions, as these would now impact our grants to churches in use. The leased churches have, it is true, continued to receive grant aid from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Covid-19 Cultural Recovery Fund, and the Listed Places of Worship Roof Repair Fund in 2015. They have also benefited from VAT recovery through the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme. But the degree of uncertainty and contingency attached to these grant sources makes confident future planning difficult.

If Anglican churches occupy most of our time and resources, we are keen to help other denominations. The church of Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen at Lynford, near Thetford, leased to us from the RC Diocese of East Anglia in 2009, has recently been repaired with the benefit of a Covid-19 Cultural Recovery Fund grant. These grants were given against a tight timetable, so only those with advanced plans could benefit. Henry Clutton’s small and splendid church was built in 1878 in the grounds of Lynford Hall (William Burn, 1857–62) by the fabulously wealthy widow Yolande Lyne- Stephens, largely for her own use. She was also the principal funder of the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge.

Lynford has ornate late gothic details in soft, yellow limestone that is vulnerable to erosion, especially in the openwork parapets and delicate western bellcote. The most fragile elements have been made safe by careful conservation and some stonework replacement. In earlier days Mrs Lyne-Stephens would travel 18 miles to worship at St Mary’s, Thetford, so it was probably at her request that Clutton built into the plinth of the new church salvaged fragments of rare and important late-11th-century Norman sculpture from the ruins of Thetford Priory.

Other trusts are involved in the direct care of the county’s churches and chapels. The Norwich Historic Churches Trust, founded in 1973, has 18 city churches. The Churches Conservation Trust has 28 mainly rural buildings and the pioneer Norwich Diocesan Churches Trust has time-limited responsibility for around a dozen. The Friends of Friendless Churches and the Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust have two each. Taken together, these holdings represent about 10 per cent of the churches in Norfolk. These organisations clearly play an important role, but no one can confidently propose that the answer to the present pressing question lies in a significant expansion of their holdings. This would not be practical without new and dramatically increased sources of external finance. It can also be challenging to maintain constructive engagement with communities once a building has been taken over by another institution. This can sometimes weaken the hitherto creative and economically useful funding partnership between local effort and outside help.

The priority, therefore, is to increase the support that can keep rural churches in use for worship and community service. The extended use and enjoyment of churches by the whole community is central to their long-term future, and there is plenty of evidence in Norfolk that non-churchgoers are willing to engage with the upkeep of the building and its churchyard.

But widespread and sustained local social engagement will not have much chance of growing without a more supportive public funding environment. What is required is a concerted and collaborative effort by church, state and the charitable sector to give more widespread and targeted help. Our current competitive and under-funded mixed economy of grant aid – one that works best for those most able to make use of it – is self-evidently unequal to the task in hand.

This article originally appeared as ‘Supporting Norfolk’s churches and their communities’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 175, published in March 2023. It was written by John Maddison, chairman of the Norfolk Churches Trust. The last 30 years as a practising artist followed his early career in medieval architectural history, the Victorian Society and the National Trust. Some of his art and design in historic buildings can be seen at Ely, St Albans, Westminster Cathedral and Stowe House.