‘Church Going’ by Andrew Ziminski review

You never quite know what you’ll find when you open the door to one of England’s many ancient parish churches. Perhaps there will be a glorious, overblown tomb, or perhaps some miraculously preserved remnant of pre-Reformation faith. Sometimes, it is true, the results are disappointing; but there is usually at least something worth seeing, even if it takes a little time to find it. Taken together, our churches are the single greatest museum this country possesses.

Open the door to a church in the West Country and you might encounter Andrew Ziminski. A craftsman and antiquary, his first book, The Stonemason, drew on three decades of experience to tell the story of how Britain’s buildings were created. He can write with real authority – and no little style – on that fascinating alchemy by which masons turn living stone into standing structures. In Church Going, he looks at a single type of building, one that he knows extremely well, having restored several dozen over the years. Organised thematically, rather than chronologically, the book begins at the lychgate and ends in the crypt. In between, there are short, informative and often witty sections on everything from spires to beehives and fonts to knockers.

Interspersed with all this information, Ziminski recalls his owns visits to church. If you do encounter him there, he might be working on the masonry. But, then again, if you open an ancient door to find someone trying on a memorial helmet, preaching from the pulpit, or climbing up the disused stair to a damaged rood loft, that might be our author too. One image shows him in the parvise of St Mary’s, Steeple Aston, engaged in writing the text of this book.

It is a volume that will be of real value to anyone unsure what a parvise is (a room above a porch). As a primer on architectural history, theology and modern religious practice, it can be recommended to anyone who shares Ziminski’s joy in church crawling. For historians, though, the book is even more interesting because it vividly illuminates how churches and church history are understood in 21st-century Britain.

Ziminski’s is, to be sure, an eclectic approach. His book does not seek to present a single, coherent analysis. But it does draw on a particular – and, I suspect, widely held – set of assumptions about Christianity in the past and religion in the present that, in many respects, deviate sharply from what was once the dominant view of historians and lay readers alike. Until fairly recently, for instance, British history was also almost always Protestant history. There was a recognition that the Reformation had been a troubled time and that extremists had often gone too far. 

The medieval church was, nonetheless, fairly universally depicted as sunk in depravity and ripe for reform. It is an index of what the historian Simon Green termed ‘The Passing of Protestant England’ (in an article and book of that title) that Ziminski instead tends to follow Eamon Duffy’s far more positive account of Catholic Christendom and catastrophic view of the Reformation.

It is also telling that Ziminski’s approach to these buildings is syncretic and spiritual rather than denominational or doctrinal. He touches saints’ tombs to cure toothache, senses unearthly presences and fears the ‘ill-will’ of long-dead parishioners if he undoes the changes they made to their church centuries before. He also assumes that Christianity is in terminal decline. He hopes that such special places will be treasured by ‘whatever version of religious faith comes along next’. It is intriguing to ponder on what historians of the future will make of this.

• Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles
  Andrew Ziminski
  Profile, 416pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History at the University of Oxford.