Historical Notes: Less obscure purposes for the parish shed

AT THE heart of every English community stands a building of great antiquity. It is handsome, spacious, filled with that community's art and craftsmanship, surrounded by pleasant grounds. Local people built it with their rents and tithes. For a thousand years, they saw it as embodying their ceremonies and rites of passage. Yet for most of them it is now a meaningless shed, empty and visited only by a small minority of those living round it. It is an Anglican church.

I have spent five years wandering these churches seeking out those that an enthusiast might regard as "the thousand best". Though not a member of the Church of England, I have come to love these buildings and congratulate those who struggle to keep them alive and make them more accessible. Some vicars in the more depressed parts of the country should rank among the modern saints. But I am overwhelmed by the hopelessness of their task. With exceptions, the decline in church use is remorseless. Put crudely, most churches are a dreadful waste of space.

This month, Christian England will troop out to celebrate the birth of Christ in a myriad of local halls. The Anglicans will take the architectural glory, in churches over half of which were originally designed for the liturgy of the Roman Church. Nonconformists will find themselves mostly in Victorian chapels, Roman Catholics often in little more than a shed. Each will celebrate the same event and the same God but in a different building, almost all of them empty for most of the week. But the emptiness of the parish church, often dark and locked, is the most obtrusive. It is a monument not so much to a lack of faith as to a lack of good ideas. What can be done?

For the nine of the past 10 centuries the answer was easy. The church was the centre of local life. It blessed harvest and battle alike. Chancel, aisle, nave and porch embraced parish administration, justice, civil law, matrimony, schooling, counselling, charity, the arts, local guilds, trade regulation, pilgrimage, even travel.

These functions have fled elsewhere, usually to meaner buildings and more distant authority. School alcoves lie empty or have reverted to chapels. Parish notices fade and flutter in porches. Churchyards, sacred plots of green, are often dirty and defiled. Almost all the churches I encountered are oases of calm, but I came to see many of them as mere vacancy, Philip Larkin's "A shape less recognisable each week / A purpose more obscure".

This cannot go on through the next century. The church may be God's house, but He plainly has more real estate than He needs and should sublet. Some churches are already bucking the trend. In Blakeney in Norfolk, or Leighton Buzzard, or Rye, to name but three, are churches which buzz with life. Local institutions have been invited to colonise spare corners. Disregarding cliches about money changers in the temple, the market has brought the community to church and filled it with people, laughter and activity. All Saints, Hereford, now has one of the best restaurants in the town and welcomes other denominations to use its aisles. If some can do this, why not all?

The great medieval churches of England are marvels of national history, the "thousand best" comprising a collective museum of English vernacular art. It is a museum unequalled in Europe, outshining any national gallery. I find it absurd that, by being locked, they should be exclusive to one religious group, shutting out the communities which created them. Somehow they must be brought back into the mainstream of local life. A parish church is not just a place of worship but also a focus of its community. It is communitarian or it is nothing.

Simon Jenkins is the author of `England's Thousand Best Churches' (Allen Lane, pounds 25)