From the 1840s on in Britain the changing religious geography mainly depended on the migration of ethnic groups bringing their faiths with them, and the pattern of settlement ran on all fours with that in America, though on a much smaller scale. The Irish arrived at the east-coast port of Liverpool, creating a semi-Catholic culture in west Lancashire, and moved across the country to the urban north-east coast and the Scottish urban south-west, and also downwards via Birmingham to particular parts of London. The Jewish migrants were mostly from Eastern Europe and were particularly numerous in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. They moved in the reverse direction, travelling north from East London to Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. The Muslim, Sikh and Hindu migrations arrived after the Second World War, and they followed a similar trajectory, concentrating in East London and in certain Midland and northern cities like Leicester and Bradford. The parallel Caribbean and (later) West African migrations, largely Protestant and sometimes Pentecostal, also settled in the inner London suburbs, and indeed in inner suburban areas all over the country, like St. Paul’s in Bristol. As for the Anglican Church, it remained relatively strong in the outer London suburbs, in the rural shires and particularly in a band running from south-west through Oxford (the conservative and political university) to Lincolnshire and cross-ways to the main migrations.
This religious geography has been mirrored in political geography, with Catholics, Jews and Muslims in the big cities voting for Labour (as they vote for the Democrats in the US), making inner London a Labour stronghold, with further strongholds in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow and the mining areas of Yorkshire and South Wales. Historically, Nonconformists, especially in Wales, the West Country and northern Scotland, have voted for the Liberal Party, which at one stage was inclined to promote religious disestablishment and could be seen as a civil rights movement for groups newly emerging and mobilising in the industrial cities, and as a party well disposed (except for the Liberal Imperialists) to Irish self-rule. Naturally the Scots-Irish in Ulster voted Conservative and Unionist, and also had links with conservatives in the American South. Seventeen of America’s presidents have been of Scots-Irish background, compared to one (Irish) Catholic. We can now consider how far this national religious and political geography is mirrored in London.
London is two cities. One, known as ‘the Square Mile’, is set on a hill. It is the centre of financial power, and jealous of its historic self-governance. The other is the City of Westminster, historically the centre of royal power and now the centre of parliamentary power. Both cities are almost completely occupied by the historic emplacements of religion, government and finance, and both were seen from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century as at the heart of empire: two architectural realisations of the imperial theme are Soane’s original (c.1800) Bank of England and Constitution Arch (1846), both appropriately classical. There are two other powerful sites downriver. To the north of the Thames there is Canary Wharf, a new financial centre without any distinctive religious marker, whose name is a reminder of the historic role of London as a great port. To the south is Greenwich, a magnificent group of buildings, including important churches, set by or beneath a hill, with royal, naval and – at the Observatory – scientific associations.
The traditional emplacements of established religion in Westminster and the ‘City’ – such as the ‘royal peculiar’ of Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Bartholomew’s Priory and St. Bride’s Church – are probably set on pagan holy sites, and St. Paul’s Cathedral was for 1,000 years the centre of a cult of St. Erkenwald. St. Bride’s recapitulates the history of London, being the site of a Roman temple, a Saxon church and a medieval church, and now of a (rebuilt) Renaissance church. Its current association is with the press, and it contains a memorial to John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts.
St. Bride’s is not alone in that. Several of the churches in Westminster and the City have North American associations, and are minor pilgrimage sites recalling the so-called ‘first British Empire’ (1655–1776) and marking a continuing transatlantic association, as for example the insignia of all the American states in the stained glass set behind the altar of St. Paul’s in gratitude for American succour in the Second World War. These churches are also reminders of a radical London which was aligned with eastern England in siding with Parliament and the Puritans in the Civil War. For centuries London, like the established Church, has looked towards North America and a global empire, whereas in medieval times it faced towards the continent, as the name Lombard Street indicates.
Today there is little to remind anyone of medieval mystery, sanctity and sacrament – apart from names like Paternoster Row and Amen Court, or churches of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival like St. Magnus Martyr or the Ely Place church of St. Etheldreda reacquired by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1870s. The Temple Church may be a medieval Crusader church, and built in the round because that is how medieval people imagined the temple in Jerusalem, perhaps unintentionally on the model of the Dome of the Rock, but its contemporary role is to act as the church of one the legal profession’s Inns of Court. It is characteristic of England that the sacred places symbolising the ancient links between religion and law remain in place and in use, unlike in the USA or indeed laïque France, even though the two spheres are functionally quite distinct. The same links are observable in the older universities, but in London the functional differentiation was made very explicit with the founding of University College in 1826 and of Bedford College for women in 1849. Neither college had a chapel. King’s College in the Strand, founded by royal charter in 1829, represented an attempt by the Established Church to restore the link between Church and university, but the Senate House is a massive essay in neo-Egyptian, not unlike some of the imposing buildings of continental Fascism, and it suggests a distinctly secular ethos.
If London University mostly represents a functionally differentiated sector animated by a secular ethos, in spite of the Anglican foundation of King’s College, the military retains a surprisingly close link to the Church, in part because of the social and religious origins of the officer corps, particularly among Scottish and Ulster Protestants as well as Anglican independent schools. The elite Guards units are stationed in quarters adjoining Buckingham Palace, where they have a major chapel. Most military units have a chapel, an association which is enhanced wherever there is a close monarchical connection, as at Windsor. However, there is an interesting contrast between the modest establishments of London and the grandiloquence of analogous establishments in Paris: the Chelsea Hospital is not remotely on the scale of the military monastery of Les Invalides, conceived under Louis XIV as part of a vast programme of monumental buildings. Nor are the streets of London named after generals – or intellectuals for that matter – as in Paris.
It is also possible to discern an internal secularisation even in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. Both churches are mausolea of great men in war, politics, science and the arts. Wellington and Nelson are buried in the crypt of St. Paul’s. Both have been iconic national heroes but are certainly not candidates for beatification. The churches of central London – dating from about 1680 to 1830 and running geographically from Christchurch, Spitalfields, in the east to St. George’s, Hanover Square, in the West End – are the light-filled temples and the Protestant auditoria of a rational civic cult. St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, the royal parish church, is closely affiliated to the dominant classical style of New England and much of North America; and even St. Paul’s, though it looks to the Baroque, rejects the Counter-Reformation opulence of the European continent. Looking at the heartlands of established religion in London one might think that secularity had secured its first triumph at just the point in the late seventeenth century when some scholars have identified the secular crisis in European consciousness.
All the same, a different picture emerges if one looks before and after the ‘long eighteenth century’ because the City churches in particular were built over medieval sites within a medieval street plan, and reproduce an ancient guild structure modified by relatively modern forms of activity, for example the Royal Air Force church of St. Clement Dane’s. The churches of the City proper cater mainly for a weekday working population, and have each developed a different character at different times, depending somewhat on the incumbent, for example the tradition of political debates at St. Mary-le-Bow.
The Evangelical movement beginning in the eighteenth century and the Anglo-Catholic movement emerging nearly a century later have claimed sites in or near the central area, with outposts in the fashionable West End and what has been historically a poor East End, crowded by successive waves of migrants: Huguenot, Jewish, Pakistani and Bangladeshi. St. Mary’s Bourne Street and All Saints Margaret Street are major Anglo-Catholic churches in the West End, and major architects like Pugin and Butterfield embraced versions of Gothic as a warm and compassionate Christian style contrasted with a cold, pitiless and secular classicism. The East End is also famous for Anglo-Catholic churches, now often decayed, which were built there in the nineteenth century to serve the poor. The same purpose inspired the Anglican settlements and the Free Church Missions, such as the West Ham Mission. If the Anglo-Catholic spirit is at a low ebb the reverse has been true of the Evangelicals. All Souls, Langham Place, located in what nearly two centuries ago were the new wealthy extensions of London northward, housed the first wave of an Evangelical revival, while Holy Trinity, Brompton, situated in another wealthy extension of London further west towards the ‘village’ of Chelsea, housed a major (and now widespread) charismatic revival, attracting many young business executives. The atmosphere here is in marked contrast with what one would at one time have encountered at the ‘progressive’ church of St. James, Piccadilly, with its market and distinct air of the New Age and the arts. To the north of Piccadilly, in opulent Mayfair, there is the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, a first outpost of American therapeutic faith to serve those, particularly women, whose needs were more intimate and personal than material. Pevsner comments that it looks surprisingly secular, and it could easily be mistaken for a city insurance office. The Christian Science movement, with its massive cathedral-like headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, is in recession, but it belongs to the genealogies of the centrality of the self and plays a role in the triumph of the therapeutic. Like so many therapeutic movements it has a problem in maintaining generational continuity.
So far I have sketched the religious dispositions and emplacements of the London heartlands and their historic extensions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to west, north and east (and holding the South Bank in reserve for later). I need to focus on the religiously three-way thoroughfare of Victoria Street. There is Westminster Abbey with St. Margaret’s church at one end, linked directly to the power-centre in the neo-Gothic (and in terms of a deliberate choice of architectural style, Christian) Houses of Parliament. Then, at the other end, and set slightly back, is the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral, begun about the beginning of the twentieth century, in a deliberately non-English style (and one matching its musical repertory) based on Siena and St. Irene, Constantinople. Finally, there is the Methodist Central Hall, directly opposite and challenging Westminster Abbey, in Edwardian baroque.
Here we have in symbolic conjunction the key elements of the historic religious semi-pluralism of England: the established territorial church, the largest ethnic minority church and the largest form of religious voluntary association. The third of these is a preaching auditorium, nowadays far too large for its small congregation but ideal for secular civic and political occasions and protests, beginning with the first assembly of the United Nations after the war. The other great preaching auditoria of Free Church Nonconformity, nowadays often serviced by American preachers, are Westminster (independent congregational) Chapel, the City Temple, Whitefield Memorial Church and Spurgeon’s (Metropolitan) Tabernacle, rebuilt on a smaller scale after destruction in the war. The City Temple belongs to the conservative Evangelical Alliance and might well be seen as very close to the ethos of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, indicating that the Free Churches are now present in semi-detached sectors of the established Church. Conservative Evangelicalism, with its ambiguously fundamentalist fringe, finds the Anglican parish system ideal for forming ‘gathered congregations’. Institutional separation hardly matters, and what the French call the disaggregation of religion is realised in flows of religiosity which pay scant heed to denominational boundaries.
The fate of the Nonconformist King’s Weigh House Church and of the Methodist Kingsway Hall indicates what has befallen historic Protestant Nonconformity. The former, set in Mayfair, first developed in a high church liturgical direction and is now occupied by an ethnic congregation belonging to the Ukrainian Catholic Church. The latter has become a hotel. Religion in the form of voluntary association – sometimes with radical political associations, as with Kingsway Hall – does not cherish architectural expressions on sacred sites; and its memorials, apart from Wesley’s Chapel to the north in the City Road, tend to be graveyards, such as the Moravian graveyard and Bunhill Fields, also by the City Road.
The Protestant national narrative, historically dear to Nonconformists, is now largely forgotten: for example the unnoticed statues on the Victoria Embankment to William Tyndale, translator of the English Bible, and to Robert Raikes, founder of the now virtually defunct Sunday School movement. The Smithfield Protestant martyrs are also unremarked. The exception is the highly controversial statue to Oliver Cromwell, complete with Bible and sword, set up in 1889 in front of Parliament; but the motives behind its erection may have been as much political as religious. Again, the association of Free Churches with particular strands of political movement, sometimes radical and revolutionary and sometimes pacifist, means that Church and movement flourish and decline together. The Methodist Central Hall was built when Methodists and other Nonconformists had their maximum representation at Westminster during the time of the radical Liberal government of 1906. The Unitarians, who were quite disproportionately represented in the radical nineteenth-century elites and were also prominent in the radical agitations of the French revolutionary period, are now represented by a bookshop on an historic site in Essex Street and through their cultural activities as wealthy industrialists, for example the Courtauld Institute and the Tate. Perhaps one might include the Freemasons under Unitarianism: they have complex roots in both Judaism and Egyptian mythology and links to Anglo-American deism. Winston Churchill and Edward VII were both Masons. The ‘Brotherhood’ was founded in 1717 and has its headquarters in an inter-war Grand Temple (Art Deco with hints of Egyptian splendour) in Great Queen Street.
The name Courtauld in the context of Unitarianism aptly introduces the theme of successive migrant groups, beginning with the Huguenots and other Protestant groups, with churches, some of which are close to the heartlands of the establishment – for example the Lutherans at St. Anne’s and the Dutch church at Austin Friars. The French Protestant church in Soho Square, dismissed by Pevsner as just another office building, reminds us that Soho was once identified with French migrants. Today Soho is a louche district, densely populated by migrants of all kinds, and its principal churches are Notre Dame de France and the Catholic church of St. Anne’s in Soho Square. This is a rather different milieu from that of the high-powered Jesuit church of the Immaculate Conception in wealthy Mayfair or the Brompton Oratory in fashionable Knightsbridge, built in the style of Il Gesù in Rome, and with a mainly traditionalist Catholic congregation.
The ethnic faiths, concentrated in different parts of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, are likewise concentrated in different parts of London. They can be taken in turn: the Irish, the Welsh and Scots Presbyterians; the Jews, the Greeks and other Eastern Orthodox; the Italians, the Poles and other Catholic migrants; the Caribbean and African Christians, mainly Protestant; and successive waves of Indians, Sikhs and Muslims. The Irish initially settled in quite poor inner areas, and stayed there for a long time with little social mobility before the mid-twentieth century and relatively little erosion of religious practice prior to the 1960s, though priests did complain in the mid-nineteenth century of poor mass attendance among the early migrants. Some Irish settled in the north-west inner suburbs like Kilburn, in inner areas just north of the river like St. Giles or immediately south of the river, in the Borough. There seems to have been relatively little of the tension between Catholics and Ulster Protestants that was exported to Liverpool and Glasgow. There was, however, some tension between Irish Catholics and the remnants of English Catholicism, with its aristocratic sprinkling and distinctive ethos, especially as the Irish became numerically dominant and stayed dominant – even after the arrival of Poles in the further western suburbs during the war and (later) other Catholic refugees from communist Europe.
There are, of course, two kinds of refugee: the poor or oppressed looking for a better life; and the rich, who may be in diaspora after persecution, like the Armenians, or a displaced elite as in the case of the Russians and (to some extent) the Poles. The suburbs of west London stretching along the M4 corridor, house major concentrations of Poles, consisting mainly of refugees who stayed in England after the Second World War. The Russians and Armenians both have their cathedrals in wealthy Kensington, whereas the Greeks have their cathedral in Bayswater, an uproarious migrant area, though the clientele of the cathedral includes wealthy conservative Greeks and groups surrounding the Greek ex-royal family. The main Serbian Orthodox church is also in Bayswater. Many Greeks, Cypriots and Italians live in the immediate northern suburbs, the Italians in Clerkenwell, where they have a magnificent church, and the Greeks a little further out in Camden.
The Scots and Welsh Presbyterians established churches in London, the Welsh in a church in Charing Cross Road, now used to sell Australian food, and the Scots in the upmarket area of Pond Street. However, both communities tended to assimilate to English Nonconformity and failed to establish a religious presence commensurate with their numbers or their social and professional influence, which was disproportionate, since both groups were ‘bible black’ cultures, valuing literacy and education.
The Jews are, of course, another ‘bible black’ culture, and their combination of hard work, intelligence, supportive networks and aspiration has created a pattern of social and geographical mobility that has made them rivals to the Scots in the professions, the media and in politics. As in the cases of the Scots and the Welsh, mobility has meant some secularisation and loosening of ties to the religious community, so that Jewry has become an ethnic as much as a religious category, and one suffering considerable leakage due to intermarriage and emigration. The Jewish community has been simultaneously secularised itself and a force for secularisation in the wider society, due to its position in many of the command posts of the media and the university. Half of Britain’s Jews live in London, and are concentrated in the better-off suburbs of North London. After an enforced absence of nearly four centuries the Jews were invited back into England in the mid-seventeenth century. They were mainly Sephardic, and their first synagogue, Bevis Marks, was built, with Quaker assistance, in the City in 1700–01. In the mid-nineteenth century they still numbered only some 40,000 until the worsening situation in the Pale of Settlement, including Russian-occupied Poland, resulted in a massive migration of people who initially settled in London’s impoverished East End, for example the area of Spitalfields which had once been settled by Huguenot refugees. Once the Jews had become economically and geographically mobile, and had moved to the more salubrious slopes of North London, the same area was occupied by Muslim migrants, many of them from Bangladesh. Jewish sacred buildings – whether we are talking about the large Orthodox synagogue in the West End or the Liberal synagogue near Lord’s – do not draw attention to themselves as do, for example, the ornate and deliberately oriental-looking synagogues of Berlin and Budapest. They blend into their environment as easily as the people who attend them, and have the appearance, indeed the reality, of functioning as community centres. Perhaps that is some indication of the way Jewish devotion is centred on the family rather than on a distinctive ecclesial institution.
The reverse can be true of mosques, though minarets are usually not high and dominating. It is an established principle of sacred buildings that height establishes dominance, and a tall minaret in a sensitive area, or the proximity of a proposed mosque to the new Olympic stadium, automatically arouses resentment. Even the large Saudi Arabian mosque in the wealthy inner area of Regent’s Park is set back and half hidden by trees, while the Ismaili centre in equally wealthy Knightsbridge does not advertise itself as a place of worship at all. These are the religious foci of rich migrant communities, very different from the communities from the Indian subcontinent. The famous Finsbury Park mosque was for a while a focus of Islamic radicalism, but it is not on the kind of prime site occupied by the Ismaili Centre.
Perhaps it is significant that it is not at all easy to identify a Buddhist presence architecturally, apart from a statue of the Buddha in a park facing the River Thames, though there are certainly many British adepts, particularly in the upper middle class of Hampstead and adjacent northern suburbs inhabited by the intelligentsia. One Buddhist centre lies out in deepest leafy Surrey in Haslemere, while the UK’s very first mosque is also in suburban Surrey at Woking. Buddhist organisation seems associational rather than based on temples, at least for British Buddhists, whose philosophical understanding of Buddhism is (as in the USA) very different from the everyday Buddhism of South East Asia and of migrants from that area.
However, the architectural presence of Hinduism is less elusive, for example the magnificent new temple in the outer suburb of Neasden, celebrated in the media as proof positive of the diversity of multicultural Britain. Indian Hindus concentrate in particular suburbs, notably in the far western suburb of Southall, an area where there are also many Sikhs. The Chinese presence is also indicated by ritual markers and festive decorations, for example for the Chinese New Year, in Soho and in the traditionally Chinese parts of what used to be the port area of East London.
The Buddhist presence in the leafy interstices of suburban Surrey provides a reminder of how minority faiths may prefer locations well away from the vast conurbation, perhaps as part of their protest against the modern urban lifestyle. East Grinstead, for example, is home to the Anthroposophists as well as the Scientologists, and a major Mormon temple is not far away. However, the most visible, and strikingly modern, Mormon place of worship is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Kensington in the centre of the museum sector.
Apart from Muslim migrants, the largest migrant minorities are Christian, many of them from the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, though there are also Christians from Asia, particularly Korea. In parts of South-East London black migrants provide the main Christian presence. It is not possible to specify in detail the vast number of churches, from the Nigerian Cherubim and Seraphim to the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, except to notice that many of the worship venues are not immediately identifiable as churches. Perhaps one famous building, and one certainly looking like a church, can stand in for the rest. The Elim Pentecostal Kensington Temple is as much an advertisement for multiculturalism in its way as the Neasden Hindu Temple. It claims to include among its large throng of worshippers some 169 ethnic groups. Its position in the heavily migrant Notting Hill area, just north of Kensington, is arguably iconic. Notting Hill was the site of the first inter-ethnic riots in Britain, in the fifties, and it has since become internationally famous for its annual street festival.
One does not think of a Protestant country like England as traversed by pilgrim ways and processional routes, and it is certainly true that London is conspicuously lacking in the broad avenues that provide processional ways in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Proposals to build these – for example from St. Paul’s to Westminster and a Via Triumphalis from Regent Street to Buckingham Palace – have always failed to materialise, as though the democratic spirit (or the British talent for ‘muddling through’) rejected urban grandiosity as both continental and oppressive. At the same time, St. Paul’s is certainly a focus of perspectives, protected by law; and it is also the place where great national occasions of mourning or celebration take place, for example the huge congregations, including much of the American community, that gathered there for a service after the events of September 11th.
Processions and pilgrimage routes are eloquent of what, quite literally, moves people: there are the processional routes of state; the accepted trails for different kinds of protest; and the pilgrim ways that typically lie outside the city and run from ancient site to ancient site, whether Christian or pagan, or both at once. Perhaps the most astonishing procession of state, and one which was also an occasion of popular mourning, followed the death of Princess Diana. It ran from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, and then along Whitehall on a long journey north to Diana’s last resting place, which itself became a place of pilgrimage. The expressions of grief that accompanied her death gave the impression that England was no longer a northern Protestant country but syncretistic and almost Latin in its ethos. Such improvised rituals of contemporary ‘spirituality’ are eclectic expressions of public and personal grief with candles and flowers and invocations of RIP that indicate the continuity of the religious impulse detached from confessional specificity. Yet the sense of grief over Diana was as short-lived as it was heartfelt.
By contrast, the gatherings in Whitehall on Remembrance Day to recollect the grievous losses in the wars of the twentieth century have infinitely greater staying power. They are carefully choreographed occasions of Church and state which have even gained in public participation of recent years. It also tells a lot about a country where the grave of its ‘Unknown Warrior’ is situated, and in England it can only be in Westminster Abbey.. The Cenotaph in Whitehall was conceived by Lutyens as an empty tomb in apposition to the occupied tomb in Westminster Abbey.
Trafalgar Square and the routes leading into it provide spaces for protest marches, and these have a very varied character. Trafalgar Square contains South Africa House, so this is where many protests against apartheid were held. The famous annual Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons ended in Trafalgar Square, and it combined representatives of the Christian pacifist and anti-war traditions and the idealistic morality of the left-leaning educated middle class. The Aldermaston March dates from the fifties and belongs to an older era, but the same elements have been present in contemporary protests against the Iraq war, with the addition of Muslim marchers. The Festival of Light was a different kind of moral protest, defending traditional virtues against the erosions perceived in the sixties. One of the most interesting processions was of the bishops to the Lambeth Conference protesting against the plight of the developing world, and addressed by the prime minister outside Lambeth Palace. Something of contemporary currents and counter-currents was revealed in the controversy over what sculpture should occupy the fourth and empty plinth in Trafalgar Square: candidates already installed in rotation have included sculptures of a woman disabled by thalidomide and of Jesus Christ, and Charles Darwin has also been proposed. Clearly it is a site of contemporary contestation, in part by way of explicit contrast to the imperial heroes elsewhere commemorated in the Square. There is a study to be done of the varied sites of protest, comparing the ‘Occupy’ movement in London (including the occupation of the forecourt of St. Paul’s Cathedral) and New York with major eruptions in Taksim Square and Jerzy Park, Tahrir Square, Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities, and the ‘Pussy Riot’ protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow.
The South Bank of the Thames has been for centuries the site of a counter-culture, beginning with the Globe Theatre and the criminal population that lived in Southwark. Near Southwark Bridge there used to be a plaque commemorating those, like John Penry, who were executed in the 1590s for opposing the union of Church and state in favour of voluntarism. This site can, with historical imagination, be seen as a symbolic marker presaging the First Amendment of the US Constitution, setting a wall of separation between Church and state nearly two centuries later. The major Edwardian baroque building directly facing the Houses of Parliament that used to house the civic government of London, the Greater London Council, was perceived in the Thatcher era to be a symbolic stronghold of the left, and turned into a commercial hotel rather than the Hotel de Ville. City government was later re-sited on the South Bank downriver by Tower Bridge. The Royal Festival Hall, National Theatre and other buildings, like the Hayward Gallery, inherit the same left-wing civic spirit, going back to the Festival of Britain in 1950; and there are monuments celebrating Nelson Mandela, as well as the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. This complex of buildings marks one of the early victories of architectural modernism. The spaces further along the South Bank downriver are now post-modern venues for alternative musical events, while a converted power station now houses the decidedly post-modern Tate Modern art gallery, beyond which lies the Globe Theatre, recreating the Shakespearean glories of the Elizabethan era. Even religion shares in the distinctive flavour of the area. Southwark Cathedral was the centre of the radical and demythologising movement in the Anglican Church initiated in the 1950s by John Robinson, the bishop of Woolwich, a district much further downriver. His approach was admired or dismissed as ‘South Bank religion’. Also on the South Bank, but upriver, and symbolically and dangerously aligned with the historic centre of royal power across the water, is Lambeth Palace. This was the heart of establishment, but its occupants over the last few decades have often been at odds with the political establishment, indicating an increasing distance between ancient foci of power. The Church–state link is now loose enough to dampen any enthusiasm for disestablishment such as was promoted by the Free Churches in the nineteenth century, especially as the state Church now acts as an umbrella for religious concerns in general. What became separation in the USA became in England a loose symbolic recognition whereby the Anglican Church acts as master of ceremonies for national occasions, such as Remembrance Day in Whitehall and the funeral of Margaret Thatcher.
Other pilgrimages take place away from the centres of urban power, whether they are organised by Christians or pagans. All over Europe, not excluding England, the decline in church attendance has been accompanied by an increasing interest in pilgrimage, expressing several motives and motifs: an unfocussed spirituality mingled with nostalgia for community; a recollection of a Catholic past, as in the pilgrimage to Walsingham; and a sense of alienation from the rational bureaucracy of the city. An enthusiasm for pilgrimage, and for visiting cathedrals, mingles a tourist interest and a vague spirituality with a sense of the numinous and of places and ancient sites where ‘prayer has been valid’. The pilgrimage to the rebuilt abbey on the island of Iona is part of the religious myth of Scotland, and the pilgrimage to Holy Island part of the myth of the Christian North-East.
Other ancient sites, like Stonehenge, attract people with an interest in pagan rituals embedded in the rhythms of the natural world as well as in sustainability, in ecology, in living naturally and in ideas of the goddess. The mysterious mount at Glastonbury, with its nearby abbey, is the site of the UK’s largest pop festival, even though its ‘alternative’ spirit has been diluted by commercialism as well as contradicted by an annual Christian pilgrimage.
Almost at the opposite end of the spectrum are the vast cathedrals of what has been called the religion of shopping: aspirations and dreams of fulfilment through goods as well as the good. The older form of the religion is found in the great stores of Oxford Street and nearby, such as Selfridges and Liberty, while the newer form lies much further out in the vast emporia of Brent Cross in North London, Westfield in West London and IKEA in Croydon in South London. Perhaps the nearest venue in London to resemble the classic nineteenth-century gallerias of Milan and Naples is the Burlington Arcade, just off Piccadilly. The arcade is close to the meeting point for every visitor, the statue of the Angel of Christian Charity (popularly misidentified as Eros) in honour of the great Evangelical reformer and promoter of the Factory Acts, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who gives his name to nearby Shaftesbury Avenue.
Closely allied to the monuments of the world of shopping are the monuments of modern communication: the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Street, and Bush House, built by Americans in imposing business classical style. Both Bush House and Broadcasting House have scriptural inscriptions, indicating what was originally serious moral intention and commitment to an educational ethos. The BBC, under its first Scottish Presbyterian director, originally stood for a union of faith, culture and the national myth, but this union has been dissolved since the sixties. The other institutions of mass entertainment are the finely appointed football stadia, which arguably revive classical traditions such as were celebrated at Delphi and Olympia. These are now far more salient than the traditional sacred turf at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Perhaps it is worth noticing that the modern versions of contemporary global sports were formalised in nineteenth-century industrial England.
However there remain pockets of educated seriousness, some still with a religious connection, most strongly in the sphere of music, traditionally the most religious of the arts. This can be traced in the evolution of musical taste and its architectural embodiments, beginning with the great monuments to Victorian seriousness connected with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Kensington, in particular the Albert Hall, built on the model of the Coliseum, as well as the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. This complex of buildings parallels those of the museum area in Berlin, and it owes much to the inspiration of the Prince Consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg. It represents a union of the sciences, commerce and the arts for progress, education and the inculcation of betterment and moral seriousness that lasted up to 1914. In the high Victorian period in the late nineteenth century the main musically serious expression of this was a popular choral tradition centred on the works of Handel, Mendelssohn and Haydn – above all Handel’s Messiah, which had its most extensive influence in the northern industrial districts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in Wales. There was also, of course a popular brass band movement and a flourishing interest in male voice choirs, as well as a conscious recovery of folksong and the carol. All of this belonged to an atmosphere of self-help and educational aspiration which strongly overlapped the world of the churches, even in London. Then a series of shifts took place in the elites, beginning with the aestheticism of the nineties and focussed later between the wars in the Bloomsbury Group, named after a wealthy district around the University of London, which tended to replace moral with aesthetic seriousness. Popular Protestantism faltered, though a deposit of seriousness remained, for example in the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). In the course of the Second World War it was still assumed that the object of education, when not simply utilitarian processing to improve the working skills of the masses, was to induct ever wider ranges of people into high culture. That included greater access to serious music, which increasingly meant the western orchestral and primarily continental canon. A literature was produced, in particular by Penguin Books, designed to introduce the arts, music included, to wider audiences.
About 1960 several semi-related changes occurred: a loss of confidence in educational mission, including the mission of the BBC; a vast expansion of a popular and commercial youth culture; a sense that Protestant massed choirs were provincial compared with small professional choirs and the continental operatic and orchestral tradition; and the collapse of access to a continuing contemporary high musical culture outside a tiny musical elite. That collapse coincided with the demise of the specifically English musical renaissance, dating from the 1880s, and its related religious aspects. A huge sector of musical activity continued to be associated with churches; but it was devalued, and was replaced by a vague sense of the ‘spiritual’ value of music, given that explicit faith was deemed no longer tenable. The Promenade concerts promoted by the BBC were and are a major expression of this unanchored spirituality. Mostly, however, spirituality is so personal and inward that it lacks concrete expression or public institutional form, apart from the eclectic expressions of public grief (and occasionally of celebration) mentioned earlier. Examples would be responses in Liverpool to the death of John Lennon, and to spates of teenage killings in London. Often there are both spontaneous expressions and a recourse to traditional sacred venues, Anglican or Catholic, and sometimes, in the case of black communities, Pentecostal.
Art, especially painting, now rivals music as the focus of educated seriousness, though the emergence of Brit-Art and the kinds installation art favoured by the Turner Prize would suggest that seriousness has been partly displaced by commercial sensation and counter-cultural gesture. At the same time, so-called blockbuster exhibitions have attracted huge numbers to the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Many of the UK’s most famous artists, like Auerbach and Freud, are of foreign extraction, and the same has been partly true of sculpture. One undoubted international figure in painting has been Francis Bacon, and that raises the wider question as to why the art of earlier periods when life was hard for most people was mostly affirmative, whereas today when life is relatively easy art has been despairing.
The issues raised by contemporary art are too complex to be discussed here. However, it is perhaps worth referring to the contrast between the millennium exhibition put on at the National Gallery and focussed on the image of Christ, including its theological as well as aesthetic dimensions, and the eclectic mixture that made up the ‘faith’ sector in the Millennium Dome. The National Gallery exhibition attracted huge crowds and an extensive correspondence, particularly from those who were surprised at the depth of iconographical meaning in the pictures displayed, as well as from those who were otherwise disappointed at official attempts to play down the religious significance of the millennium. Of course, if one compares this lost iconographical language with the total saturation exemplified in Renaissance Venice, and its integration with the power and glory of the Venetian Empire, one has an index both of what secularisation meant then and what it means now. Religious language then was integrated with power structures, whereas now it is one sector of a fragmented iconic field.
My final contrast is between architectural dispositions of religious and political power in Europe, and for that matter the USA, and the architectural dispositions of many of the cities of the developing world. The idea for a spatial realisation of religious dispositions came to me personally in Jamaica, where the European idea of Establishment mingles with the pluralism of North America and the developing world. At the centre of a small Jamaican town the Anglican church stood next to the police station; the traditional voluntary churches occupied the main street, while Pentecostal churches thronged the periphery.
Whereas in Europe impoverished areas might be sparsely supplied with churches, in the developing world – from Manila to Seoul, and Santiago, Chile, to Accra – they will be honeycombed with small Pentecostal churches or else with mega-churches. Mostly the European relation between established political and religious power will remain in place, though in Seoul the conspicuous architectural link is today between the mega-church of Paul Yonggi Cho and what has been the Protestant-dominated legislature of Korea. The impoverished and almost entirely black suburbs at the centre of Johannesburg are honeycombed with small Pentecostal churches, while the immense black suburb of Soweto is dominated by two buildings, the hospital and the Rhema mega-church. As already indicated, these churches of the developing world are now flourishing in the migrant suburbs of Northern Europe, and are often the liveliest centres of religion in what are the secular capitals of the world. They are also to be found all over the migrant suburbs of North America.
My aim has not been primarily to restate the general theory of secularisation, but rather to suggest how it may be inscribed in the space/time of the city, and beyond that to bring out some less obvious genealogies of the secular and of what one has to call the dialectic of sacred and secular. One such dialectic might be successive waves of evangelisation and secularisation: beginning with the monks in the Roman imperial and medieval periods; continuing with the friars in the cities of the later medieval period; and then bifurcating into a Protestant genealogy running from the Puritan to the Evangelical Revival and the Charismatic or Pentecostal movement, and a Catholic genealogy running from the Counter-Reformation to the revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Catholic genealogy is usually neglected in sociological historiography.
Another less obvious genealogy is only implied by inscription in the space-time of the city because it would involve a prolonged excursion into the history of commerce and of the military. It is the explicit embrace of power politics and the power of money in Renaissance Florence and Venice manifest in the Bank and the Arsenal. The Twin Towers in New York (along with other massive emplacements from London and Frankfurt to Doha) were the pre-eminent realisations of these closely intertwined powers in the twentieth century. Linked with that epoch-making development in Renaissance Italy was the emergence of the artist as spiritual hero and of a canonical succession of artist-heroes illustrated in museum and art gallery. Thereafter art and business have been both in conflict and complementary in a long succession that came to a climax in twentieth-century Paris and (later) in New York. This long succession includes bohemianism as reinforced by Romanticism, and has today mutated into the post-modern and the art of ephemeral statement or defiant gesture. The prime embodiment of what has to be called the turn to the aesthetic is the modern museum, which from the Guggenheim to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) is central to the contemporary city. As the emergence of bohemianism indicates, the aesthetic not only includes an invocation of the sublime but a celebration of the amoral and hedonistic. An alternative focus to the museum would be the modern hospital, with its roots in Christian philanthropy and its translation of holiness into holism and health.
Another implicit genealogy is realised in the architecture of the long eighteenth century from about 1680 to 1830, and in the secularisation of Nature associated with Newton, later completed for biological nature by Darwin. The long-term realisation of that sequence of dramatic change is located in the autonomy of the secular university understood as a translation of the universal Church, above all in the massive emplacements of science. Yet another genealogy can be located in the tradition of Enlightened Autocracy, not just in its imperial manifestations but in modern ‘Enlightened’ Dictatorships. Enlightenment has been far more ambiguous in its historical realisations than it has been given discredit for. Another momentous bifurcation manifests itself here between the more modest Palladian and Grecian strand mostly adopted in Anglo-American culture and the monumental classicism of autocracy practised in Central and Eastern Europe, for example in Berlin and St. Petersburg.
If modern spirituality floating free from institutional and creedal location cannot achieve lasting architectural inscriptions over time it must achieve expression in the uses of space, above all in venues for mass festivity or collective mourning. Every city from Paris and London to New York and San Francisco has such spaces, which (like the art scene) combine high secular finance with simply hanging out. The problem is that privatised spirituality as realised in the relationship of client and therapist needs no external markers. By contrast, the simultaneously moral and communal spirituality of the developing world signified by Pentecostalism is massively inscribed in the contemporary city from Manila to Kiev.