Roman Catholic church architecture in post-war Britain was prodigious and creative, testament to the vitality of the Church at the time. It was the product of architects, often in tandem with artists, many with clear and innovative ideas, working with a clergy eager to obtain the best and most appropriate buildings for their people. Congregations, at a historical peak of participation in parishes, equally wanted churches and worked together to achieve them. Town planners enabled and further motivated church-building. Churches were designed to be outward-facing, presenting Catholic communities to contemporary society in order to claim a stake within it. Church architecture represented cultural capital, as economic capital was put to use to elevate the status of the institution and its people. Nevertheless churches were also functioning spaces, housing the distinctive religious practices of an enthusiastic faithful. This was a period characterised by huge changes and upheavals: in the forms of cities and the lives of their inhabitants, which were followed by the Church; in liturgical and devotional worship and in theological conceptions of the Church’s place in society; in architectural forms and methods. Yet, at least until the end of this period, the one common conviction was that the church building had an important role to play, above all in bringing the faithful together to constitute a social body, constructing the Church as a reality in all its varied local manifestations.
In completing this book I am acutely aware of the many things I have had to omit. My focus has been on the new urban parish church, and I have had to neglect many important buildings that did not fit this model, including new abbeys and convents and their churches, smaller chapels and shrines, and extensions, remodellings, rebuildings and reorderings of all kinds. Even significant and prolific architects have barely been mentioned. Though this is an overview of a relatively narrow subject, it only scans the surface of a rich and complex culture. Other stories can and should be told.
This culture is now history, and the evidence for it is in decline: many churches have been demolished or altered beyond recognition. While modern church architecture is often criticised for poor-quality construction, often the result of innovations in building techniques or inadequate maintenance, traditionally built churches have not been immune from destruction: indeed Velarde’s best post-war church in Liverpool was demolished long ago, and at the time of writing another in Birkenhead is available for purchase, complete with a magnificent mural. The shift towards modernism in church architecture and the liturgical and theological innovations that took place in this period, meanwhile, are increasingly regarded as an aberration, as revisionary interpretations of the Second Vatican Council at its fiftieth anniversary emphasise continuity with tradition and lead to reversals of reform. However much of an aberration it might one day prove to have been, this period’s church architecture represents a vitally important aspect of the history of Roman Catholicism, indeed of Christianity, in Britain and internationally, and it is equally significant in the history of British towns and cities, their architecture and their social life.