Under the rather ponderous headline ‘Revealing Misunderstandings about Stewardship of Our Ancient Churches’, Historic England has just published the results of its survey into public awareness of the crisis facing the nation’s places of worship. The results show that people are blithely unaware that many are at risk of closure and sale.
The discovery of a mass grave in the Jordanian city of Jerash (ancient Gerasa) has provided evidence of the impact on the population of the Justinian Plague. A newly published study of the burial site has revealed that at least 230 individuals were hastily buried on top of each other, rather than in individual graves, within the city’s abandoned hippodrome
Organisations in the heritage sector welcomed January’s news that the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport was going to invest £1.5 billion in capital funding for the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors in England (the other three home nations have yet to say whether they will be making similar investments)
Today, 757 synagogues are deemed to be at risk, which illustrates the scale of the task facing the FJH in its mission to ‘celebrate and honour Europe’s lost Jewish communities’ and rescue these emblematic buildings as ‘powerful places of education’ offering ‘valuable insights into Jewish life and its impact on wider society’.
Christopher Catling employs joined-up thinking in his regular column on the eccentricities of the heritage world
No doubt those early Christians would say it was relatively mild revenge for the sufferings of the martyrs.
Christopher Catling highlights threats to Fab Four-related buildings in their home city of Liverpool
‘Context is all’: as the culture wars heat up, Christopher Catling looks at the problems of our contested heritage
Christopher Catling examines new evidence of the ancient links between Celtic Britain and the eastern Mediterranean
Many of us have developed a stronger appreciation of the natural and cultural heritage in our own back yards.
The Cloister Cafe at London’s St Bartholomew the Great (used as a location for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, Sherlock Holmes, and Muppets: Most Wanted) is described as ‘an extraordinary cafe for an extraordinary church.
Dressing up as a ghost or ghoul seems a relatively harmless activity by contrast with the inflammatory implications of burning a religious fanatic, especially to children bought up on a diet of Harry Potter and TV vampires.
Though the Trust owns the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and last year said it would consider buying the Abbey Road studios if EMI put up for sale, it seems not to be interested in Starr’s home. Standing unloved and boarded up, it will share the same fate as a number of other Victorian two-up-two down terraces in the area known as ‘the Welsh Streets’.