Little and large

Here are two approachable and distinctive books on our churches, great and small. Simon Jenkins’s cathedrals survey follows his earlier volumes on England’s best churches and houses, and like them includes fine photography by the late Paul Barker of Country Life. Too hefty to serve as a guide book, it can be consulted as a reference work, or read with pleasure for its vivid and well-informed descriptions.

Jenkins’s parish churches book was a publishing hit in 1999 — partly, one suspects, because it stimulated parochial rivalries with its five-star rating system. The cathedrals are ranked too. At the top are the author’s personal favourites, the ‘three graces’ of Ely, Lincoln and Wells, which share the maximum score with Canterbury, Durham, Westminster Abbey and Winchester. The single-star league is made up mostly of Catholic cathedrals, and some of the C of E’s dimmer promotions from urban parish churches, such as Blackburn and Portsmouth.

Descriptions are necessarily brisk; even mighty Canterbury gets little more than 2,000 words. Cathedralgoers who like to track the medieval masons’ progress from telltale signs in the fabric, or who lock on to the amazing variety of furnishings and monuments found in so many English cathedrals, should look to their Pevsners instead. But Jenkins is a consistently stimulating companion, and his accounts are cheerfully free from conventional pieties, religious or secular. He is particularly dismissive of the ‘nails, spikes and agony’ school of post-war religious art, seen in strength at Sir Basil Spence’s rebuilt Coventry cathedral (which nevertheless gets three stars).

By contrast, the book is refreshingly open to Victorian things. The great George Gilbert Scott receives his due, both for his scholarly recreation of lost or perishing fabric — the central tower at Chichester, the ravaged west front of Lichfield — and for the quality and visual power of his furnishing designs.