Canterbury Cathedral is falling down

1/7
5 April 2012

In the first four months of this year Christie's sold an unremarkable Monet for more than £21 million, three quite ordinary paintings by Matisse, Miro and Richter for a total beyond £27 million and a triptych by Francis Bacon for more than £26 million. This week, Sotheby's trumped that Bacon with another for £43 million. For the art market these were reassuring prices at a time when the values of stocks, shares, houses, the dollar and the pound are far from stable, but, sceptic that I am in art market matters, I wonder if in any of these examples the money of rich men was wisely spent. In terms of current fashion and immoderate display no doubt it was, for those who cultivate envy on the cocktail circuit, in terms, too, of the private collector boastfully making his collection visible to the hoi polloi in yet another privately funded museum; but in the longer terms of posterity, the century, even the millennium, will Bacon, Monet and Matisse still matter? Will there not be too many of their works for these ever to have the distinction of one by Leonardo? I cannot imagine, in 2107, 10,000 visitors a day flocking to see anything by Bacon, as they did to see Leonardo's Annunciation when the Uffizi lent it to Tokyo last year.

If posterity matters to the rich — and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, the Ondaatje Wing of the National Portrait Gallery and the Madejski Rooms of the Royal Academy are evidence that it does — then I can think of no finer object for their charitable impulses than Canterbury Cathedral. It is not yet quite as broken down as London Bridge, not yet the subject of a nursery rhyme, but the roof is leaking, the masonry crumbling and, to put it in the human terms of an old man with a prostate problem and an arthritic spine, it needs more than a strategic bucket and a zimmer frame to keep it going. "Build it up with silver and gold, silver and gold ..." goes the ancient rhyme — and that is indeed the answer, as much silver and gold as was paid for the Bacon this past February or for the Monet, Matisse, Miro and Richter.

The trouble is, of course, that rich men have vanities that demand a quid pro quo. The Sacklers and Annenbergs of this world, in paying for extensions, replacements and refurbishments, expect to be honoured by having their names attached to them. The Royal Academy is topped and tailed by a Sack-ler Gallery and an Annenberg Courtyard, but for how long will these names have meaning for the passing passenger on the Piccadilly bus? The National Gallery took Ludwig Mond's money for a room some 80 years ago, and his name is still there, aere perennius so to speak, but the visitor must be at least as old as me to know the why and who of it, and twice as old to care. Were Sainsbury to fall into the oblivion of Tesco ownership, none afterward would ever know why the hideous bit of the National Gallery is called the Sainsbury Wing.

Could Canterbury Cathedral ever entertain such secular arrangements? Could there be a Sainsbury Transept, Nave or Aisle, a Sainsbury West Front, a Sainsbury Bell Harry Tower? Could the grocer's name be attached to St Anselm's ancient chapel, the Black Prince's tomb or the site of Thomas Becket's martyrdom? With any and all these the attachment of a layman's name would be an embarrassing impertinence.

Donors in the case of Canterbury Cathedral must expect nothing in return. They must give simply and solely because the cause is good. The building is a great corporate work of art, of architecture, sculptural monuments and stained glass. Its foundation reaches back all but a thousand years, to the Norman Conquest, and it is part of the "and all that" of 1066, when plans were laid to replace the much smaller and simpler cathedral buildings that had stood and fallen since the seventh century. The first stage of the current building took a century or so to complete; a second stage began two centuries later, in 1376; the great central tower, Bell Harry, was undertaken in c. 1495 when the first of the Tudor dynasty, the seventh Harry, was on the throne; and the north tower of the West Front was built in the later 1830s, concurrently with the greatest of Gothic Revival monuments, the Houses of Parliament. A little less than eight centuries under construction, the victim of fire, collapse, reconstruction, stylistic revision and the desecrations of Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, it is now parting at the seams, its ancient stones — from massive buttresses to delicate tracery — friable, and, after a dozen decades of exposure, shrinking, expanding, oxidising, the sheets of lead that cover the acres of its many roofs let in the rain.

Estimates for essential repairs to the fabric are:
West towers — £2 million
Nave and aisles — £6.5 million Bell Harry Tower — £5 million Transepts — £5.5 million
Choir, presbytery etc — £3 million
Library and archives — £1.5 million Chapels, undercroft etc — £3 million
To this total of £26.5 million (the price of the Christie's Bacon) should be added:
Stained glass — £2 million
Organ rebuild — £4 million

With a fair wind all sorts of improvements to conditions for the choir, visitors technology and education are also planned, for which the estimates reach a total of another £17.5 million. Thus, to execute the whole grand plan, £50 million, as they used to say at American Express, will do nicely.

I can hear the roars of dissent and dis-approval. This is no longer a Christian country. In a multicultural nation all religions should be equal and we wouldn't dream of giving £50 million to Islam, Jewry, Hindus or Roman Catholics. Let the Church look after its own — its commissioners, the most incompetent of landlords and property developers, are reaping what they've sown. Let the Church of England be disestablished (a view with which I agree). And so on. But I must argue that the cathedral is a building embodying our heritage of political development as well as theological dispute: that this nation's history is witnessed in every single stone from the Norman Conquest to the high Victorian confidence of the British Empire at its apogee and that it is thus a great deal more than just a church of the Church of England. I must also argue that in its beauty it is as much the heritage of the wider world as Angkor Wat, the temples of ancient Greece and Rome, the Pyramids of Egypt and the remains of the Aztec and Inca civilisations, against the religious significance of which there has been no argument. Contempt for the Church of England, the congregations of which it is now estimated will number fewer than 100,000 souls by the middle of this century, must be set aside — the conservation of the building is entirely a matter of its inestimable value, to the world as well as England, as a work of art and a monument of history.

In 1974 the V&A mounted an exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House. This clearly demonstrated the extent to which our architectural heritage had been ravaged by the demolition of hundreds of beautiful domestic buildings when the world about them was changed by fiscal depression, the effects of war, taxation and political manipulation. It seemed to me then, the National Gallery just having paid some £1.7 million for Titian's Death of Actaeon, that we had lost our sense of proportion, for that sum then was enough to buy and restore a dozen substantial country houses. I draw the same parallel now — the £50 million required to save Canterbury Cathedral now that the world about it, too, has changed, is the price of Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull, a couple of Bacons, or one signfiicant Picasso.

Conservation work on the cathedral began earlier this year, the target date for its completion eight years hence, so urgent is the need. This is also the main year of the appeal for funds. In its support, a week hence, on Saturday 24 May, an art exhibition will open in the cathedral chapter house, an exhibition primarily of watercolours and drawings, not only of Canterbury but of churches round about in Kent and in France and Italy, some the treasures of Venice, Rome and Pisa, others utterly unfamiliar. All are, of course, in styles now classified by Christie's as Traditionalist, that is, broadly speaking, recognisable in subject and scrupulously depicted by artists who cling to the ancestral techniques of drawing and painting — nothing here is bucket and slosh and happy accident. The contributing artists are David Arbus, John Doyle, Charlotte Halliday, Peter Kuhfeld, Hubert Pragnell, Alec Vickerman and Charlotte, John and Toby Ward. All 150 pictures are for sale and a proportion of the proceeds will be donated to the Save Canterbury Cathedral Appeal. Build it up with silver and gold, silver and gold...

How wonderful it would be if Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, all the artists who have taken part in the Fourth Plinth and Turner Prize exhibitions, all the many who have profited from foolish commissions for the Church of England's attempts to be "with it" in the art world, and Tracey Emin — Canterbury's local girl (almost) — were to mount another selling exhibition for the benefit of the cathedral. They could solve the money problem in a trice. Build it up with silver and gold, silver and gold ...

Let me end with one more example of the imbalance of value between the art of the present and the past: Christie's have a Chairman Mao by Andy Warhol — the comparatively rare 4.5 metre high version — for sale by private treaty at £60 million or so. Which should a civilised billionaire choose at such a price — the basically printed portrait of a disreputable Chinese despot, or the restoration of the founding church of English Christendom?

Houses of God, an exhibition of paintings in the Chapter House, Canterbury Cathedral, 24 May-14 June, will be open daily, 10am-4pm. Admission to exhibition free, with £7 cathedral entrance, concs available (01227 762862, www.canterbury-cathedral.org).

Canterbury Cathedral fundraising office (01227 865346), 8 The Precincts, Canterbury, Kent, CT1 (www.savecanterburycathedral.com).

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