In April 1878, William Morris made an impassioned protest via The Times letters to the editor pages against what he called the “systematic” and “wholesale” demolition of Sir Christopher Wren's City of London churches. To Morris's dismay, nine of Wren's City churches had recently been demolished and five more had been scheduled for demolition. Morris's letter of protest described this program of demolition as an act of “outrageous and monstrous barbarity.” The City church spires, his letter insisted, were singularly original and beautiful punctuations in the otherwise dull and monotonous City skyline; the churches themselves, meanwhile, were characterized by Morris as unique examples of English renaissance architecture, illustrative of “a style of architecture peculiar not only to this country but also to this city.” Expanding on this theme, Morris argued that no other European city could boast of an equally picturesque group of related buildings. Indeed, Morris's objections to the demolition program turned the conventional wisdom about the relative worth of St. Paul's and the City churches on its head by arguing that, whereas St. Paul's was merely an imitation of St. Peter's, Rome (as Morris put it “an English rendering of the great Italian original”), the City churches were utterly original, and moreover uniquely English, masterpieces. Wren's City churches were in this way characterized by Morris as both beautiful pieces of art and important historical monuments. That these churches would almost certainly be replaced by banks, insurance houses, and office blocks made their removal all the more objectionable to Morris, who went on to condemn their demolition as a “sacrifice to mammon-worship.” With the financialization of the City in mind, Morris closed his letter with a charged appeal: “[I]s it absolutely necessary,” he asked, “that every scrap of space in the City should be devoted to money-making, and are religion, sacred memories, recollections of the great dead, memorials of the past, works of England's greatest architect, to be banished from this wealthy city?”Footnote ¹

Of course, Wren's parish churches were not entirely banished from the City; there would be no wholesale destruction of these “memorials of the past.” Indeed, the remaining City churches are now treasured by Londoners and admired by thousands of visitors each year.Footnote ² Yet between 1841 and 1904, a significant number of Wren's City churches (fourteen in all, accounting for over a third of the City's forty Wrens) were demolished. The oval domed church of St. Antholin, Watling Street, for instance, was pulled down in 1875; the elegantly proportioned, almost entirely freestanding “corn church” of St. Michael, Queenhithe, was demolished in 1876; and All Hallows, Bread Street, with its fine arcaded and pinnacled tower, was taken down in the same year. But for certain deficiencies of the legislation enabling City church demolition, the toll would have been much higher—for although the demolition of Wren's City churches was not wholesale, it was nonetheless systematic and extensive. At one point during the late 1860s, well over half of all City churches had been selected for demolition.

City church demolition was the most focused and yet also the most sustained episode of Victorian “vandalism,” and it therefore offers a uniquely appropriate case study through which to draw larger conclusions about late Victorian attitudes to the relative merits of historic preservation and urban development. Recently, a handful of historians have emphasized preservationism's modernist credentials in an attempt to save the movement from its reputation for atavism and rural nostalgia.Footnote ³ Paul Readman, for instance, has argued that late Victorian preservationists embraced urban modernity while simultaneously seeking to counterbalance its excesses by “bridging the gap between past and present.”Footnote ⁴ Andrea Zemgulys has offered a complementary analysis of the imagery of metropolitan modernity that focuses on the process of photographic “recordings” of the “vanishing city.”Footnote ⁵ Yet very little effort has been made to reassess Victorian advocacy of historic building demolition. As Peter Mandler has compellingly argued in a recent essay, the voice of the demolitionist has been silenced under an avalanche of decidedly Whiggish scholarship devoted to uncovering the origins, nature, and ultimate triumph of the preservationist movement.Footnote ⁶ Consideration of the advocates of demolition and development has consequently rarely moved beyond the caricature drawn by Morris and his fellow preservationists in which demolitionists are portrayed as, at best, “utilitarian philistines” and, at worst, self-interested mammon-worshipping “forces of darkness.”Footnote ⁷ This caricature has been too readily parroted by historians of preservationism and has even been absorbed into a wider scholarship on the Victorian city.Footnote ⁸

The following essay revisits debates over City church demolition in an attempt to reconstruct the relationship that existed between Victorian advocates of historic building preservation and their counterparts, the “demolitionists.” These debates suggest three heretofore underappreciated features of this relationship. First, they suggest that the categories “demolitionist” and “preservationist” were fluid and contingent, rather than fixed or dyadic, and that individuals moved freely between them. Many advocates of City church demolition were sensitive to the aesthetic and historical claims of the buildings that they condemned to oblivion. Some supported the demolition program on condition that the removed churches would be rebuilt elsewhere. Indeed, it was not uncommon for advocates of City church demolition to oppose the demolition of other historic structures. Much of the advocacy for the retention of the City churches was, similarly, contingent on practical calculations about the continuing “usefulness” of these buildings. The remarkable flexibility of those who argued for and against church demolition in turn suggests a second conclusion, namely, that neither camp was motivated exclusively by aesthetic, spiritual, heritage-based, utilitarian, or self-interested agendas. Rather, both camps were informed by a mixture of all of these concerns. City church demolition was never simply the work of “the juggernaut of modern utilitarianism,” as Sir Charles Barry claimed.Footnote ⁹ Neither, for that matter, were the critics of City church demolition entirely motivated by Morris's heritage concern for “recollection of the great dead, memorials of the past, [and] works of England's greatest architect.” In fact, if one looks beyond Morris, public debates over Wren church demolition reveal that utilitarian attitudes informed the preservationist agenda to a far greater degree than they did the demolitionist agenda. Third, debates over City church demolition suggest that preservationists of all stripes, but especially aesthetic/heritage preservationists, often either misunderstood or willingly misrepresented their enemies. Most advocates of City church demolition were not the philistine materialists that Morris and other preservationists would have us believe they were. They were, instead, driven by a deep concern for the spiritual well-being of the metropolitan population. Advocacy of City church demolition was prompted primarily by the perceived growth of irreligion in the suburban districts of the metropolitan diocese and by an intense desire among Anglican evangelicals to revive the Church of England through urban missionary work and a remobilization of church resources. Indeed, many of these evangelical Anglicans conceptualized the demolition of Wren's churches as a difficult but necessary sacrifice, made in an effort to combat the culture of materialism of which they, like Morris, despaired.

However, Morris and his ilk should not be judged too harshly for conflating evangelical motivations with utilitarian ones. In so far as evangelical culture was concerned with critiquing the “waste” of the Anglican establishment, it did betray something of a utilitarian perspective. Indeed, a significant, if somewhat well-worn, body of scholarship has attempted to explain the development of Victorian culture by illustrating the various ways in which evangelicalism and utilitarianism engaged with one another.Footnote ¹⁰ One recent contribution to this literature has claimed that “despite the obvious contrasts between them [evangelicalism and utilitarianism], a kind of symbiotic relationship mutually reinforced their work,” and that, at the most foundational level, “both were borne up by the conviction that many things were rotten in the kingdom and needed to be fixed.”Footnote ¹¹ The Victorians themselves were well aware of this symbiosis. A. V. Dicey's famous analysis on the compatibility of these creeds is just one illustration of a widespread appreciation of this dovetailing.Footnote ¹² The debates over City church demolition illustrate the ubiquity of utilitarianism and the multiple ways in which it acted upon evangelicals and the Victorian mind generally. Whereas Anglican evangelicals advocated City church demolition as a means of promoting ecclesiastical efficiency and relevance, many preservationists urged the retention of these buildings on precisely the same grounds. Many preservationists made their case, in other words, by arguing that the City churches had not lost their usefulness and that church demolition would comprise an even greater waste than church retention. Large City congregations could be revived, they reasoned, if only capable rectors were appointed.

Insofar as both demolitionists and preservationists were informed by utilitarian calculations of how best to utilize church resources, their positions differed in degree rather than in kind. It would, however, be wrong to conclude that pragmatic considerations were all that stood between the two camps. In fact, their disagreements ran much deeper than this shared utilitarianism would suggest. For many participants in this debate, the fate of the City churches engaged directly with an ongoing struggle for the heart and soul of the Anglican Church itself. The intensification of competition between ecclesiastical parties within the Anglican establishment during the second half of the nineteenth century was at least partly a consequence of the Church's need to respond to the threats posed to it by nonconformist dynamism.Footnote ¹³ Low, High, and Broad Church factions during the second half of the nineteenth century drew on relatively equal levels of clergy support, and each promoted some brand of reform. Although the particulars of their reform agendas differed in important, indeed fundamental, respects, all were agreed on the need to remove the most glaring abuses of the early nineteenth-century establishment—especially diocesan inequality and pluralities. Moreover, Low Churchmen were not alone in advocating domestic urban missions and outreach programs. Tractarians and even ritualists were just as likely to establish settlements in impoverished districts. However, as the debates over the fate of the City churches make clear, these factions harbored significant differences in outlook. Most advocates of City church demolition were self-identified evangelicals who were in no doubt as to the ritualist proclivities of those who advocated church retention. Advocates of City church preservation were consequently characterized by evangelical critics as more concerned with protecting “piles of bricks” than with saving living souls. Church demolition was promoted by these evangelicals as a means of enabling suburban missionary work in underprovisioned metropolitan districts. This missionary work was aimed at saving souls not only from irreligion and nonconformity but also from the predations of their High Church rivals.

■ ■ ■

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the City of London was transformed from a densely settled residential quarter into a business district peopled, during trading hours, almost exclusively by daily commuters from the London suburbs.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1851, the City's residential population peaked at 128,000. Then, very suddenly, it began to fall away. Between 1851 and 1871, the total number of people living in the City declined by nearly 50 percent. Over the course of the following three decades, this residential hemorrhaging became even more severe, until, by the turn of the twentieth century, only 27,000 people lived within the square mile.Footnote ¹⁵ Contemporaries were both fascinated and disturbed by the City's rapid depopulation. Garrett Ziegler has recently illustrated the emergence of a major literary genre of the 1850s that cast the City as either a necropolis or a ghost town. During this critical decade, George Augustus Sala wrote of the “City spectres,” John Delaware Lewis composed poetry on the “City graves,” and Charles Dickens published essays such as “the City of the absent.”Footnote ¹⁶A Christmas Carol, in which the City-dwelling Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by a succession of ghosts, was also first published only a few years earlier. Such allusions to a haunted City proved resonant not only because the City's living population had been displaced but also because no other metropolitan district was so deeply “historic.” London's ancient nucleus—which many Londoners thought of as the only truly “historic” metropolitan district—was in this sense a ghost town even before the 1850s. As one midcentury poem put it, “[T]he great City, towered and steepled/ is doubly peopled/ Haunted by ghosts of its remembered past.”Footnote ¹⁷ At the same time, the City's de-peopling provided a strange juxtaposition to the rest of metropolitan London's spectacular growth during the second half of the nineteenth century (of course, the developments were related, as displaced City dwellers added to the numbers in Shoreditch, the Nichol, St. Giles, and other inner metropolitan growth zones). From the 1860s, this contrast heightened the perception of a “deserted city” existing at the heart of one heaving and throbbing with humanity.

The condition of the City churches provided Victorians with a uniquely powerful illustration of this haunted emptiness. Dickens, for one, dedicated a full chapter of his Uncommercial Traveller (first published serially in 1860) to a meditation on the mysteries and oddities of the “hidden and forgotten” City churches, which his traveler visited systematically over the course of one year. On his visitations, Dickens's traveler first encounters a “mouldy” tower, then a “dusty” font, a “rickety” alter, a “sleepy” organ, a “musty” service book, “threadbare” cushions, “exhausted” church furniture, and a worm-infested register. Indeed, decay is the organizing theme of Dickens's essay. The chapter's most memorable passage conveys this sense of decay very powerfully by describing the traveler's inhalation, during a church service, of an “invisible snuff” that he realizes to be “dead citizens.” “Not only,” observes the traveler,

Rot and mildew and “dead citizens” form what Dickens calls the “uppermost scent” of the churches. Even the living congregants encountered by the traveler are in some way lifeless. The traveler encounters a cob-webbed bell toller in the first church he visits, later describes “exhausted” congregations and beadles, and finally, and most memorably, observes a City merchant and his daughter descending the steps of a church vault to bury themselves. The churches, and their congregations, are presented as lifeless relics of a bygone era. They are, the traveler claims, “monuments of another age,” comparable, as a group, to the “Eternal City” and the “Pyramids of Egypt.” Indeed, his conclusion is that there are “few more striking indications of the changes of manners and customs that two or three hundred years have brought about than these deserted churches.”Footnote ¹⁹

As the City was denuded of its population and given over more completely to finance, its architectural and spatial character was correspondingly transformed. Especially after 1847, the appearance of new joint-stock banks and insurance office blocks built in Cinquecento or Venetian Gothic styles radically altered City geography and architecture.Footnote ²⁰ These substantial, imposing, even monumental edifices—qualities that were meant to advertise solidity as well as prestige—replaced scores of much smaller, often clustered and dilapidated, late Stuart and early Georgian houses. In fact, the demolition of City houses was almost as marked as the migration of its population. Whereas there had been 14,580 inhabited City houses in 1851, by 1901 only 4,000 remained. Although their commercial replacements did not raise the elevation of the City by any considerable degree, from the ground the City seemed to be a wholly different place. To begin with, the bulky monumental qualities of the new City commercial architecture tended to give the square mile a new heft and grandeur. The new City buildings also tended to diminish the effect of the City church spires and obscure the church buildings altogether. Contemporaries found the gradual disappearance of the churches and their steeples to be a uniquely powerful illustration of the City's transformation.Footnote ²¹ The noted architectural writer Lawrence Weaver, for one, was dismayed to find that Cannon Street Station (erected in 1866, and described by Weaver as a “hideous incubus on the City skyline”) and the warehouses of Thames Street blotted out a great number of spires. “It is only,” Weaver lamented, “from a lofty vantage-ground like St. Paul's or the Monument that one can now get any general grasp of Wren's scheme of grouping.”Footnote ²² The sense of contrast and negotiation between “improvement” and “decay” that Lynda Nead has described as fundamental to the discourse of Victorian modernity was powerfully illustrated by the way in which the City churches were increasingly obscured, yet never completely lost, among modern office blocks and banks. The new offices and warehouses consequently enhanced the “historical” qualities of the churches while simultaneously tying the preservation of the churches directly to the preservation of the “historical City.”

■ ■ ■

The Uncommercial Traveller was not alone in emphasizing the emptiness and decay of the City churches. In 1851, just as the City began its transformation, the Census of Religious Worship exposed the shockingly small congregations of many City churches (where it was not unusual to find ten or fewer congregants at a Sunday service) and highlighted the great need of church provision in the rapidly growing metropolitan suburbs.Footnote ²³ In doing so, the census laid bare the scale of waste caused by the City's superabundance of Anglican churches. In the course of the 1850s, further evidence of City parochial waste came to light.Footnote ²⁴ The Union of Benefices Act, passed into law in the same year that The Uncommercial Traveller was serialized, attempted to redress this waste by enabling the demolition of seventeen City churches between 1860 and 1904.Footnote ²⁵ The legislation was quite simply intended to empower the metropolitan diocese to remobilize its resources away from the overprovisioned, and rapidly depopulating, City and into the underprovisioned, and increasingly crowded, metropolitan suburbs. For each City church demolished under the auspices of the act, a new church would be erected elsewhere in the metropolitan diocese.Footnote ²⁶ This program of church extension would be funded by freehold sales of the plots upon which the removed City churches had stood.

The resulting program of church demolition unfolded in an arc. Church removal began slowly, with only one demolition effected before 1870. Momentum then gathered during the 1870s, when nine churches came down. The 1880s played host to a further three demolitions, and the remaining four demolitions were split evenly between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first four years of the twentieth. Although a small number of these churches were architecturally undistinguished, the great majority were unique buildings.Footnote ²⁷ The very first City church demolished under the auspices of the 1860 Act, St. Benet Gracechurch, was spacious, dignified, and set off to great effect by a magnificently tall lead-peaked spire that rose from the building's northwest corner. The casualties of the 1870s were yet more remarkable. St. Dionis Backchurch, which came down in 1878, was a striking Ionic square that boasted a handsomely wainscoted interior and a carved pulpit of rare elegance.Footnote ²⁸ St. Antholin Budge Row, demolished in 1875, was equally idiosyncratic and much admired for its oval dome, which was supported by eight Corinthian columns, as well as for its sold stone octagonal spire.Footnote ²⁹ Despite these demolitions, many advocates of City church removal believed that the terms of the 1860 legislation, which demanded multiple consents from all potentially interested parties in order for any demolition to be undertaken, prevented church demolition from taking place on the necessary scale.Footnote ³⁰ In fact, more than half of the demolition schemes proposed by the Benefice Commission set up in 1860 to choose churches for demolition never came to fruition. By 1904 no fewer than twenty-four schemes for church demolition had been thwarted by patrons, vestries, or the bishop of London himself. Advocates of further demolition consequently sought amendments in 1872 and 1883 that would have removed the requirement for vestry approval of demolition schemes.Footnote ³¹ These amendments were unsuccessful.

In both 1872 and 1883, preservationists mounted strong opposition to streamlining the process of demolition established by the Union of Benefices Act. Many of the loudest voices raised in opposition to these amendments belonged to preservationists who, like Morris, were primarily motivated by an aesthetic and heritage agenda. Arthur Heygote Mackmurdo's Wren's City Churches, published amid debate over the 1883 amendment, is a particularly forceful and cogent articulation of this agenda. Mackmurdo had been Ruskin's pupil and confidant during the 1870s, and in 1882 had cofounded, with William Morris and others, the Century Guild of Artists. Like Morris, Mackmurdo was a committed preservationist. Indeed, according to Morris's friend and biographer Aymer Vallance, the establishment of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings had actually been Mackmurdo's idea—an idea, moreover, that owed its genesis to the threat posed to the City churches during the 1870s.Footnote ³²Wren's City Churches is both a hymn to Wren's singular genius and a meditation on the wider virtues of the Northern Renaissance. The book celebrates the City churches—which it calls “the most perfect embodiments of fine imagination and culture”—primarily for their success at capturing in stone the spirit of the age in which they were built. The harmonious and picturesque arrangement of Wren's spires and steeples—which Mackmurdo calls the “family characteristic”—is presented as especially emblematic of this spirit. Each spire, wrote Mackmurdo, had been

The City churches were imperilled, claimed Mackmurdo, precisely because so few contemporary observers considered them as a community of buildings belonging to a single, integrated historical monument.Footnote ³⁴

Mackmurdo's analysis was shared by many preservationists. William Niven, the Ruskinian chronicler of threatened historic buildings, for example, lamented in 1887 that the City, which he described as “the only picturesque part of London,” had been “barbarously injured by the destruction of the steeples of Allhallows, Bread street, St. Antholins, St. Benet's Gracechurch, all standing on high ground in the middle distance, and St. Michael, Queenhithe nearer the river.”Footnote ³⁵ A contributor to the Athenaeum agreed that the removal of these steeples severely compromised “the coup d'oeil of London from a distance.”Footnote ³⁶ Like Mackmurdo, many critics of City church demolition conceived of the City churches as “living windows” into a lost world of piety and communal concern. One finds C. Kegan Paul, for instance, claiming that, more than any other set of “ancient monuments,” the cluster of City churches preserved the memory of a time when religious devotion and community were valued above mere moneymaking.Footnote ³⁷ A. E. Daniell's London City Churches took much the same view and entreated its readers to “stem the tide of desecration which is obliterating the memorials of the piety of our ancestors.”Footnote ³⁸ Yet more important even than this ancestral piety was the story of the churches' phoenix-like renewal. London's rebirth in the wake of the 1666 fire, when, according to a Graphic editorial on the condemned churches, “misfortunes only proved to be incentives to increased energy; calamities were turned into blessings; the indomitable English courage had prevailed,” offered powerful lessons to a cultural elite beset by a host of new anxieties and increasingly convinced of national decline.Footnote ³⁹ The churches stood as powerful memorials of this story of redemption and national dynamism. “Sweep away the church,” warned Sir Charles Barry in a lecture on the condemned City churches, “and the story goes with it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This warning was echoed by the British Archaeological Association, which claimed that the removal of the churches would “leave ancient London, full as it is of historic memories, as barren of tangible evidences of the past as a city of today in the American wilderness.”Footnote ⁴¹ It was ultimately these “historic memories,” rather than any aesthetic considerations, that the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings believed would rouse popular opposition to demolition and save the churches. “Although the number of people in this country who care about architecture is not very large,” observed the society's chairman, Percy Wyndham, in 1879, “they do care about the associations connected with these buildings.”Footnote ⁴²

Although this heritage agenda was shared by many preservationists, it was by no means the only basis of opposition to City church demolition. Ethical and spiritual considerations were also important. The rector of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, who described the prospective violation of City burial grounds as akin to the “outrages upon graves by the French philosophers and ruffians during the period of the French revolution,” was just one of many commentators who found the desecration of the church burial grounds to be the most obnoxious aspect of the 1860 legislation.Footnote ⁴³ Importantly, this view was not confined to the clergy. The long-serving Benefice commissioner Michael Gibbs, whose job was to negotiate and undertake the actual demolitions, felt that “disturbing the dead” aroused more public opposition to the demolition program than any other single issue.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, correspondents to City and national newspapers repeatedly decried the disturbance of human remains as an unpardonable act of barbarism and a public scandal.Footnote ⁴⁵ The editorial position of the City Press pushed this perspective with vigor, claiming that the violation of graves “will bring upon the City the indignation of that God to whose service they have been consecrated.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The City Church and Churchyard Protection Society (CCYPS), meanwhile, organized vigorous opposition to any “desecration of a resting place of the dead within the City” and pledged that “if for any reason there might be an adequate necessity of the demolition of a consecrated fabric [i.e., church buildings] . . . that the site and the churchyard should be kept as an open space and preserved from desecration.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Henry Wright, the secretary of and driving force behind the CCYPS, maintained that generations of Londoners had buried their loved ones in the City graveyards “not anticipating that another generation would desecrate their remains” and consequently characterized the demolition program primarily as a violation against the voiceless dead and their descendants.Footnote ⁴⁸ Indeed, the CCYPS considered such “wanton” desecration to be an “offence to public decency and morality.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Crucially, the utilitarian argument that City church demolition was needless, and therefore wasteful, proved to be even more resonant than objections founded on either heritage considerations or concern for the voiceless dead. In the face of striking statistical evidence of the minuscule size of City congregations, many critics of demolition claimed that the existing City churches could be filled again, and could be saved, if only the right men were appointed to the benefices.Footnote ⁵⁰ This perspective found great support among the general public. A series of letters to the City Press, for instance, claimed that the “root evil” of the empty churches lay with “the sluggish habits of several of the clergy in their own districts.”Footnote ⁵¹ Letters to the Daily News, meanwhile, confidently asserted that “the desertion [of the churches] has, as a rule, originated with our clergy. . . . [I]t is not to be expected that where incumbents have been in the habit of repeating the most slovenly discourses, with the most heartless apathy, two or three times in the course of the same year, their churches shall be well attended.”Footnote ⁵² Indeed, critics of demolition often claimed that if only more men of Spurgeon's or Dr. Croly's abilities could be found, the congregations of the City churches would reappear immediately.Footnote ⁵³

The assertion that absentee clergy who enjoyed multiple livings were driving away thousands of potential congregants remained remarkably common even during the 1870s and 1880s, by which time the process of City depopulation had become strikingly evident. Robert Gregory, canon of St. Paul's, claimed in 1882 that the City's absentee clergy had left their flocks “to the wolf.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Twelve years later, the City alderman Sir Joseph Savory argued that “it had been the misfortune of the City livings to be considered as convenient shelves for college dons, but if, in future, younger and more energetic men were appointed there would be a great revival of Church work in the City.”Footnote ⁵⁵ A John Bull editorial echoed this argument the following year by questioning and then denying “the assumption” that thin congregations were a consequence of small resident populations. “It is quite notorious in the city,” claimed the editorial's author, “that the prime reason why the congregations are thin is simply because parish priests are non-resident.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The City newspaper the Citizen, which opposed the church demolition program, illustrated the problem by noting that, in 1878, the rector of St. Michael Bassishaw actually lived in Amsterdam!Footnote ⁵⁷

During the 1880s, this line of argument was promoted with special vigor by Henry Wright, the secretary of the CCYPS, who lobbied the archbishop of Canterbury to halt further demolition on precisely these grounds. In a series of letters to Archbishop Benson, Wright claimed that nonresidence was responsible for the small congregation of the condemned church of St. Olave Old Jewry. According to Wright, the late rector (Dr. Forbes), who had lived in Brighton, “did nothing to get people to attend his church.” Moreover, he “kept the church locked from Sunday to Monday, and the parishioners complained that he was always attending deputations or to the affairs of the Continental church society.” It was, to Wright's mind, a “scandal to the church” that rectors such as Dr. Forbes were allowed to “farm out” their rectories and “put the proceeds in their pockets.” Wright's observations were echoed by the St. Olave's churchwarden John Plummer, who in November 1883 communicated his own view to Bishop Jackson that “I feel certain a congregation would be obtained if a good energetic man (not one worn out) was appointed rector and compelled to reside at the rectory which is about being built.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Throughout his correspondence with Benson, Wright forcefully pushed his own view that “as long as City churches are made into almshouses for decayed (though deserving) clergymen, so long must they be empty. . . . Every City church might be used if properly worked.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Moreover, Wright made this argument into the central plank of his public defense of the churches. “It is admitted on all hands,” he wrote in a letter to the Morning Post, “that non-residence is at the bottom of the emptiness of the City churches. . . . [W]hy should not the City churches be left standing?”Footnote ⁶⁰

As Wright's lobbying suggests, the main object of the CCYPS, which led the fight against City church demolition between 1873 and 1900, was not to “advocate the preservation of the churches on artistic grounds, [but rather] on account of their practical use for worshippers.”Footnote ⁶¹ Henry Wright recognized that this agenda put his organization at odds with its partners in preservation, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). Whereas the SPAB sought to protect only those City churches that it deemed historically and architecturally significant, the CCYPS aimed “to prevent the disuse and demolition of churches in the City wherever there was or might be collected a congregation.”Footnote ⁶² The architect Edmund Ferrey, who belonged to both the SPAB and the CCYPS, recognized this cross-purpose and lamented in a public letter to The Times that Morris's 1878 letter of protest over City church demolition had “not touched on what, to a Churchman, is a most important feature in these City church demolitions—I mean the religious aspect. Here are these structures hallowed by the worship of past generations, absolutely swept off the face of the earth, and the site devoted to secular uses—a change most repugnant.”Footnote ⁶³ Wright was himself well aware of the distinct, though complementary, agendas promoted by these two organizations. “Many members of our society,” Wright warned William Morris in 1882, “do not agree with your society.”Footnote ⁶⁴ An illustration of this incompatibility can be glimpsed in the text of the special thanksgiving service given by CCYPS member H. C. Shuttleworth in 1879 to commemorate the preservation of St. Mary-at-Hill, which had been recently saved from demolition through the joint agitation of the CCYPS and the SPAB. His sermon, Shuttleworth claimed, “would not show how much more acceptable was the offering of a heart or a life than the most gorgeous church ever built, but he wished to press upon them [his audience] the sacredness of the buildings devoted to the worship of God. . . . Only the forgetfulness of these principles could induce men to promote the demolition of the houses of God in the City. Did those persons forget that houses once devoted to the worship of God were his still?”Footnote ⁶⁵

In the face of statistical evidence detailing the absurdly low City parochial populations, the CCYPS dreamed up ingenious schemes for refilling the disused churches.Footnote ⁶⁶ The CCYPS publicly predicted that the Inhabited House Duty and the Artisans Dwellings Act, for instance, would lead to a substantial increase in the City's residential community, and claimed that there was “a desire on the part of professional and business men to return to reside in the City, which is one of the healthiest parts of the metropolis. . . . [T]he day will come when all the remaining churches will be needed.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The society also claimed that, if the churches offered daily services to the City's weekday working population, they would regain their congregations and usefulness. The society suggested in 1884, for instance, that although many of the condemned churches (St. Olave's, Jewry; St. Katherine Coleman; and St. Thomas in the Liberty of the Rolls were given as examples) were neither beautiful nor historically important, and while there could be no question that these churches were empty on Sundays, good clergy and sensible weekday opening hours would see them rehabilitated. “The main argument for the maintenance of the remaining City churches,” argued the president of the CCYPS,

The Citizen wholeheartedly endorsed this analysis.Footnote ⁶⁹

Many, while conceding that the City's resident population was inadequate to justify the continued existence of seventy-four churches, bought into the CCYPS's vision of a future in which London would “come back to town.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Importantly, the arguments mobilized by these critics of demolition were both spiritual and utilitarian, but neither aesthetic nor heritage based. Both R. W. Church and Robert Gregory, for instance, lobbied Benson to prevent further demolition during the 1880s, and each man claimed that his objections stemmed not from “antiquarian or architectural concerns” but wholly from spiritual ones.Footnote ⁷¹ As a critic of the City clergy plainly put it in a letter to the City Press, “[P]eople will not come to worship God because the church was built by Sir C. Wren, but from the style of service afforded them.” Indeed, this correspondent went on to argue that St. Mary-at-Hill should be preserved, not on account of its splendid renaissance interior, but because it drew larger congregations than neighboring churches.Footnote ⁷² Such objections fundamentally agreed with the underlying concerns of the demolitionists—that the chief purpose of these buildings was to save souls, and that heritage and aesthetic value were but secondary considerations.

■ ■ ■

Advocates of City church demolition were often characterized as “utilitarian”—primarily by aesthetic preservationists such as Morris, Mackmurdo, Paul, and Berry, but also on occasion by the late Victorian popular press. The Graphic, for instance, described the advocates of City church demolition as the “utilitarian party,” whereas the Builder characterized this group as products of a “utilitarian age.”Footnote ⁷³ Aesthetic preservationists repeatedly berated demolitionists as philistines, one-eyed pragmatists, and vandals who lacked even the slightest appreciation of the churches' aesthetic and historical value, and who privileged “mere expediency” over sweetness and light. Of course, these claims were not entirely groundless. One finds utilitarian justifications for the removal of the City churches peppered throughout the late Victorian public debate. The editorial position of the Echo, for instance, betrayed a clearly utilitarian perspective when it argued that, although churches such as St. Mary-at-Hill were beautiful landmarks, their “uselessness” justified demolition.Footnote ⁷⁴The Times letters pages, which hosted an intense debate over church demolition, were likewise never short of correspondents justifying church demolition through simple statistical evidence of dwindling City congregations and the “waste” that this occasioned. “Are Wren's churches, elegant as they are,” asked one of these correspondents, “worth this waste?”Footnote ⁷⁵ Remarkably, the editorial position of The Times itself betrayed a similarly “utilitarian” position on church demolition during the 1860s. In the immediate wake of the passage of the 1860 Act, The Times wholeheartedly endorsed the legislation, while arguing that “in a City such as ours it is a matter of first importance to have good thoroughfares, and the church will not gain by having her steeples in the way.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Henry William Clarke's 1898 essay The City Churches, which offered a straightforward pounds and pence analysis of the substantial financial benefit to be gained through systematic demolition and the sale of church sites, is representative of the utilitarian perspective. According to Clarke's calculations, the church could hope to raise over £3.5 million from thirty-two carefully chosen site sales, while at the same time cutting nearly £40,000 of yearly waste through the cessation of income to the nonresident incumbents of the condemned parishes. If invested in ground rents and corporation bonds, the combined sum would realize £140,000 per year.Footnote ⁷⁷ Importantly, Clarke argued that this revenue should be used to augment existing underfunded livings in populous metropolitan parishes rather than to fund church construction in underchurched suburbs. This allocation in turn led Clarke to reject suggestions that the City churches should either be rebuilt elsewhere or given to the post office for continued use. These attempts to keep the buildings intact, he maintained, would be both costly and pointless. Indeed, throughout his essay, Clarke poured scorn on what he calls the “Wren craze,” which he characterized as sentimental “twaddle and cant.” The cry for the preservation of Wren's churches, Clarke claimed, was “condemned by every hard-headed, acute businessman in the City.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Although he proposed the retention of some of Wren's most widely admired churches (including, for instance, St. Stephen, Walbrook; St. Peter, Cornhill; and St. Martin, Ludgate), Clarke nonetheless argued for the complete demolition of Wren's best Gothics (including St. James, Garlickhithe; St. Mary, Aldermary; and St. Alban, Wood Street) as well as the baroque gems St. Vedast and St. Margaret, Lothbury. In the face of criticism from preservationists over the great loss that the demolition of such fine buildings would bring, Clarke was unrepentant. “When one ventures to suggest the pulling down of unnecessary City churches,” he wrote,

Clarke's work was grist to the mill of those who conceptualized the demolitionists as so many desiccated bean counters. This taint of utilitarianism was deepened by the close association of church demolition with the rationalization of the City parochial charities. As the City lost its resident population, the substantial City parochial charitable endowments became ever more estranged from their original purposes. Trust revenues earmarked specifically for the maintenance of widowed mothers residing within the parish of St. Botolph, Billingsgate, for instance, were used to fund lavish dinners for vestry officers, if only because the parish no longer contained any widowed mothers. Elsewhere, money intended for charity schools was used to defray contributions to the poor rate.Footnote ⁸⁰ The misspent and unspent parochial charity revenues comprised yet another stark example of City “waste” crying out for reform. However, utilitarians were not alone in advocating this reform. Evangelicals also joined this crusade. Sir Charles Trevelyan, himself both evangelical and utilitarian, was morally outraged by what he described as the “shameful and almost incredible fact that the City parochial charities, which were consecrated to the poor, have in the great majority of cases been misappropriated to the benefit of the rich.” Crucially, Trevelyan also argued, in a more utilitarian manner, that misuse of the parochial charities aided the maintenance of redundant City churches that should otherwise be pulled down. Citing the appropriation of charitable funds for the upkeep of St. Michael, Cornhill, as an example, Trevelyan charged that “the intense costliness of this work of art, for it can be regarded in no other light, gives a painful impression of luxurious waste.”Footnote ⁸¹ The patron of St. Mary-at-Hill, Sir Henry Peek, also mixed evangelical and utilitarian concerns, writing to Bishop Jackson in 1880 of his outrage at “seeing large ecclesiastical funds available, lying purposeless except as provision for a good many useless drones. I refer to the City churches, with their large incomes and scanty populations. I believe 50 might come down without the least spiritual loss to the metropolis.”Footnote ⁸² Opponents of demolition, and beneficiaries of these charities, understood very well that the crusade to end charitable “waste” informed schemes for church demolition, but they ignored the moral critique offered by reformers. “The project for church demolition is coupled, and closely matched, with another,” argued the rector of St. Edmund the King, “for the seizure, namely, of the Charities of London. . . . [T]hus the scheme of spoliation is two-fold: firstly, to rob God's church of her altars; secondly, to rob God's poor of their heritage.”Footnote ⁸³

The City parochial endowments severely compromised the Benefice Commission's ability to effect church demolition, and in fact the difficulty of obtaining the consents necessary for the removal of individual churches was often explained by demolitionists as a consequence of “self-interested” and “corrupt” attempts to ensure the continued operation of these endowments. Henry Peek claimed, for instance, that City rectors and vestries had blocked numerous schemes for church demolitions at least in part because demolition would lead to the loss of their patronage over charitable incomes. In the case of St. Mary-at-Hill, Peek suggested, the rector, Arthur Trower, refused his consent for demolition on at least two occasions owing to his personal interest in keeping control of the parish's substantial charity income.Footnote ⁸⁴ According to the terms of the 1860 legislation, patrons, vestries, and rectors each possessed vetoes over demolition schemes proposed by the Union of Benefices Commission. In the view of many advocates of demolition, these required consents rendered the legislation unworkable. The long-serving Benefice commissioner Bloomfield Bernal, for instance, claimed in 1873 that three projected demolitions had been vetoed by vestries that had been manipulated by powerful individuals and “managed” by interested parties including vestry clerks and other paid officers.Footnote ⁸⁵ Crucially, while he believed that the obstruction of the City vestries proceeded from a spirit of corruption, Bernal was not opposed to the principle of popular veto over demolition schemes. In fact, Bernal believed that consents should be obtained through popular vote at public meetings of all parochial ratepayers—something more akin to open vestry meetings. This, he claimed, would both undermine the ability of “interested parties” to manage voting outcomes through manipulation of small select vestries and result in far more demolitions, owing to the general support for demolition schemes among the wider public.Footnote ⁸⁶

The critique of self-interested vestry obstructionism offered by Peek, Bernal, and others was part of a wider evangelical conviction, entertained by many demolitionists, that the continued maintenance of the City churches came at the expense of the spiritual welfare of the wider metropolitan community. The “superfluous” City churches were, in other words, understood by many demolitionists to be physical embodiments of a selfish disregard for the increasingly intense deprivation, both social and spiritual, of great swaths of London. Given this perspective, many of the most outspoken promoters of church demolition characterized the agenda of their preservationist opposites, especially those advocating aesthetic preservation, as either “un-Christian” or, perhaps even more damningly, “Romish.” In the midst of debate over the 1860 bill for Benefice Union, for instance, The Times, which gave its strong support to Tait's demolition program, combined these two characterizations by describing opponents of the bill in the following manner:

This emphasis on the “interests of the church” and the “good of souls” enabled church demolitionists to cast themselves as the virtuous party and slough off accusations of narrow “utilitarianism.” According to the City Press, for instance, the 1860 legislation was anything but a hard-eyed efficiency measure. Rather, it was an attempt to “keep the church in active labour for the good of mankind. . . . [I]ts principle is that the human soul is of more value than architectural grandeur.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Like the City Press, many advocates of church demolition justified their position by appealing to the obligations of “spiritual stewardship.” This was certainly true of the Bishop of London's Fund, which had been established in 1863 by Bishop Tait both to raise money for metropolitan church extension and to recruit lay missionaries who might assist the metropolitan clergy in bringing London's “heathen” population back to the church. The fund collected significant contributions from the great and good (including the evangelical Duke of Westminster, who gave an annual gift of £1,000) while simultaneously agitating for a revision of the 1860 Benefices legislation that would obviate the problem of obtaining multiple consents and result in more extensive church demolition.Footnote ⁸⁹ This agenda was presented to the public as a way of assisting the bishop's spiritual obligations to his metropolitan flock in the face of selfish private interests that aimed to undermine the bishop's noblesse oblige.Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed, the fund's invocation of “spiritual stewardship” as a justification for further church demolition was enormously appealing to evangelical Anglicans such as Charles Kingsley, who believed that the fund's mission to reallocate church resources would ultimately save London from “barbarism.”Footnote ⁹¹ Quite to the contrary of Morris's claims that church demolition was symptomatic of an increasingly selfish and barbarous age, demolitionists claimed to be doing the selfless work of preserving Christian civilization from the onslaught of disbelief.

Evangelical concerns, and the missionary urge, lay at the very heart of the movement for City church demolition. Like Kingsley, many of the most outspoken advocates of demolition were alarmed by what Andrew Mearns had famously called the “bitter cry of outcast London.” Crucially, from the early 1880s, these Anglican demolitionists were equally alarmed that Mearns, the Booths, and others were attempting to answer this cry from outside the Church of England. The drive for City church demolition had begun in earnest in 1851 following the publication of evidence that the Church of England was losing ground and, more precisely, souls to dissenting sects. Three decades later, the emergence of the literary genre of sensationalist, crusading urban social investigation provided a similar fillip for those who argued the urgent need to redistribute metropolitan Church resources.Footnote ⁹² In particular, the missionary spirit that emerged from the exposure of “outcast London” revived the legislative agenda for promoting further demolition. Just as the abortive 1872 Union of Benefices Amendment bill had been prompted by Trevelyan's publicity of the City parochial charities scandal, so in 1882 an amending bill aimed at obviating vestry consent (thereby securing more extensive demolition) was laid before the House of Commons against the backdrop of a metropolis sensationalized by the publication of Mearns's essay.

Importantly, this environment also encouraged the development of Anglican urban missionary societies, such as Wilson Carlile's Church Army, which aimed to “alleviate the sorrows of the ‘submerged tenth’ . . . in slums and dens of iniquity where Nonconformists cannot permanently afford to labour.”Footnote ⁹³ Although it was an avowedly “non-party” society within the Church of England, the Church Army, which quickly became the largest and most successful of all Anglican missionary organizations, was profoundly evangelical. Beyond enhancing the role given to “lay readers” within the church, the Church Army expanded opportunities for the laity to participate in the wider mission of the Church through social work, and in 1884 it established a training college in Oxford that prepared working men to become full-time evangelists. Carlile's own evangelical outlook had been heavily informed by his participation in the Moody and Sankey missions of 1875, and it is therefore unsurprising that Carlile remained a hot advocate of any measure, including City church demolition, which might enable further Anglican missionary and social work. Prior to taking up holy orders at the age of twenty-one, Carlile had worked in his father's City silk firm and was consequently well acquainted with the abuses of the City church, which he came to view as entirely unethical. Although it pained him to destroy beautiful ecclesiastical buildings, Carlile conceded the necessity of demolishing even the church of his own rectorship, the Wren masterpiece St. Mary-at-Hill, which had been saved by a SPAB crusade in 1875. “I should deplore it,” he wrote to St. Dunstan's churchwardens in 1893, “yet it would not be half so iniquitous as the squandering in sparsely attended services, overlapping each other by meanness, the hard-earned benefices of our devoted forefathers who thought they had provided for the spiritual needs of populations that now reside elsewhere. . . . [W]e are living in rapidly changing times. We have our modern Goths and Huns hanging as vultures upon our borders.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This justification for demolition—that human souls are more valuable than even the most beautiful and historically significant buildings—was widely invoked by advocates of demolition. The Hackney-based demolitionist James Bacon invoked precisely this idea, for instance, when he granted that, although many of the City churches were “triumphs of art, interesting in antiquarian, architectural, and historical aspects,” they were still “but secondary considerations, and that the primary conception of a church is that of a place of worship.” On another occasion, Bacon claimed similarly that “the spiritual wants of the great living suburban population far transcend and outweigh all sentimental feelings for the remains of the dead or the preservation of elegant architecture.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The evangelical priorities of the movement for church demolition are further illustrated by the fact that many of the most outspoken advocates of demolition condemned aesthetic preservation as symptomatic of ritualism. Bacon, for example, characterized the CCYPS as a ritualist organization and attacked the society's agenda for protecting all consecrated buildings as evidence of a “Romish” orientation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bacon was not alone in characterizing the CCYPS in this way. Henry Peek made similar accusations, claiming in 1878, for instance, that a leading member of the society, the St. Mary-at-Hill rector, Arthur Trower, was a strong ritualist.Footnote ⁹⁷ As accusations such as these suggest, the specter of ritualism hung heavily over the City. Bacon, a primitive church evangelical, confessed himself to be troubled by the increasing popularity of ritualist practices in the City churches such as St. Ethelburga, which he feared might “cause the reformed Anglican church to relapse into the state from which it was purged scarcely more than three centuries since.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Peek shared these concerns, keeping Archbishop Benson informed of the “silliest popery” promoted by the young curate of St. Dunstan's in-the-East.Footnote ⁹⁹ Henry William Clarke, meanwhile, who, it will be remembered, advocated the retention of only fifteen City churches, was thoroughly convinced that the ritualism of many metropolitan churches would fatally undermine the protestant character of the Church of England. In a book titled Romanism without the Pope in the Church of England, Clarke detailed the significant spread of “Roman practice” in the diocese of London while simultaneously arguing for the need to prosecute ritualist clergy for “lawbreaking.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Ritualism was understood by Anglican evangelicals to be a particularly widespread problem in the City. St. Dionis, Backchurch, which was demolished in 1878, was said at the time to have been “famous for its ritualism,” and in fact in the wake of demolition its ex-rector, William Hearle Lyall, converted to Catholicism.Footnote ¹⁰¹ St. Vedast was equally notorious for the ritualism of its rector, the Reverend T. Pelham Dale, over whom Bishop Jackson kept a close watch during most of the 1870s.Footnote ¹⁰² The late Victorian belief that the City was awash in ritualism was of a piece with the analysis that characterized the administrative inefficiencies of the City church as a “Catholic abuse.” In light of such attitudes, it is clear that the champions of demolition sought not only to extend church provision but also to purify it by clearing the City of, and consequently saving the metropolitan church from, quasi “popery.”

The reluctance, and even pain, with which Carlile, Bacon, and others conceded the need for church demolition suggests yet another feature of the demolitionist movement: namely, that it was not entirely dismissive of claims for preservation. Most advocates of church demolition were not heartless philistines or vandals. In fact, many recognized the great artistic and historical value of Wren's churches, and very few argued for anything like wholesale or indiscriminate demolition. Robert Gregory's outlook was in many respects typical of this attitude. As dean of St. Paul's, Gregory could hardly overlook the waste occasioned by the maintenance of the superabundant City churches, and he was correspondingly “desirous that there should be a reasonable diminution in the number of City churches, partly because we recognize that their number is ‘excessive’ and partly because we recognize that if nothing is done, enemies will be active.” But Gregory was also anxious about the prospect of stripping the City of beauty and historical association, and consequently put out feelers with Archbishop Benson about the possibility of preserving the tower of St. Dunstan's-in-the-East.Footnote ¹⁰³ Gregory was not alone in his appreciation of Wren's work. There was nearly universal agreement among the Benefice commissioners, for instance, that a handful of Wren's best churches should be saved regardless of their scant congregations.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Even Henry Peek justified his proposed demolition of St. Mary-at-Hill by arguing that, in his view, St. Dunstan's-in-the-East was one of Wren's chefs-d'-oeuvre and should therefore be saved, at the expense of his own church, to become the parish church of the united benefice.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Moreover, the Union of Benefice legislation dictated that care be taken to rebuild as many of the removed City churches as possible in new locations, although this did little to satisfy preservationist critics of removal. Advocates of church demolition were also mindful of the fate of church furnishings, and in fact Archbishop Benson consulted with the Royal Institute of British Architects over the preservation of “historic” fabric such as church screens, pulpits, pews, brass, and chandeliers.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The advocates of church demolition were removed from the culture of utilitarianism in one further respect, namely, that the great majority of demolitionists looked to the past rather than to the future to justify their program. Instead of conjuring up visions of a brave new world, the advocates of church removal justified their program through appeals to “convention” and indeed “heritage.” In the past, they argued, when churches were no longer needed, they had been torn down and rebuilt where there was a need. “Our forefathers,” argued The Times in its defense of the Benefices legislation, “made nothing of a church or a steeple, or a burial ground. These they cut about as freely as a carpenter his boards or a tailor his cloth. . . . [T]he present Bill goes more in the old beaten track, and really has nothing new about it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Much was also made of the fact that Wren himself had intended to scale back the number of City churches in the wake of the fire. In 1860, for instance, Tait sought to legitimize his measure by emphasizing that Wren had originally intended to reduce the number of churches from ninety-one to thirty-two when commissioned to rebuild the City churches in the wake of the fire.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The preservationists, Tait claimed, were the ones deviating from tried-and-true methods; the preservationists were the “innovators.”

■ ■ ■

The late Victorian debates over City church demolition should caution historians from taking the claims of preservationists at face value. We have assumed, for too long, that the Victorian advocates of demolition and development advanced a set of sensibilities and mentalities that were diametrically opposed to those of their preservationist critics. Yet many of these men were demonstrably not the narrowly utilitarian philistines that the caricature drawn by William Morris and other would have us believe they were. In fact, many demolitionists shared much the same set of sensibilities as those advanced by their preservationist critics. Evangelicals who in one set of circumstances might advocate the demolition of a Wren church might in another set of circumstances advocate the conservation of some other historic monument such as the Temple Bar. Likewise, it is entirely likely that a High Church advocate of City church preservation might happily concede the necessity of removing Temple Bar to facilitate the free movement of traffic. The relationship between these groups, in other words, was defined less by static polarity than by fluid interconnection.

Moreover, the debates over City church demolition should also caution us against understanding late Victorian preservationism as a creed dominated by heritage and aesthetic considerations. This was just one, and not the predominant, thread that informed the thinking of those advocating the retention of historic buildings. This heritage consideration only came to dominate preservationist thinking during the interwar period. In fact, late Victorian debates over church demolition were strikingly similar to early Victorian debates on the same topic, but they shared very few similarities with early twentieth-century debates over church demolition. One gets a clear sense of this when the tone, character, and shape of late Victorian debates over church demolition are compared to the tone, character, and shape of debates surrounding the unsuccessful City church demolition schemes put forward in 1834 and 1919. In 1834, a committee of the City Common Council proposed the demolition of thirteen City churches, including the magnificent St. Stephen's, Walbrook. Anticipating Morris's later critique, the City barrister J. Sydney Taylor described the corporation scheme as a “barbarous” outrage, which would have deprived London of its greatest and most unique architectural ornament merely to enable the erection of additional “shrines to Mammon.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Most critics of the proposal, however, ignored such heritage and aesthetic concerns, concentrating instead on the effect that this scheme would have on metropolitan church provision. Bishop Blomfield, for instance, opposed the corporation scheme, but his opposition was contingent rather than absolute. Had the corporation agreed to fund the erection of thirteen churches in the London suburbs, Blomfield would have considered its proposals.Footnote ¹¹⁰ These same considerations dominated the late Victorian debates. By 1919, when a Bishop's Commission suggested the demolition of a further nineteen City churches, such considerations had become marginal.Footnote ¹¹¹ In fact, they had been replaced almost entirely by heritage considerations. Advocates of City church preservation had by the 1920s almost completely discarded the view that these “heirlooms” should be retained as places of worship. Rather, the City churches had come to be valued almost exclusively as historical texts. “For purely religious purposes as measured by the numbers who use them, these churches have largely lost their value,” conceded a correspondent to the Observer, but “to admit this does not in any way lessen the incontestable value of most of those now in question as works of art representative of the most interesting aesthetic phase in our national life, and which, as such, demands their preservation.”Footnote ¹¹² Similar letters appeared in provincial papers. “Those churches may or may not have congregations, but that is not the point,” claimed a reader of the Manchester Dispatch, “those churches are the nation's. . . . [T]hese buildings are history in stone, and at least show us the ideas and ideals of our forefathers as no lecture can.”Footnote ¹¹³

Many observers of the public protest against City church demolition commented on this new centrality of heritage consideration. The Times, for instance, noted in late May 1920 that public comment had been almost entirely concentrated on the “prospective loss to the nation, to the City, to the church, to architecture, and to posterity” that further church demolition would occasion.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Westminster Gazette, meanwhile, claimed that

The absence of late Victorian popular support for such perspectives comprises perhaps the most striking feature of the debates outlined in this essay. The tone of these late Victorian debates was set by the twin pillars of Victorian culture: utilitarianism and evangelicalism. This tone, and the secondary importance of heritage considerations in church demolition debates, calls into question the relationship that is said to have existed between preservationism and “Victorian modernity.” Modernity has become a conceptual meeting point for historical geographers, literary scholars, art historians, and historians wishing to refound the interdisciplinary claims of Victorian studies—although one could make the case that practitioners within these various disciplines have approached the subject according to competing rather than shared or even complementary methodological frameworks.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Recent reconceptualizations of “the Victorian” have also hinged on particular readings of the chronology and nature of modernity. As an upshot, the final three decades of the nineteenth century have increasingly come to be seen as part of a separate “post-Victorian” age defined by its modernity.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Much of the work that problematizes orthodox conceptions of “the Victorian” has focused on specific moments of “metropolitan modernity.” To take just one recent example, Stephen Inwood's City of Cities has synthesized a series of these points of modernity to make an argument for the 1880s as a watershed of modernity in London. The book's closing chapter explicitly rejects the view that the First World War modernized London, noting that each of the postwar developments that have conventionally been associated with modernity had already taken place in London and had “touched almost every life” there before the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹¹⁸ If, as some have suggested, the emergence of a preservationist movement during the late 1870s signifies a “modern moment,” then popular apathy or, worse yet, popular antipathy, to the aims of this movement during the final three decades of the nineteenth century should surely caution us from invoking the preservationist mentality as evidence of “Victorian modernity.”