Trevor Cooper and Sarah Brown have compiled what is likely to be the definitive book on church seating for many years to come. The motivation for this collection of essays arises from the current desire in many Church of England and nonconformist churches to remove pews and provide alternative forms of seating, usually chairs, but sometimes movable benches.
Twenty-two authors, mostly architectural historians or conservationists, as well as a social and cultural historian, a person interested in liturgical studies and the Church of England's National Worship Development Officer, have contributed thirty articles about congregational seating. Seven articles deal with the period before the nineteenth century, nine with the nineteenth century and seven consider change in the present century. In addition there are fifteen case studies of recent changes to seating in churches.
Four brief introductory papers discuss the significance of pews, recent liturgical changes, changes for the better in replacing pews with chairs in a Gothic Revival church, and, improbably, pews in Norwegian churches. The bulk of the book, twenty essays, comprising 322 out of 487 pages, is devoted essentially to discussing historic seating. Some essays provide valuable excerpts from the Incorporated Church Building Society's guidance on congregational seating in churches to which it gave grants, correspondence from The Ecclesiologist between 1854 and 1856 about the merits of movable benches and chairs in churches, and extracts from nineteenth-century church furnishers’ catalogues for pews. Others provide insightful contributions from current historical research projects, adding to our knowledge about seating in churches. This section could have done with a paper about the rationales for the planning of the arrangement of seating in historic churches. Surprisingly, there is no reference to the late Nigel Yates's pioneer work in Buildings, Faith and Worship.
From the point of view of seeking constructive alternative seating plans in churches, Robert Maguire's article on seating in churches (based on an article originally published in 1964) is outstanding in setting out the issues about church seating. He especially highlights the way in which seats change the architectonic character of a church interior, and how empty seats stand as symbols of emptiness, of missing people. This, Robin Gill suggested in The Myth of the Empty Church, may have been a significant deterrent to church-going in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and at least partially account for the decline in church attendance. This essay should be compulsory reading for all those considering a church reordering, including parish priests, parochial church councils and architects.
For people considering changes to congregational seating, Trevor Cooper provides papers on why pews matter, and, with Susan Brown, an eight-step process, supported by a flow chart, for considering change. These papers, along with the fifteen case studies, are heavily biased towards conservative change: one describing the introduction of new pews. Only one describes the replacement of Victorian pews with chairs.
Primarily this collection of essays is an excellent handbook for people seeking to conserve or adapt existing church-seating arrangements, and to demonstrate their historical significance. It does not take seriously church interiors as arenas of continuing change, driven by changing theological and liturgical perceptions. Most church interiors and seating arrangements are monuments to past radical theological and liturgical movements, whether the sixteenth-century Reformation, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Laudian-influenced reorderings, Camdenian and Ecclesiological Society medievalizing reorderings in the nineteenth century, or reorderings resulting from the twentieth-century liturgical movement. All of these were radical, and incurred much, at least local, opposition in their time. Without them, we would not have the seating arrangements that these essays are defending against current desires to provide assembly space in churches, and space for more informal styles of worship.
