This piece first appeared in The Times’ Credo column on Saturday 20th June 2026. Written by George Lapshynov.
If England lets its cathedrals crumble, it will be everybody’s loss.
People walk into cathedrals for all sorts of reasons: to light a candle, hear a choir, escape the rain, attend a service, admire the architecture or simply to sit quietly for a few minutes to escape the busyness of life. Many enter with no clear purpose at all. They simply step inside and the building does the rest.
That’s what makes England’s cathedrals so unusual. They are among the last institutions left in national life that still draw together people of all ages, classes, politics and beliefs, under one roof. Yes, they are Christian places of worship, but they are “houses of prayer for all peoples”, as Isaiah puts it (Liii, 7). They are civic spaces, cultural landmarks and public sanctuaries, open to anyone who wanders in and finds themselves lingering under their vaults. No wonder, then, that the question of how to keep these places alive is not just a church issue. Earlier this week, deans from England’s Anglican cathedrals were in Westminster with MPs to form a new parliamentary network of cathedral cities, pressing the urgent question: who is going to cough up the money to keep these remarkable buildings going?
It’s a query that cannot be left to church leaders and politicians alone. Cathedrals matter far beyond the Church, because the people who use and cherish them stretch far beyond the (dwindling) ranks of practising Christians.
New research by Theos and the Association of English Cathedrals underscores just how broad this public relationship is. Nearly three quarters of adults in England said in a recent poll that they had visited a cathedral at least once in the previous three years.
They come for a wide range of reasons. Step into a cathedral on a weekday, and you will find a microcosm of English life: morning prayer, followed by a school trip, a civic commemoration, a midday organ recital, the steady trickle of tourists and local lunchtime visitors who come simply to sit and reflect, a service of evensong and perhaps an evening lecture or concert to round out the day.
Even for those with no religious faith, cathedrals clearly offer something increasingly hard to find elsewhere: silence, beauty, perspective, a break from the frenetic blur of screens and shops.
And yet, that very familiarity hides a serious problem. Because cathedrals look grand, ancient and permanent, many people assume they must be well funded — by the Church, by the state, by some hidden endowment, by someone else. But that’s often a fantasy.
Cathedrals are expensive to keep open, safe, warm and welcoming. Stonework decays, roofs leak and heating bills mount. Choirs, libraries, archives and education programmes do not sustain themselves by magic. Meanwhile, what money cathedrals do help to generate for their local areas often doesn’t make its way back to the cathedral itself.
Visitors drawn by a great cathedral spend their money in often struggling nearby shops, cafés and hotels. Cathedrals bolster tourism, local commerce, heritage skills and civic pride, but too little of that benefit comes back to fund the cathedrals themselves. They often must scramble for grants, donations and emergency funds just to keep the lights on.
This is the cathedral paradox. The public’s relationship with these buildings is engaged, but also passive. In the same poll, 61 per cent said they would be upset if their local cathedral closed, yet only 31 per cent would be likely to donate to save it. In short, we Brits want these grand, beautiful spaces in our cities and counties, but tend to assume their survival is someone else’s responsibility.
That assumption is dangerous, because cathedrals are not luxuries or museum pieces — they are vital to our national life. If they are allowed to decline, the damage won’t stop at the church door. It will reverberate through local schools that count on the cathedral for assembly and celebration, through music and arts communities that flourish around choir schools and concert series, through small businesses that rely on tourist footfall, through towns and cities whose soul and sense of identity and history is reliant on their cathedral’s silhouette.
People in need of solace or quiet will lose their refuge. Those who would not call themselves believers but feel that ancient pull in times of crisis will be left bereft. Supporting cathedrals is not about subsidising religion, it’s about investing in civic life, and in institutions that bind together so many facets of our shared life.
Cathedral leaders are working to make this case, but they cannot do it alone. If we want these places to remain alive — rather than beautiful ruins like those left by the dissolution of the monasteries, a picturesque backdrop to national decline — then government, philanthropy and the wider public must stop leaving them as someone else’s problem.
We inherited cathedrals we did not build and cannot now replace. Will we hand them on as living spaces open to all or let them crumble into monuments to our own carelessness? Affection alone is not enough. At some point, it has to translate into cold, hard cash.
George Lapshynov is a researcher for Theos, the Christian, religion and society think tank. He is co-author of its latest report, “Living Stones: English Cathedrals as Sacred Spaces in Changing Times”.
