Unlocking the Church: The lost secrets of Victorian sacred space

by William Whyte

The Victorians built tens of thousands of churches in the hundred years between 1800 and 1900. Wherever you might be in the English-speaking world, you will be close to a Victorian built or remodelled ecclesiastical building. Contemporary experience of church buildings is almost entirely down
to the zeal of Victorians such as John Henry Newman, Henry Wilberforce and Augustus Pugin, and their ideas about the role of architecture in our spiritual life and well-being.

In Unlocking the Church , William Whyte explores a forgotten revolution in social and architectural history and in the history of the Church. He details the architectural and theological debates of the day, explaining how the Tractarians of Oxford and the Ecclesiologists of Cambridge were embroiled
in the aesthetics of architecture, and how the Victorians profoundly changed the ways in which buildings were understood and experienced. No longer mere receptacles for worship, churches became active agents in their own rights, capable of conveying theological ideas and designed to shape people's
emotions.

These church buildings are now a their maintenance, repair or repurposing are pressing problems for parishes in age of declining attendance and dwindling funds. By understanding their past, unlocking the secrets of their space, there might be answers in how to deal with the legacy of the
Victorians now and into the future.

Genres: Christianity, History, Architecture

272 pages, Hardcover

Published December 12, 2017

About the author

William Whyte, Professor of Social and Architectural History and Vice President of St John's College, Oxford.

William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History and Vice President of St John's College, Oxford. His last book, Redbrick: a social and architectural history of Britain's civic universities was shortlisted for the Longman-History Today prize and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He serves as associate priest in the parish of Kidlington and writes regularly for the Church Times.

Reviews

[Katedurie50 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly intelligent, informed and written with a degree of dry wit I enjoyed. It traces the development of the church from the 18C auditory box through the mystery and splendour of high Victorian revival and beyond. It's particularly good at revealing the meaning wrapped up in architectural choices and how cultural change undermines these - there's a good chapter that deals with the 1960s and after and the rejection of the Victorian legacy (and buildings closed, demolished, repurposed). My only disappointment was that illustrations were black and white, in-text, though to do justice to so much sumptuousness would have made a more expensive book.

[John Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating, somewhat revisionist, account of the Victorian church expansions, and their architectural and theological underpinnings. I've studies quite a lot of the architecture of the period and found Whyte's arguments well made. But somehow it was a harder read than it should have been, and I ended up reading it occasionally, five or six pages at a time, rather than in longer sessions, as witnessed by the six months from start to finish!

[Susan Leigh Connors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed.