There are two churches in my life. One is the church of St Sarkis, an intricate little egg-white edifice in central London, built in the medieval Armenian style – like a belltower dragged from the Caucasus and dropped just behind High Street Kensington. This is where my parents married, where I was baptised and where we held my dad’s funeral.
The second is Holy Trinity in the East End, a hunk of austere Victorian brick with two mill-like chimneys. It hosts weddings, christenings, funerals and carols. But I’ve also been there to see a light show, an exhibition of architectural painting, and a DJ set by synthpop duo Darkstar. It isn’t a consecrated church at all: it closed in 1984, and was left dilapidated and abandoned until a few years ago when some funding came through to revive it as the Heritage and Arts Centre.
Both buildings are meaningful to me. At St Sarkis, a hit of the heavy incense takes me back to fidgety Easter services, justified by the promise of stuffed vine leaves and barbecued lamb in the churchyard afterwards. Childhood memories and ancient murmurs of my heritage echo off its alabaster and marble. The only traditionally built Armenian church in England, it’s a hand outstretched to a diaspora accustomed to watching such churches destroyed in the rampant aftermath of occupation.
At Holy Trinity, the revival of a derelict space lifted the local atmosphere: eager visitors bring along camping chairs to queue down the street for free modern art installations (the most memorable, perhaps ironically, involving ten tonnes of confetti floating from the ceiling). Bringing our own candles, we have gathered there at Christmas for carols and then wandered to the pub a few doors down for mulled wine and chips. After so many years watching the church crumble, it’s satisfying to see it now in brisk and lively use.
I thought of these two when Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, announced his party’s latest policy: to grant immediate and automatic listed status to churches to protect their character, and change planning law to stop them converting into other temples, namely mosques. The symbolic aim of this policy is clear, from a party preoccupied with the cultural influence of Islam.
There’s certainly a poignancy to seeing quaint parish churches converted into flats and covered with for-sale signs, no longer representing a free sanctuary for any passer-by. You’d have to pay a £162-a-month gym membership to swim in the pool at the converted Claybury Hospital chapel on the London-Essex border, for example, or stretch to £7 for a pint at the foodhall now occupying St Mark’s in Mayfair.
And no doubt the old denizens of east London’s Brick Lane felt the times changing: a chapel was founded there in 1743 for French Huguenot refugees, then 76 years later it was transformed into a Methodist church, only to become a synagogue in 1897 and, in the 1970s, a mosque, as it stands now – serving local Bangladeshi worshippers and overlooking the original houses of the French silk weavers.
More than 900 churches are on Historic England’s risk register, according to the National Churches Trust, which also warns that a third of UK churches could close by the end of the decade. But while some congregations are ageing and dwindling, others grow. The pattern of church closures isn’t uniform. It’s estimated that more than 3,500 churches have closed in the last decade across the UK, but there was a net rise of around 800 churches between 2005 and 2015 in London.
Churches that close are commonly put to new use, mainly converted into flats, but you can find all kinds of resurrection. St Paul’s in Bristol is a circus school. Grange Free Church in Kilmarnock is a climbing wall. I remember going to “Mass” as a teenager, a club night in the crypt beneath St Matthew’s Church in Brixton, south London. This trend is something of an architectural British tradition in itself now: many a Brit will have found themselves sipping cheap lager under the stained-glass glow of a Wetherspoon’s pub.
Churches often close amid high maintenance costs. Listing a building, as one priest pointed out in response to Reform’s proposal, can make repair and renovation even more expensive and difficult. “Churches are a really important part of our shared heritage, but they need sustainable funding and ultimately many will need new types of ownership and use to survive,” said Matthew McKeague, head of the Architectural Heritage Fund, which specialises in keeping historic buildings alive in deprived places.
In any case, the Church of England already uses “restrictive covenants” to prevent churches becoming mosques or any other faith settings. A company that won planning permission from Stoke-on-Trent City Council a couple of years ago to convert St John the Evangelist into a mosque faced this veto. The church, which closed in the Eighties, had become an overgrown site of disrepair and fly-tipping, and still stands empty today.
Making it more complicated to maintain churches, or convert them into something new, might end up doing the opposite of preserving character. It could mean, as was the case for my local Holy Trinity for 35 years, one more crumbling shell in the town centre – like another shuttered shopfront or defunct department store. A plague on House of Fraser, and the house of God.
[Further reading: The public is turning against the student loans system]
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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