The price of a cathedral

We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake, not a parish church: they must be rich, with all those gold-coloured vestments and choristers in ruffs. But if we want our cathedrals to be alive and singing psalms in 20 years’ time, this misconception about cathedrals must change. Indeed, the sub-dean of Coventry is openly clamping down. At the end of organ recitals, he now employs a joke designed to elicit banknotes: ‘The lady collecting your donations today is rather frail, so please don’t load her down with coins.’ A survey by the BBC earlier this year found that out of 38 cathedral deans, 26 were ‘worried’ or ‘very worried’ about the financial future. Many cathedrals are only just breaking even, and some remote ones off the tourist trail are running at a deficit. They might be asset-rich, but they’re cash-poor and selling any of those assets is either against the rules or as short-termist as selling the family silver. Unlike in France, where cathedrals are propped up by state, in the UK cathedrals are totally self-financing. Keeping them going is like trying to run a private school with no fee-paying parents or a small kingdom with no taxpayers. George Osborne did release a one-off gift of £20 million two years ago, to be shared among 42 cathedrals: the ‘First World War Centenary Cathedral Repair Fund’. Cathedrals were prostrate with gratitude for that handout, but the money was guzzled up in no time in urgent, unglamorous repairs such as rewiring. Year after year, cathedrals have to find the money to fund their choir (sometimes paying a large chunk of the choristers’ school fees), the salaries of all the vergers and other members of paid staff, the heating, the lighting, and above all the upkeep of the priceless crumbling buildings.