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If you’ve ever explored the UK, the variety of church buildings will be an aperitif. Every era has contributed its own styles and methods to these religious monuments. Let’s take a tour of church buildings in Britain, looking at how shifting aesthetic tastes, technological changes and changes in religious behaviour have reshaped those sanctified places from the Norman conquests to our own day.

The Norman Legacy: Strong and Powerful

Our starting point is the Norman Age, the Norman conquest of 1066. The Normans also brought a style of architecture that became Romanesque, massive in proportions, with thick walls, round arches, heavy piers, big towers and elaborate arcading. Durham Cathedral, for instance, was a prime illustration of the grandness and power that the Normans wished to manifest. In stone, as a change from the wooden churches of the older centuries, it set the standards for church-building for an age to come.

Gothic Revolution: Flying Higher and Higher?

We enter the Middle Ages in the Gothic style with its sharp arches, ribbed vaults and flying-buttresses. This type of architecture enabled structures to be taller and windows to widen, flooding churches with natural light and Bible stories through the windows. This vertical transformation of architecture sought not just to invite the gaze and the soul upwards, but also to communicate an evolving technology of architecture and religious sensibilities. York Minster is one of them, with its elaborate gable and rambling stained glass windows.

The Tudor Settlement: combining Military with Monastic Coherence?

A combination of defensive architecture and pious strictness – a mixture of the Tudor era and its time of the Reformation – was also in evidence. Here church design included taller, defended buildings, but interiors were more modest and removed some of the majesty associated with the Catholic Church. Not only was the appearance altered but also its function: many monastic churches were demolished and rebuilt.

The Renaissance and Baroque Flourishes

Moving into the Renaissance and Baroque, British church architecture also recreated classical antiquity in the form of symmetry, proportion and classical orders, albeit with a touch of pomp. St Paul’s Cathedral in London, restored by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666, was an illustration of the Baroque – its grandeur, monumentality and luminous interiors, but at a radical break with medieval motifs.

The Victorian Eclecticism: An Aesthetic Rebirth

It was architectural pluralism in the Victorian period, and a nostalgic reprise of earlier styles (Gothic Revival being the dominant one). It was a renaissance of the decorative arts and romanticisation of medieval Gothic architecture with a Victorian flair for drama and ornament. This style of churches – such as the Albert Memorial Chapel – are characterised by its complex stonework and decoration, with the grandeur of medieval splendour combined with the precision of modern construction.

Modernism & Beyond: Function Over Form

By the 20th century and beyond, with the rise of Modernism, ornamentation gave way to utility, simplicity and realism. This was when churches such as Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral broke out of convention, experimented with unconventional styles, and used materials such as concrete, which were far more brittle in design and composition. It was not only aesthetic, but theological, enabling an openness and sense of communality in church halls.

In UK architecture, contemporary church structures offer a testament to the open-ended relationship between art and science. We’ve delved more fully into the modern age, and churches have been hotly contested and fraught with controversy as well as praise for their original forms. Today let’s look at contemporary church architecture in the UK and the avant garde innovations and the passionate debates they raise.

Desecrating the Box Breaking the Mold

There was no more steeples and stained glass and stone arches in the form of church buildings. Today’s architects are doing the opposite, breaking boundaries — with steel, glass and concrete to reimagine a church. Or consider the Church of St Jude on the Hill in Hampstead. Its expansive concrete façade and minimalistic design contrast starkly with the old, but its purpose, to create community and contemplation, hasn’t changed.

Most contemporary churches (including the Chapel of St Albert the Great in Edinburgh) make use of glass walls that flood the interiors with natural light, both an act of religious revelation and a design gesture that unites believers and the external world in a kind of flow. These architectural choices encapsulate a general pattern of modern design that emphasises light, airiness and closeness to nature in harmony with modern principles of openness and sustainability.

Technological Integration

Church buildings today serve not only as religious venues but as a centre for a whole range of public events. Architects are bringing in technology not just for the sake of aesthetics, but to make these spaces more functional. Smart sound, green lighting and even Wi-Fi are standard features of many new churches, making them more conducive to more kinds of services and community gatherings.

More radical architectural expressions, in turn, have been enabled by improvements in construction technology. CAD (computer aided design) software has allowed architects to experiment with strange, outlandish shapes that would otherwise be impossible to build. Technology has given us some stunning architecture that makes the sky look radically different and challenges what sacred space is.

The Modernity Debate

But not all of these modernist experiments appeal to everyone. Some have contended that there are contemporary church designs that deviate too much from the sacred and historic nature of church building. The stark minimalism and industrial materials, they assert, can be chilly and alienating, lacking the intimate, majestic atmosphere that older churches give off.

So the Cardinal Wiseman School Chapel in Greenford’s angular architecture, for instance, had a mixed response, being welcomed for its brave modernity and dismissed for its coldness and sterility. It is one way in which modern church architecture confronts a more general problem – that of how to create a progressive identity while preserving religious tradition.

How to Connect Heritage and Innovation?

It’s an argument that raises a deeper philosophical point: what should a church be in the contemporary world? But is it just somewhere to reflect and live or does it have a mandate to maintain architectural heritage? New churches – in a nation with an increasingly secular character – also speak to changes in attitudes towards spirituality and communal space, as the role and architecture of new churches also evolve.

The Reformation of Church Architecture in Britain

Reformation didn’t just impact on the nature of religious faith and practice: it had an unshakeable imprint on the building of churches across the UK. Going back through this history, there is no doubt that what church design reflects were more ideological shifts and a reconceptualisation of what a sacred space might be. Let’s see the way the Reformation transformed the church, unleashing iconoclastic minimalism alongside new design.

Churches were flamboyant before the Reformation. Consider the huge Gothic cathedrals with their layered stone, their arches and their windows encrusting the Bible with light. They were places meant to awe and to encourage, to gaze and reflect heavenward. And then came the Reformation – with its word, not spectacle – and churches took on a whole new aesthetic.

Perhaps the most immediate effect was a decline in religious symbolism. They destroyed the altars, statues and paintings in most churches, which, according to emerging Protestant doctrines, were distracting, even idolatrous. The elaborate gave way to the practical as the centre of gravity became the pulpit and the Bible. Not a modest decoration so much as a literal reconceptualisation of space, designed to focus attendees’ eyes not on the architecture but on the sermon.

New churches that were constructed during and after the Reformation were also architecturally more severe. Reformation churches were more simple and less decorated, and they were far removed from the towers and ornamentation of medieval cathedrals. Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral is one instance, with the inside greatly trimmed to Protestant proportions.

This purely architectural paresis was more than aesthetic. The simple, often empty interiors resolutely marked a retreat from the Catholic past, and an embrace of a ‘cleaner’ worship, freed from all its vices and luxuries. As part of the Reformation, churches also opened up in new ways to support various modes of devotion and social use. As the monasteries disbanded, many monastic churches were used as parish churches, and needed extensive building work. Such adaptations often meant making them into something more communal and polyvalent – for example, as a school or assembly house – the Protestant concern with community and education.

And churches were reorganised so as to bring the congregation closer to the preacher, focusing on the sermon as the most central worship. This sometimes meant introducing galleries or changing seating arrangements, and rearranging the inner world.

Long-Term Perspective

These reformations have long shaped church architecture in the UK. The stress on simplicity, clarity and usability can still be seen in many Protestant churches erected centuries later. But the Reformation also opened the door to additional architectural experiments as denominations invented their own idioms and requirements.

The edifices that the Reformation built were radical and sustained – revealing profound alterations in religion and public life. The British churches we walk through, whether ruins of cathedrals converted for Protestant worship or ordinary parish churches in the wake of the Reformation, are not only stones and glass but reminders of an important moment in British history. These are monuments to how architecture can record and express changing thought, respond to changing needs in society, spiritually and communally.

Church architects in the UK are ever changing, driven both by technological changes and cultural shifts. Architects recast sacred space in a new and fresh way, and also push back on what the modern church can or should be. Honoured and resisted, these structures invite us to contemplate the contemporary relationship between faith, art and society. The architecture of churches will, in the decades to come, undoubtedly continue its process of evolving expression – like the increasingly intricate and shifting social fabric of Britain.

From robust and raw Norman churches to gleaming Gothic cathedrals to the urbane unclutteredness of the 20th century, each tells a tale of its day. Such buildings are not just buildings of worship, but are monuments to the artistic and spiritual struggle of their makers.

With each subsequent construction and redevelopment of these sacred buildings, we inherit an archive of the divine in time, of the past and present, of the dialogue between religion and art.

Trevor Newman

I'm a historian and writer based in the North East UK with a keen interest in architecture.