Book round-up 3

Andrew Ziminsky, Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles

Published by Profile

Andrew Ziminski is a stonemason who works on the repair and conservation of historic buildings, especially churches. He also visits Britain’s churches endlessly, and has met many fellow visitors in the process, noticing how many of them knew relatively little about the architecture, furnishings and fittings of the churches they were visiting. So he wrote this book to explain these things. CHURCH GOING guides the reader around the churchyard, the church exterior and the interior, describing the purpose and architecture of the different parts of the church (porch, nave, side chapels, chancel, vestry, etc), and of the fixtures and fittings (font, seating, altar, etc, etc). He covers everything from wall paintings to ancient graffiti.

But to summarise the book like this is to make it sound like a rather worthy handbook, and it’s much, much better than that. What makes this book so impressive (and often so entertaining) is that it’s written out of direct, practical experience. This is a guide written by a stonemason – Ziminski knows how these buildings work not just because he has visited thousands of churches (he has), not only because he has read about them (he has done that too), but because he has taken bits of them apart and repaired them.

Ziminski’s practical experience tells him that there are structural reasons why the doors of Irish round towers are set high up in the wall. He assures us that there are good structural reasons too for building a round tower when your building material is flint, as in many Norfolk churches. Contemplating the 89 carved Norman corbels on Kilpeck church in Herefordshire, he says that each one would have taken a single carver three days to create. Naturally, Ziminski shows a close familiarity with building materials, especially stone, and describes eloquently the explosive fizzing when water is added to quicklime to make lime mortar, and evokes the pleasing riven surfaces and undulations of stone church floors, whether of limestone, sandstone, granite or slate. Stone, of course, is everywhere in ancient churches, from the floor to the spire. Asked if he knows how to build a spire, Ziminski is pleased to be able to deliver a punch line he’s had ready for years: ‘Up to a point’.

One of the joys of CHURCH GOING is the author’s strong opinions. He dislikes much Victorian architecture and is particularly scornful of Victorian church tiles, with their ‘hard’ surfaces, so different from softer medieval tiles. He is against paying to enter a church. He is very much in favour of leaving in place even the most modest historic deposits. Working in a church roof he finds a pair of 19th-century shoes left by a Victorian roofer. When he shows the find to the vicar, she tosses them into the skip, declaring the idea of leaving behind such ‘offerings’ to be ‘superstitious nonsense’. Ziminski continues, ‘It was uncomfortable to learn that she had broken her ankle the following day after tripping on an undone shoelace…only I know how it was that the shoes were returned to their original position.’

Whether writing about church bells, about animals in churches (bats, bees, doves), about the structure of fan vaults, about rood screens, or simply about the effect of the colours of medieval stained glass projected on to a church floor in York, Ziminski is engaging and informing and a pleasure to read. He brings details such as carved roof bosses, ‘green man’ or foliate head carvings, images of heaven and hell in wall paintings, and wooden misericords to life in his descriptions. Anyone who wants to find out more about Britain’s pre-Reformation churches will enjoy this book and learn a great deal. Those of us who think we know a lot about these buildings already will learn yet more.