Chiltern Open Air Museum, Buckinghamshire

 

Woodworkers

If you read one of those books about traditional English crafts by authors such as Dorothy Hartley or James Fox, you’ll probably find a section about the chair-makers of the Chilterns.* Some of these craftsmen were based in the local woodlands, where they made entire chairs. Others specialised in producing turned chair legs using a hand-operated pole lathe. They worked next to the trees that provided their raw material, and the chair legs they made would be sold to a wooden-chair manufacturer. Buckinghamshire was a centre of furniture-making and towns such as High Wycombe were famous for their wooden chairs, particularly Windsor chairs. Chair-makers like James Elliott and Son added hand-turned chair legs to wooden seats and other components to produce comfortable, elegant chairs that were popular and long-lasting. James Elliott and Son built their factory in High Wycombe in 1887 and ran their business there until 1974, making Windsor chairs there for the whole period except for the two World Wars, when they branched out into aeroplane wings (World War I) and furniture for the Royal Navy (World War II).

When their factory came to the end of its working life, the building was taken apart and rebuilt at the Chiltern Open Air Museum. Brick on the ground floor, wooden boards over a timber frame above, the building is roofed in slate. Its two floors are connected by exterior staircases that free up the space inside and provide an easy way of manoeuvring unwieldy chairs and raw materials in and out of the building. There are large windows, so the factory is very light inside, creating good conditions for the meticulous work of assembling chairs that workers and owners could be proud of. Today, a collection of chairs, other wooden products, and wood-workers’ tools are displayed inside.

Looking very neat in its shiny green paintwork, the furniture factory is an asset to the museum, preserving a building linked to an important industry in the area. It’s also one of a number of wooden buildings in the museum – Buckinghamshire is not rich in good building stone, so pavilions, workshops, houses, barns and all kinds of other farm buildings were often made by constructing a timber frame and cladding it with boards. The museum has several of these, and the furniture factory is one of the most striking.

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* See, for example, Dorothy Hartley, Made in England (first published in 1939; reprinted by Little Toller Books, 2018) and James Fox, Craftland (The Bodley Head, 2025). James Fox’s book is an excellent place to start, is beautifully written, and is one of the best books I read last year.

The weakest go to the wall

There are rumblings in the Church of England. Up and down the country, pews are being removed from parish churches and not everyone likes it. Press reports that stress the new uses to which pewless churches can be put - yoga classes and the like - make yet more hackles rise. We know the C of E is a broad church, but yoga classes? Really? There's the stuff of comedy and soap opera here, and Ambridge is already debating the question. But, as so often, the soaps are airing a real issue.

In many places, the church is used by a handful of people for an hour a week, and such a group finds it hard to raise the money to maintain an often old and listed building. Meanwhile, there's frequently the need for a comunity building to house all kinds of activities from drama groups to, yes, yoga classes. Not all villages have a village hall and removing pews from a village church frees up space for such activities. To many, opening up the church in this way is a chance to bring the building back to the wider population - and to give the church the chance to raise money for costly repairs too. To others, such a move seems like heresy.

Well, it's a bit unfair to condemn it when, for hundreds of years, churches have been used for so much more than services. In the Middle Ages, church buildings were used, amongst other things, for court sittings, village meetings, charitable handouts, and sealing business deals. Later they became in addition repositories of records or schoolrooms, or provided garaging space for the local fire engine. Most of these things took place in the nave, the main body of the church, while the chancel, the domain of the clergy, was reserved as the truly sacred space.

Many of these secular uses of church buildings required flexible space, and early medieval churches had little in the way of seating - mainly seats for the infirm near the walls (hence the expression 'The weakest go to the wall'). In the later Middle Ages, many churches fitted pews (though not always throughout the church) and pews were also the staple of church fitting in the Georgian period. The Victorians too were great pew-builders, and many of the pews now slated for removal are Victorian. By the Victorian period something else had happened too. People were thinking of the whole church as an exclusive 'sacred space', devoted entirely to God. Business dealings, fire engines, and the like just weren't appropriate here.

And that's still one reason why, for many, pews are sacrosanct. They define sacred space - as well as being old, traditional, what people are used to, and better looking than the insitutional chairs that so often arrive as pew replacements.

In my opinion, there's often a case for removing pews (though I'd keep historical fittings like medieval benches and Georgian box-pews) from at least part of many church buildings. A clear, uncluttered pewless area can enhance the spatial dignity and grandeur of a church interior as well as making it usable for all kinds of activities and so bringing more people in. But if you do scrap the pews, for goodness sake find some decent chairs for parishioners to sit on. Then open the building up to the groups that need the space, introduce people to the church, and get them raising cash for the roof repairs. Then the building itself won't go weakly to the wall.