Context 155 - July 2018

4 C O N T E X T 1 5 5 : J U L Y 2 0 1 8 forth symbols, under which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree under its foliage. These symbols, in which all humanity believed, continued to grow and multiply, becoming more and more complex; the primitive monuments – themselves scarcely expressing the original traditions, and, like them, simple, rough-hewn, and planted in the soil – no longer sufficed to contain them; they overflowed at every point. Of necessity the symbol must expand into the edifice. Architecture followed the development of human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads, a thousand arms, and caught and concentrated in one eternal, visible, tangible form all this floating symbolism… Mankind has two books, two registers, two testaments: Architecture and Printing; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. Doubtless, in contemplating these two Bibles, spread open wide through the centuries, one is fain to regret the visible majesty of the granite writing, those gigantic alphabets in the shape of colonnades, porches, and obelisks; these mountains, as it were, the work of man’s hand spread over the whole world and filling the past, from the pyramid to the steeple, from Cheops to Strassburg. The past should be read in these marble pages; the books written by architecture can be read and reread, with never- diminishing interest; but one cannot deny the grandeur of the edifice which printing has raised in its turn.  From Notre-Dame De Paris (1831) by Victor Hugo When the memory of the primitive races began to be surcharged, when the load of tradition carried about by the human family grew so heavy and disordered that the word, naked and fleeting, ran danger of being lost by the way, they transcribed it on the ground by the most visible, the most lasting, and at the same time most natural means. They enclosed each tradition in a monument. The first monuments were simply squares of rock ‘which had not been touched by iron,’ as says Moses. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. A stone was planted upright and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and on every hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. Thus did the primitive races act at the same moment over the entire face of the globe. One finds the ‘upright stone’ of the Celts in Asiatic Siberia and on the pampas of America. Presently they constructed words. Stone was laid upon stone, these granite syllables were coupled together, the word essayed some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words – some of them, the tumulus in particular, are proper names. Occasionally, when there were many stones and a vast expanse of ground, they wrote a sentence. The immense mass of stones at Karnac is already a complete formula. Last of all they made books. Traditions had ended by bringing Eddie Booth Eddie Booth, past chair of the IHBC and director of the Conservation Studio, died on 6 May. We will be remembering him in the September issue of Context . church are jointly responsible for the upkeep of historic churches, and local councils can apply for grants from central government on their behalf.We might be inclined to be jealous of this arrangement. The architect GE Street put it in a more positive light in 1858: ‘Fortunate indeed is it for us in England that the state is not so careful for us as in France, for then we should see here, just as there, a people utterly careless of the noble buildings which surround them, in place as of here, a people whose care of their old monuments is enhanced and in part created by the fact that they themselves are perpetually invited to help in their restoration and repair.’ Churches, uniquely positioned at the heart of almost every community in England, have both the ability and the desire to be a resource for the people who live in the parish. Investment (not only financial) in these magnificent buildings is needed from the public as a whole, not just from what is now a minority of those who worship in them. Keri Dearmer is historic churches support officer to the Diocese of Southwark.