If These Stones Could Talk

‘A heavenly book, elegant and thoughtful. Get one for yourself and one for the church-crawler in your life!’ Lucy Worsley

‘Someone new to both church history and church-crawling would learn a good deal from this agreeably written book’ Lucy Beckett: TLS

‘I have long found the books of Peter Stanford to be always entertaining and stimulating. This rich and varied text…ought to be enjoyed by a wide audience as it describes and comments on nearly 2000 years of religion among the many cultures that have come and gone in that time’ Peter Costello: Irish Catholic

‘Simon Jenkins had enough trouble choosing 1000 of the 16,000 Anglican parish churches in England: daringly, this author manages to whittle that down to 21 in the whole of the British Isles…and produces a highly engaging history’ John Inge: Church Times

‘‘Setting out to relate the history of Christianity on these islands through a selection of churches or monasteries may seem a bold or even foolhardy undertaking. However, Stanford pulls it off with flair and conviction.’ TP O’Mahony: The Irish Examiner

Christianity has been central to the life of Britain and Ireland, and to those of us who live here, for almost 2,000 years. It has given us laws, customs, traditions and formed our national characters. From a persecuted minority in Roman Britannia through the ‘golden age’ of Anglo-Saxon monasticism, the devastating impact of the Vikings, and the alliance of church and state after the Norman Conquest to the turmoil of the Reformation that saw the English monarch replace the Pope, and the Puritan Commonwealth then replace the king, it is a tangled, tumultuous story of faith and achievement, division and bloodshed. In If These Stones Could Talk, with wonderful line drawings by artist-architect Stephen Tsang, I set out on a journey through England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland to 20 churches, abbeys, chapels and cathedrals, both grand and humble, ruined and thriving, ancient and modern, which century by century chronicle how a religion that began in the Middle East came to define our past and shape our present.

In exploring the stories of buildings that are still so much a part of the landscape, the details of their design, the treasured objects that are housed within them, the people who once stood in their pulpits and those who sat in their pews, a narrative grows of what Christianity has meant to the nations of the British Isles, how it reflected the relationship between rulers and ruled, and the sense it has given us of who we are and how we live with each other. It is, I hope and intend, as much a book for those with no faith, or a ill-defined sense that there may be something more to life than meets the eye, as much as for those who go to church occasionally or every Sunday. Because over the past 2000 years religion has been so bound up with political upheavals, social change and economic development, the story of these churches, and hence of Christianity, is all of our stories.

Published in London in hardback on October 14, 2021 by Hodder (ISBN 978-1529396423).