Sir John Betjeman - Betjemans Best British Churches

COLN ST DENYS: ST JAMES THE GREAT sunk into the picturesque Gloucestershire landscape, the church retains its Norman ground plan and tower
Richard Surman

PREFACE
by Richard Surman

Since John Betjeman compiled the first 1958 edition of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches , it has become a classic of its kind, and has been reprinted several times, most notably in the two-volume Collins Pocket Guide to English Parish Churches , published in 1968, and the 1980 edition, in which the scope of the book was extended to take in churches in Wales. The background to the book is a story all of its own. To many, Sir John Betjeman was latterly the Poet Laureate, whose work was reviled and adored in equal measure. But Betjeman was many things apart from being a poet: as a young boy holidaying in Trebetherick he went church-hunting, and in adolescence, churches became a passion for him. He would always talk about his childhood impressions of buildings as being crucial in determining his later responses to architecture.

Friendships with James Lees-Milne, the noted architectural advisor to the National Trust, Betjemans work on the Architectural Review , where he met and formed a life-long friendship with the artist John Piper, a spell as the film critic for the Evening Standard all these fed Betjemans limitless and sometimes mischievous imagination, which was equally exercised by his colourful private life.

His working life would take a different emphasis however, when he proposed the idea of a series of county guides to Jack Beddington, publicity manager of Shell-Mex BP. Beddington was known for his patronage of artists and writers, and Betjeman found himself working alongside Paul Nash and a coterie of friends to whom he handed out work on the Shell Guide series. What always characterised Betjemans reactions to architecture and countryside was a sense of place the setting as well as architectural and topographical detail. However mannered Betjeman might sometimes appear, one of his great gifts was to let landscape, architecture and art speak for themselves. After the war, Betjeman worked on many magazines, as well as writing poetry, and appearances on television became more and more regular. His presenting of the ABC of Churches programmes was a great success, not least to the crew, with whom he got on famously (although he did disconcert at least one member of the crew by taking his teddy bear Archibald Ormsby Gore wherever he went).

This new version Betjemans Best British Churches takes Betjemans original idea and moves it in a slightly different direction, but with great respect for his fundamental love of parish churches. The volume has much of a 21st-century feel about it the age of satellite navigation and precision mapping have allowed us to create very precise locations for each of the churches featured herein. Betjeman would have found this odd, Im sure, but it is our hope that in modernising the format of the book, we might appeal to a new audience more familiar with the digital age, as well as re-invigorating those familiar with earlier versions.

There are three radical departures from previous editions. The first is that we have introduced a much stronger pictorial element: full colour photographs are used throughout the book, as are accurate and clear maps of each county. The second radical difference arises from the first: with a large number of colour illustrations, the extent of the book has had to be considerably reduced. Betjemans original book contained some 4,500 entries, and in some respects was a gazetteer. We decided to considerably modify this present edition, cutting down to some 2,500 entries. The criterion for retaining entries has been, wherever possible, to refer to the very simple star system that Betjeman employed in the 1968 edition, as the basis for first selection. Although the most recent 1993 edition discarded this form of rating, we have re-introduced it here, refining it so that throughout the book there is now a one- and two-star rating. Naturally there are many other churches included that were not starred in Betjemans 1968 edition some of those have been revised too. There are also new churches included, and to these we have applied rating criteria that reflect those of which Betjeman would have approved.