Holy Trinity, Secular Use

On churches as St Andrews’ public venues

My first evening of Freshers’ week was spent not carousing in "Spoonion," but 300 metres away in the equally hallowed nave of Holy Trinity Church. I had made the consciously identity-fashioning decision to attend Gordon Brown’s talk for his new polemical treatise The Future Starts With Us. What first struck me was the Gothic building’s intoxicatingly muscular atmosphere: a rhythmic march of parallel stone piers pinned the central nave in their guard of honour formation. The site’s storied history had seeped into every ledger stone and cross-slab. It was at Holy Trinity Church in 1559 that Reformer John Knox delivered a sermon on the Cleansing of the Temple, inflammatory enough to flush the dull sandstone red. His instruction to purge the city of its idolatrous monuments was duly followed. Townspeople and bailies alike tore down wooden altarpieces and Catholic ornaments to be burnt in public bonfires. 

Basking in the space’s severity, I awaited Gordon Brown’s saturnine brow and baritone voice. It was only once he rose to speak that the room’s true allegiance revealed itself: one of its stalwart piers, apparently sharing Knox’s suspicion of idols, positioned itself between me and the great man’s face, leaving me the whole address in voice alone.

The rest of my Freshers’ week was coloured by repeated encounters with the odd marriage between parish halls and secular events. Beyond Topping’s talks, various commercial uses populated the town: the riotously popular poster fair at the New Kirk and the Headlock Vintage Clothing Sale at St Mark’s Parish. The Church of Scotland’s contraction, with hundreds of churches slated to close, converges with the physical deficiency of space in St Andrews. Crucially, the spaces become an asset almost exclusively when put to non-religious uses. As venues, they are staggeringly beautiful; as churches, they rely on a shrinking donor base and an equally shrinking institution. The pattern is unlikely to relent. Sites once frequented by the likes of John Knox and Samuel Rutherford will house authors’ lectures and bric-a-brac sales. 

This dependency, though, has never meant the surrender of discretion. Churches do retain decisive control over who they house. The Kirk Session holds statutory responsibility for spiritual affairs and an absolute right of refusal. As religious organisations, they are vested with unique powers of exemption from the Equality Act 2010’s prohibition of discrimination. 

John Knox would surely shudder that a discretionary power indebted to his Presbyterian polity now welcomes the market rather than bars it. While lacking Knox’s zealous conviction, I still feel that a once-tempestuous grandeur has been extinguished. The burning-hot sandstone has returned to its characteristic grey; the building has become simply a building. A notion of banalisation permeates much of life at St Andrews. The Opening Ceremonies saw Younger Hall scarcely half-filled by the singing of ‘Gaudeamus.’ Fittingly, our Wetherspoons is named after a 17th-century red gown once used to deter underage drinking.

Yet the banalisation I mourn is itself a kind of romanticism, one that risks freezing the past to indict the present. Knox’s purge was not the building’s inevitable purpose but a grand intervention. The site’s stripping, endorsed by council and congregation, reads as the contemporary authority’s answer to its moment, no different from the Kirk Session that now lets out the nave. Since its 1144 founding, the church has been relocated, rebuilt, and restored; its present medieval face is a twentieth-century reconstruction. Each change answered the tension between inherited form and the day’s pragmatic needs. To mourn what’s lost is to ignore that we are this negotiation’s latest party; it is ours to enter and reshape, not to lament.

Illustration by Ella Burrowes