A History of English Churches in 100 Objects
by Matthew Byrne 
(London: Pitkin, 2024)
ISBN: 978-1-84994-917-0 (hardback)
225 pp., many colour plates 
£18.99 

Unforgettable Gardens: 500 Years of Historic Gardens and Landscapes
Edited by Susannah Charlton for The Gardens Trust
(London: Batsford, 2024)
ISBN: 978-1-84994-903-3 (hardback)
256 pp., many colour plates
£30.00 [PLATE 2]

As HRH The Duke of Gloucester observes in his Foreword to Byrne’s book, “it has become fashionable” since Neil MacGregor’s The History of the World in 100 Objects, “to write a story on one hundred specially selected objects”. What we have here is an intelligent selection of works of art, artefacts, architecture, monuments, stained glass, sculpture, etc., connected with Christian worship in England since Roman times, starting with a fine mosaic from Hinton St Mary, Dorset, and Roman silverware from the Water Newton Hoard, Cambridgeshire.

Byrne’s informed taste has ensured that almost everything he has illustrated is of first-class quality. His journey includes considerations of the wonderful Bewcastle Cross, in Cumbria (c.700), the Lindisfarne Gospels, the stunning Saxon crypt in the church of St Wystan, Repton, Derbyshire, and much, much more. Here we find the 9th-century font in St Mary’s, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire; the late Anglo-Saxon tower at All Saints’ church, Earls Barton, Northamptonshire; the awe-inspiring and intensely moving Christ in Majesty in St John the Baptist’s, Barnack, formerly in Northamptonshire (now Peterborough); the superb Norman crossing tower at the church of St Kyneburgha, Castor, formerly in Cambridgeshire (again now Peterborough); the wondrous carvings in St Mary Magdalene’s, Eardisley, and Sts Mary and David, Kilpeck, both in Herefordshire.

Here, too, is the splendid Norman font in St Petroc’s, Bodmin, Cornwall; early glass at Canterbury Cathedral; and sumptuous Gothic work at York Minster, St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire, and Hawton, Nottinghamshire. Byrne unerringly chooses first-class exemplars of various aspects of fabric connected with ecclesiastical architecture from Cartmel (Cumbria), Southwold (Suffolk), St Mary’s (Warwick), St Neot’s (Cornwall), Boxgrove (West Sussex), March (Cambridgeshire), Cirencester (Gloucestershire), Whitchurch Canonicorum (Dorset — a remarkable survival of a mediæval shrine, that of St Wite [a female Saint, whose bones are still contained within the lead coffin held within the stone shrine]), Hatfield (Hertfordshire), Abbey Dore (Herefordshire), Rycote (Oxfordshire), St Chad (Shrewsbury), Shobdon, (Herefordshire — a delicious interior of Georgian Gothick), and the church of Christ the Consoler (Skelton-on-Ure, Yorkshire (a masterpiece in muscular Victorian Gothic by William Burges [1827-81).

However, although most of the objects he has chosen deserve to be included in his book, there are some surprising omissions: these might include the outstanding church of All Saints, Brixworth, Northamptonshire, one of the grandest survivals of Anglo-Saxon architecture in all Europe; some of the wonderful rood-screens that survive in Devon (e.g. in St John’s, Plymtree) and elsewhere, glowing with colour, and deliciously detailed (although he does show us four painted panels from the prodigious screen in St Michael’s, Ashton, in that County); the perfection of Pugin’s miraculous church of St Giles, Cheadle, and Bodley & Garner’s utterly lovely Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, both in Staffordshire; Butterfield’s masterpiece at All Saints, Margaret Street, London; or Bentley’s lovely little church of St Francis of Assisi, Pottery Lane, London, the baptistry of which (1861-3) would melt the hardest of hearts. And one misses the sensitive contributions of architects such as John Ninian Comper (1864-1960) and Stephen Ernest Dykes Bower (1903-94). Apart from mention of one master-work, the church of St Nicholas, Kingsway, Burnage, Manchester (1930-2), a truly great work of architecture by Nugent Francis Cachemaille-Day (1891-1976), who was then in partnership with Felix James Lander (1897-1960) and Herbert Arthur Welch (1889-1953), the choice of 20th-century items is uninspiring.

I know I am not alone in finding the work of Henry Spencer Moore (1898-1986) lumpish and unappealing, over-rated to an absurd degree (like a lot of other individuals curiously over-celebrated in their own times and afterwards: I can recall puzzling as to why the former Third Programme used to inflict the desiccated works — examples, perhaps, of the “deep seriousness” de rigueur at the time — of Peter Racine Fricker [1920-90] on listeners way back when I was young). Byrne has selected Moore’s Madonna and Child in St Matthew’s, Northampton, which compares extremely unfavourably with the delightful, heart-rending beauty of the Anglo-Saxon depiction of the same theme in the little church of St John the Baptist, Inglesham, Wiltshire. Indeed Byrne’s selection of later stuff leaves much to be desired. The RC Cathedral in Liverpool (1959-67), by Frederick Ernest Gibberd (1908-84), for example, known by local wags as “The Mersey Funnel”, might be regarded as a tragic manifestation of Loss of Nerve, when the visitor experiences the only part of the design by Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944) to be realised (1933-41), the majestic crypt of what would have been the mightiest religious building in these islands, a contrapuntal work of masterly ingenuity based on the triumphal-arch theme its architect had developed earlier at his Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval (1927-32). The deaths of Archbishop Richard Downey (1953) and the Cathedral’s architect put paid to such a sublime vision, so what we got was Gibberd’s effort, uncomfortably lodged over part of Lutyens’s tremendous fragment. And I am not at all sure that the painting of the Liverpudlian Good Samaritan (1991), by Adrian Wisniewski (b.1958),  altogether rises to match the work of supreme quality that is the magnificently noble Anglican Cathedral (1903-80) by Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960) in the chancel of which the image is displayed.

A History of English Churches in 100 Objects, with an inadequate bibliography, is published by Pitkin, an imprint of B.T. Batsford Holdings, Ltd., in partnership with the National Churches Trust. 

The Gardens book is a delight: we are given 16th-century exemplars at Kenilworth (Warwickshire), St Donat’s Castle (Glamorgan), Holdenby and Lyveden New Bield (Northamptonshire); 17th-century gardens from Aberglasney (Carmarthenshire), Bramshill (Hampshire), The Botanic Garden (Oxford), Drummond Castle (Perthshire), Wilton (Wiltshire), Ham House and Hampton Court (Greater London); late 17th century and later gardens at Chatsworth (Derbyshire), Powis Castle (Welshpool, Powys), and Bramham Park (Yorkshire); the great 18th-century exemplars at Stourhead (Wiltshire), Blenheim (Oxfordshire), Castle Howard (Yorkshire), Wrest Park (Bedfordshire) and elsewhere; and later masterpieces of the landscape gardener’s craft, including Tatton Park (Cheshire), Belsay Hall (Northumberland), and the lovely Botanical Gardens and Parks at Sheffield, Derby, Birkenhead, then on to 20th-century works, such as those at Munstead Wood (Surrey), Hidcote (Gloucestershire), Cowden (Clackmannanshire), Allerton Cemetery (Liverpool). Mention is also made of many other gardens, including those at Prospect Cottage and Sissinghurst (Kent), Bentley Wood, East Sussex, and St Catherine’s College, Oxford. 

Very well illustrated, the book somehow encapsulates the genius of British gardeners, and explores 60 of their greatest creations, arranged chronologically from the 16th to the 21st century. All the well-known names are here, of course, including Charles Bridgeman (1690-1738), Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716-83), Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), William Sawrey Gilpin (1761/2-1843), Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman (1942-94), Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe (1900-96), William Kent (c.1685-1748), John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843), Edward Milner (1819-84), Joseph Paxton (1803-65), Humphry Repton (1752-1818), Christopher Tunnard (1910-79), and several others. It is good that some cemeteries have been included, notably the Old Town (Stirling), and Abney Park (Stoke Newington, London), the planting of which (largely by George Loddiges [1786-1846]) was partly didactic in order to raise tone and educate the public, but it is perhaps odd that St James’s Cemetery at Highgate is only mentioned in passing, as its magical siting and planting can still enchant. And although the marvellous garden at Biddulph Grange (for which James Bateman [1811-97] and Edward William Cooke [1811-80] were responsible), there is no mention of another extremely important Staffordshire garden, that at Shugborough, with its early Greek Revival fabriques designed by none other than James “Athenian” Stuart (1713-88). 

As Peter Hughes, Chairman of The Gardens Trust, writes in his Introduction to this volume, “the UK has the finest collection of historic parks, gardens and designed landscapes in the world, something of which we can be truly proud”. This admirable little book is a worthy introduction to a selection of such places, and the accompanying colour photographs are splendid, very well judged, and decently composed. The Gardens Trust and Batsford are to be congratulated.