Church of England in ruins

The estimated cost of repairing all England's 14,500 listed places of worship is almost £1,000,000,000 over the next decade - and that doesn't include thousands more unlisted ecclesiastical buildings. The bill is almost three times what the parishes, by the most optimistic calculation, could possibly raise. The statutory charity, the Churches Conservation Trust, will be able to save no more than a handful of the most important.

According to the UK National Trust "congregations and parish incomes are in a free fall" and over the next decade "the trickle of churches becoming redundant is predicted to become a torrent".

How big is the "trickle"? Ninety-five pages long, around 2,000 churches.

HT: undertheiceberg