On a weekday morning, a place of worship in London can serve many purposes. It might host a food bank or lunch club, provide a warm room or advice service, give young people somewhere to meet, or offer a place to practise English, get help with a form, share a meal or simply spend time with other people.
And, of course, it remains a place of worship.
Across London, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and gurdwaras are doing work that extends far beyond their religious congregations. Much of it is local, practical and quietly delivered. It rarely makes the headlines, yet if some of these buildings disappeared, the gaps they left behind could quickly become visible.
Perhaps it is time to think differently about the role they play in the city.
More than a roof
In January, the government published the first formal evaluation of the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme, which was introduced in 2001 to help listed faith buildings meet the VAT costs of eligible repairs and maintenance.
The evaluation found that around 12,800 individual places of worship had benefited over the ten years studied, approximately 60 per cent of the UK’s estimated 21,000 listed places of worship. It also revealed something easily overlooked in a report ostensibly concerned with roofs, stonework and repair bills: places of worship often act as community centres, providing charitable support, social services and events alongside their religious role.
The scheme primarily supported the basic components that keep buildings wind and watertight, such as roofs, gutters and other parts of the building envelope, but the consequences of keeping those buildings open extend much further. The evaluation found that 18 per cent of respondents felt their place of worship was at risk of closure within five years because of difficulties funding repairs and maintenance.
A leaking roof might begin as a heritage problem, but if the room underneath hosts an elder-care group on Tuesday, a food distribution service on Wednesday and a youth club on Friday, it can quickly become a social problem too. Public money spent keeping a place of worship dry, safe and open may therefore be protecting much more than the historic fabric of a building.
The infrastructure we do not always see
London does, formally, recognise this. Policy S1 of the London Plan defines social infrastructure as a range of services and facilities that meet local and strategic needs and contribute to quality of life. The list explicitly includes faith alongside health, education, community, play, youth, recreation, sport, criminal justice and emergency facilities. The Plan also acknowledges the importance of informal networks and community support in Londoners’ lives.
The issue may therefore be less about recognition on paper and more about visibility in practice. When we talk about the infrastructure a growing neighbourhood needs, the conversation tends to turn quickly to schools, GP surgeries, transport, parks and perhaps community centres. All are essential, but less visible are the buildings already providing meals, advice, friendship, volunteering opportunities and emergency support.
In Whitechapel, the East London Mosque operates a food bank supporting people in need in its local community.
The Sikh tradition of langar, a free community kitchen open to all, provides another model of social infrastructure built around food and hospitality. At the Central Gurdwara Khalsa Jatha, langar sits alongside outreach work providing hot meals for delivery and collection by community organisations.
West London Synagogue’s social action work includes support for asylum seekers and refugees regardless of faith or background, providing food, clothing, companionship and practical advice.
These are only a handful of examples in a city of thousands of faith communities. Their significance lies not simply in the quantity of activity taking place, but in the particular kind of infrastructure they can provide.
Faith buildings are embedded in neighbourhoods and people know where they are. Many have been in the same place for generations, while their networks can extend beyond formal service hours and professional referral systems. Volunteers may speak the languages of the communities around them or understand cultural needs that larger institutions can struggle to reach. The building is important, but so are the relationships that have grown around it.
What you discover when you walk through the door
The London Society has seen something of this first hand through our members’ visits to BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, often known as Neasden Temple.
The initial attraction is obvious. The Mandir is one of London’s most remarkable modern religious buildings. Opened in 1995, it was assembled from more than 26,000 pieces of hand-carved stone and welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
Yet the architecture has never been the whole story of our visits. Members have learned about worship, volunteering, education and community service and, memorably, they have also been fed. Visitors have left not only with a greater understanding of the building and the community that sustains it, but with takeaway care packages of food.
It may seem like a small detail, but it says something important about the way many faith communities operate. Hospitality is not necessarily an additional programme bolted onto the life of the organisation; food, welcome and service can be woven into the life of the place itself. A visitor who arrives to look at architecture can leave having experienced something much broader about the role a building plays in supporting community life.
Putting a value on the invisible
The wider social value of faith buildings is difficult to quantify, although the National Churches Trust’s House of Good research has attempted to do so for churches. Drawing on data from more than 7,000 church buildings and using methods based on HM Treasury’s Green Book, it estimates the social value generated by church buildings and the activities within them at around £55 billion a year across the UK.
The figure needs to be treated carefully. The research covers churches, not the full range of London’s faith buildings, and cannot simply be extrapolated across mosques, synagogues, temples and gurdwaras. Nevertheless, it points towards a larger question about how cities value buildings.
A place can have an insurance value, a heritage value and a land value, while also possessing a social value that is much harder to see until the building, or the activity it supports, disappears.
The role of faith communities became particularly visible during the pandemic, when local networks helped distribute food, communicate public-health information and support people experiencing isolation. Many of the pressures that drove that work have continued, from food insecurity and loneliness to high energy costs and demand for advice services. Warm spaces, initially discussed as an emergency response to energy prices, have also become a more established part of the community support landscape.
None of this means faith communities should simply absorb more responsibility as public services come under pressure. Calling a faith building “social infrastructure” should not become a polite way of expecting volunteers to fill every gap. Instead, it should encourage a better understanding of the resources that already exist within London’s neighbourhoods and how public bodies might work alongside them.
Local authorities could understand and map community activity taking place in faith buildings more consistently, while health and other public services can work with trusted local organisations on outreach. Regeneration projects can identify existing community and faith networks before masterplans are drawn. Investment in something as mundane as a roof, kitchen, toilet, accessible entrance or heating system can sometimes unlock or protect far more than the building itself.
When the space around a building matters too
Perhaps nowhere is the tension between faith, heritage and London’s appetite for growth more visible than at Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London.
The synagogue has stood on the same site since 1701 and is the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the UK, but its significance is not confined to the historic building itself. As recent BBC reporting on Bevis Markshas highlighted, the synagogue is trying to establish a new framework for how future development around it should be considered.
The congregation has published its own 22-page Bevis Marks Planning Framework Consultation Draft, setting out guiding principles for development in its surroundings.
The approach is interesting because it looks beyond the physical walls of the synagogue to the spaces that allow the community to gather and function. The courtyard, for example, is described as “an essential extension to the synagogue”.
This introduces an important distinction. Planning is good at identifying buildings, boundaries and heritage assets, but the social life of a place is harder to plot on a map. A courtyard can look like empty space while functioning as somewhere to gather before and after worship, hold events, welcome visitors and sustain the informal relationships that make a community work. Daylight and the relationship between an historic building and the changing skyline around it can be equally important to the continued life of the place.
Bevis Marks has put its proposed principles out for public consultation, inviting a wider conversation about how the synagogue and its setting should be considered as the City continues to develop. The implications could reach beyond one historic corner of the Square Mile.
London is becoming denser and its skyline continues to change, while pressure to make efficient use of valuable land is unlikely to disappear. The Bevis Marks case suggests that protecting a place of worship may require more than preserving the building itself. It may also mean understanding the light it needs, the spaces around it and the way people move, meet and gather there.
If the principles developed at Bevis Marks ultimately influence how future development around the synagogue is considered, they could provide an interesting precedent for other parts of London. Across the capital, faith communities occupy buildings and spaces under very different kinds of development pressure. A mosque in a converted industrial building, a growing gurdwara, a suburban church hall or a temple serving a community spread across several boroughs will each have different needs, but their civic value cannot necessarily be understood from the footprint of the building or the size of the congregation alone.
Faith, land and a changing London
This brings us to one of the most difficult issues facing faith communities in London: land.
Some occupy grand historic buildings designed for worship, while others have adapted former cinemas, houses, shops, warehouses and industrial units. Newer and growing congregations can struggle to find affordable premises in the neighbourhoods they serve, while existing faith buildings may sit on extremely valuable land at the same time as facing rising repair costs, changing congregations or development pressure.
Not every religious building can or should remain unchanged forever. Buildings and communities evolve, some congregations shrink while others grow, and the geography of faith changes with the city. Yet losing a faith building may mean losing much more than the principal act of worship that takes place there. It can also mean the loss of a hall, kitchen, volunteer network, advice point, gathering place and trusted front door.
The London Plan recognises this risk. Policy S1 says development resulting in the loss of social infrastructure in an area of defined need should only be permitted where appropriate replacement provision exists or as part of a wider public-service transformation. It also states that redundant social infrastructure should be considered for full or partial use as another form of social infrastructure before alternative development is considered.
That principle has particular significance in a high-value property market where community space, once lost, can be extremely difficult to recreate. Bevis Marks adds another layer to the debate by suggesting that we may also need to think more carefully about what constitutes the infrastructure of a place in the first place.
That infrastructure might be the building itself, but it might equally be the kitchen inside it, the courtyard outside or the network of people, relationships and acts of generosity that those physical spaces allow to flourish.
London already has an extraordinary network of buildings supporting these activities. Some are famous landmarks; others occupy converted houses, former cinemas, shops and industrial units that thousands of Londoners pass without knowing what happens inside.
Understanding that network better would be a useful starting point. We need to know more about the services being provided, the people who use them, the buildings and spaces under pressure and the impact of changing neighbourhoods on congregations. When a faith building is threatened or displaced, we also need to understand everything else that might disappear with it.
The London Society’s visits to Neasden Temple may begin with an extraordinary piece of architecture, yet members tend to leave talking about much more: the volunteers they met, the community they encountered and, very often, the food they were given to take home.
Their experience is a reminder that the value of a building cannot always be separated from what it allows to happen inside and around it. As London grows and changes, we need to become better at seeing not only the buildings themselves, but the communities, relationships and activities they make possible.
Image Credit - John Salmon / Bevis Marks Synagogue / CC BY-SA 2.0
