Church and State

About this register

A reader's companion to The Guardian's reporting on the UK's derelict churches.

"Abandoned" is not a category that appears in any official record. A closed church might be redundant to one body, at risk on another's register, and in the same year vested in a conservation charity that will spend a decade on its roof. This register tries to hold those categories together on one map, so that a reader can see what is actually happening to a building rather than only what happened to its paperwork.

It currently carries 1,390 churches, chapels and meeting houses across England and Wales — every Heritage at Risk place of worship in England, every building in the Friends of Friendless Churches gazetteer, every church the Churches Conservation Trust looks after, plus a small editorial spine of buildings drawn directly from the reporting series. 99% of the records carry a photograph, 96% carry a denomination, and the 928 English buildings on Heritage at Risk now carry the full National Heritage List for England listing description on their pages.

What the status colours mean

• At riskThe building has serious condition problems and no funded plan to fix them. From Historic England's Heritage at Risk register.
• RescuedRecently taken into conservation care — a new roof, a vesting agreement, a major repair within the last few years.
• PreservedHeld long-term by a conservation trust. No longer in regular worship, but the fabric is being actively maintained.
• RepurposedThe building is in active use, but not as a church. A mosque, a community centre, flats.
• Closed, unresolvedNo longer in use; no plan yet for what happens next. The holding pattern that precedes either rescue or loss.
• LostDemolished, or so far gone that the building no longer exists in any meaningful sense. Included for memory.

Cluster bubbles on the map take the dominant status colour of the buildings inside them — madder where risk concentrates, verdigris where the register has been taken into care, stone where closures and losses dominate.

How to use it

• Type a postcode, a place or part of a name into the search field. Postcode and place do a geographic lookup; anything else filters the visible register by name as you type.
• Tap a status or denomination chip to filter to that category. Tap again to clear.
• Click any dot on the map — or any entry in the right-hand panel — to read its story below.
• Each building page carries a Street View link (opens Google Maps in pano mode at the building's coordinates) and, where one exists, a Wikipedia link.

Sources the register draws from

• Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register — the statutory at-risk register for England (969 places of worship in the 2024 release).
• Friends of Friendless Churches — 72 redundant churches in England and Wales held in long-term conservation care.
• Churches Conservation Trust — 356 redundant Church of England churches in permanent care.
• British Listed Buildings — public mirror of the National Heritage List for England, used to attach the full carved-plate listing description to each at-risk record.
• Wikimedia Commons — CC-licensed photographs of churches without a charity-owned image (956 records).
• postcodes.io — geography enrichment: LSOA, parish, ward, council, constituency, rural-urban classification, travel-to-work area for every record.
• OpenStreetMap — basemap tiles, styled toward parchment.
• National Churches Trust reporting and survey work — context for the editorial argument.

Coverage gaps to be honest about: Heritage at Risk is England-only, so the at-risk colour misses Welsh and Scottish buildings until DataMapWales / Cadw and the Buildings at Risk Register for Scotland are added. CofE buildings still in active use (the largest single category of UK churches) aren't here at all — the register is about the closing, the closed and the saved.

How the data is built

A suite of Python scripts in the project's build/ directory pulls each source into a normalised record, joins the geography and photos, and writes a single data/buildings.json the frontend reads. A GitHub Action runs the pipeline nightly. Source code, including every step of the ingest, is on GitHub under MIT.

Every record carries a provenance string at the bottom of its sidebar — the honest record of where its information came from and how far we'd stand behind it. Status classifications follow a single rule: condition data drives the colour, the custodian decides whether it reads as at risk or preserved. We err toward conservatism — a church the National Heritage List rates "Fair" or worse with no funded plan stays in at risk.

How to contribute

Every building page has an Add to the record button. It sends your note to an editorial queue — nothing is published automatically. We are particularly interested in:

• Photographs of churches from your area, especially ones that aren't well-documented online.
• Memories of services, weddings, funerals, harvest festivals — the ordinary life of a building.
• Corrections. If a record has the wrong status, the wrong denomination, the wrong photograph, or a description that's out of date, tell us.
• Tip-offs. A closed church you're worried about. A chapel that was quietly demolished. A rescue we haven't heard of.

Editorial notes

This is journalism, not a definitive register. Where two sources disagreed about a building's status, condition or denomination, we kept the more conservative classification. Where Wikidata or a Wikipedia link was available we surfaced it on the building page; that doesn't mean every Wikipedia article matches the building it's linked to perfectly. Every record links back to its primary source so you can take the chain of evidence further.

The basemap is OpenStreetMap; coordinates are to street or village level. The map marker is a sign-pointing pin, not a surveyor's stake.