As sanctuary for the doomed king, Charles I, and inspiration for a great poet, TS Eliot, brick by brick the tiny Cambridgeshire church at Little Gidding bears a heavy cultural load. Yet its future is in jeopardy this summer if urgent repair work is not carried out.
It is a familiar story for a small parish church. Survival becomes a precarious matter when there is no regular congregation and an almost constant need for maintenance and conservation. Now, in an effort to improve the long-term prospects for St John the Evangelist at Little Gidding, the vicar, the Rev Mary Jepp, is appealing for help. The stone frontage, three windows and the bellcote over the doorway all need vital work.
“We had to get a five-yearly architect’s survey done and it revealed these issues. The repairs would not cost a vast amount of money, possibly they would be covered by as little as £60,000 to £80,000,” Jepp said. “The problem is that the nearby church at Great Gidding has a resident congregation of only around 12 and they have to look after both churches. At the moment I spend more time on building management than anything else.”
The endangered church is just one of eight places of worship in the care of Jepp, as rector of the wider benefice of North Leightonstone, but because of Little Gidding’s close association with Eliot, who used the name for the final part of his 1943 work Four Quartets, Jepp is hoping that fans of his poetry will want to help. There is also a wider plan, in collaboration with the Friends of Little Gidding, to establish the church as a more prominent place for contemplation and prayer.
An annual “pilgrimage” event will be held at the end of this month, ahead of the 10th Eliot festival in July. The neighbouring house is already available as a centre for people on retreat.
Simon Jenkins, author of 1,000 Best Churches, knows the “charming chapel” well and admires its “intimate and introverted” interior. “Little Gidding must be the most evocative of Eliot’s church imageries,” he said this weekend, adding his voice to calls for the preservation of the building. “He was fascinated by this concept of an isolated commune dedicated to self-purification through fire and prayer – and paradox, ‘England and nowhere. Never and always’.”
Thomas Stearns Eliot, who was born in America in 1888, visited Little Gidding in May 1936 and later composed some of the most-quoted lines in modern English literature when he recalled the scene. His arrival at the secluded chapel, set apart at the end of a lane, prompted him to write: “We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.”
Jepp believes she understands why Little Gidding lodged in the poet’s mind. “People mostly ignore the slightly lonely Huntingdonshire countryside around it and it is a very odd little church. You would think you are in a college chapel, because the pews face each other,” she said.
The chairman of the TS Eliot Society, Hugh Black-Hawkins, is backing Jepp’s plea for funding: “There is a sense of timelessness at this church that Eliot found in some music and in certain locations. The irony is, of course, that Eliot came to this church only once, after a lunch at Magdalene College, Cambridge,” added Black-Hawkins. “This often surprises people who visit, but I suppose you don’t need to know a place well for it to make an impression.”
The church was built by the influential Ferrars family in 1625, restoring a site that had been deserted after the ravages of the plague. Charles I is believed to have made two or three visits to the Ferrars’ home and to the church, including a final trip on 2 May 1646 when he was on the run from the Roundheads after the battle of Naseby. Eliot’s line “if you came at night like a broken king” refers to this attempt to find refuge. The poem also mentions the blossom-covered lane leading to St John’s, the nearby pigsty and the building’s flat or “dull facade”.
The case for the unique contemplative atmosphere of Little Gidding is made in Four Quartets when Eliot argues that there are “other places which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city … But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England.”
For Jenkins, this church has a significant literary and architectural legacy and should be preserved in peace. “It should be kept just as it is, in a wood by the old house, little troubled by passersby,” he said.
