THE ESSEX CHURCHES SITE

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St Michael, Braintree

Click on the 'play' symbol in the second image to see all my photographs of this church as a slide show, then click on any image in the slideshow to see it large in a new page. Alternatively, if you don't have flash enabled, you can go straight to the set for this church on flickr. Braintree is a big town, the fifth biggest town in Essex after Southend, Chelmsford, Colchester and Harlow, and sits more or less right in the middle, meaning that it has a lot of traffic. I remembered from my last visit that it is not a cycle friendly town - indeed, all the road signs direct you onto the nearest bit of the outer bypass, whichever way you want to go. This church is kept locked without a keyholder notice. I've been here before several times, and it is always locked without a keyholder notice. It is a large, dull church sitting in a large, open grass area with no headstones, as if it had been designed to look as little like a churchyard as possible. Indeed, if you didn't know what a church looked like you might wonder about St Michael. What can the big padlock and chain on the porch outer gates mean? Obviously a storage facility of some kind. Why are the churches in the Braintree area all kept locked? I have heard various reasons from churchwardens and ministers who really should know better - 'Braintree is a high crime area!', 'We've had all the lead taken off the roof!', 'We've had several break-ins!', 'There are lots of gipsy camps around Braintree!', 'This is a rough area, you couldn't possibly leave a church open around here!' 'We're so close to London here!', 'The church is so remote!' and so on. Of course, only locked churches get broken into, and locking a church doesn't protect the lead on the roof. Indeed, Ecclesiastical Insurance tells us that a locked church is more likely to be vandalised, more likely to be broken into and even more likely to have something stolen from it than one which is kept open. I find it hard to see how most of these pitiful excuses might not equally apply to the other hundreds of north Essex churches who all seem to manage to be open, but there we are.

 

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home - index - latest - e-mail
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Norfolk churches - Suffolk churches
www.simonknott.co.uk