FT263

In Britain you are not going to be arrested for being a spiritualist, but you could find your church at risk if it gets in the way of a major developer. That was nearly the fate of the Britten Spiritualist Centre at Lancaster, after finding itself on a list of buildings proposed for demolition to make way for a planned shopping development involving the city’s Canal Corridor, Northern Side. The shopping scheme was originally going to be a joint venture between Lancaster City Council and London retail developer Centros. In circumstances that are unclear, someone described the spiritualist centre in the application as being “redundant” and therefore posing no obstacle to demolition. The error and lack of proper consultation was taken up by the Spiritualists’ National Union on behalf of the Centre and representations were made at a public inquiry. Fortunately, in what was called an “early Christmas present” by campaigners, Secretary of State John Denham rejected the entire planning proposal in an announcement made on 22 December 2009, despite the Planning Inspector declaring that the spiritualist building was of “very modest” architectural interest. Lancaster City Council and the developer have also quarrelled amongst themselves, and the whole project has gone down. The SNU are now seeking costs for all the trouble and legal expense they were put to by having to appear at the inquiry. (For the Secretary of State’s decision letter and more, see www.itsourcity.org.uk)

The comparative rarity of spiritualist churches alone is surely reason enough not to allow their cavalier or casual demolition. Although spiritualism was highly popular in Britain from the mid-19th century through to the 1930s, it has left relatively few prominent buildings or other physical monuments. A notable exception is the Arnewood Tower near Lymington in Hampshire built in 1885 by a retired Indian High Court Judge named Petersen; its plans were supposedly dictated under a control from the spirit world identifying itself as Sir Christ­opher Wren (See The Table-Rappers, 1972, by Ronald Pearsall). What architectural heritage spiritualism has is therefore surely worthy of protection, given the paper commitment by most local and national Government agencies to diversity and respect for minority beliefs and faiths.

Certainly, at one time in the UK, any destruction of religious buildings and property would have been viewed as a risky act of sacrilege. After the Reformation, dire consequences were considered to attach to those who turned ecclesiastical houses and lands to secular use. A good example was Newstead Abbey in Nottingham­shire, home of Lord Byron, whose family and successors suffered notorious bad luck and misfortune. Byron claimed family tragedies were preceded by the appearance of the ‘Goblin Friar’, a ghostly monk in black robes acting as a harbinger of doom. The poet claimed to have seen the ghost on the eve of his marriage to Anne Milbanke and mentions the ghost in his poem Don Juan (See The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain, 1888, by John Ingram; Haunted Houses, 1907, by Charles Harper.) Newstead Abbey was just one of many such properties afflicted; Sir Henry Spelman’s 17th-century work The History and Fate of Sacrilege, updated in four editions up to 1896, lists hundreds more examples, extracted from historic family records and wills.

Interestingly, the failure in Lancaster is a further loss for the developer Centros, which was amongst the companies ritually cursed in 2005 over plans for building a similar shopping scheme in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk [FT242:20]. Less than a year after the Bury St Edmunds scheme opened for business in March 2009, Centros has decided to pull out, putting the entire mall on the market for £70 million, considerably less than its estimated £105 million construction cost. On being asked by property journal Estates Gazette why they were quitting, Centros denied it was because of supernatural influences – but an insider from the company claimed “the firm was fed up with press coverage of the curse.” (Source: Estates Gazette, 30 Jan 2010).