Our parish churches are a unique and special contribution to European civilisation. Yet many are under threat. Thousands are now supported by tiny, ageing congregations who spend a disproportionate amount of their time attempting to maintain the crumbling medieval fabric. In the last 30 years, 1,600 churches have become redundant in England and 357 have been demolished. Each year, 20 become newly redundant. When you consider that half of all Grade I-listed buildings in England are churches and cathedrals, this is a massive problem. English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery fund are now in the fifth year of a grant scheme to help the best of our churches with their maintenance problems. In some ways, what we can do is a drop in the ocean, but it is no less important for that. Why? Well, there is no more fundamentally English sight than the parish church as the centre of the village, set in its own churchyard. Villages all over Europe have churches, but they are not like ours. The medieval English parish church is almost always set in a walled churchyard full of the graves of past villagers.

Next to the English Heritage site of Lyddington Bede House in Rutland is St Andrew’s church, set in its graveyard. This is a quintessentially English sight. On the Continent, it is rare; the dead are normally buried in separate cemeteries on the outskirts and the church sits squarely in the middle of the village, not in a separate compound. Unlike our Continental cousins, the English have tended to build communities round their burial grounds. The buildings themselves are different, too. In France, Germany or Italy, you always enter a church at its west end through one of three portals that generally relate to the nave and the aisles. By contrast, English parish churches are usually entered through a large porch on the north or south side, as at St Mary’s church, Berry Pomeroy in Devon. In the Middle Ages, many legal transactions were executed at the church door, including marriages. In the English climate, a porch was essential to provide shelter for the villagers. Inside, our churches are roofed with timber – rather than the stone or plaster vaults usually found on the Continent. Many, such as the ceiling of St Michael and all Angels, Tettenhall in Staffordshire, are highly decorated, carved and usually painted. The timber roofs also give English churches a different external appearance, with low-pitched roofs, mostly hidden behind battlements, as at St Peter’s in Walls End, Tyne and Wear. Finally, there is the peculiarly English flat-topped tower that characterises so many parish churches and the square-ended, rather than apsidal (semi-circular), chancels, both features seen at St Peter’s in Tawstock, Devon.

But it is not just parish churches that are particularly English. A strong case can be made for our 17 medieval cathedrals. They are all complexes of buildings, rather than the very large, isolated churches found on the Continent, where cathedrals were not part of monasteries. By contrast, about half of English cathedrals were – and those that were not still adopted monastic architectural forms. So, while Lincoln Cathedral, for instance, was not a monastic foundation, it still has a cloister and an enormous chapter house. Moreover, English cathedral complexes were set, like parish churches, in graveyards. These graveyards, now transformed into cathedral closes, acquired the houses of the canons and other cathedral staff around them. The close, as a setting for a cathedral with its chapter house and cloister, is thus a purely English conception. On the Continent, it is usual to turn the corner of a street and be confronted by the vast bulk of a cathedral sprouting out of the townscape. This is famously the case in Florence.

Other unique features of English cathedrals include the incredibly long naves. These were first built by the Normans after the Conquest, to establish power and authority over the Saxons, intimidating them with the sheer scale of the buildings. The lowness of English cathedral nave vaults is also distinctive. Westminster Abbey has the highest nave in England at 31 metres (102 feet). That still falls short of one of the lowest in France, Notre Dame in Paris, which is 33.5 metres (110 feet) tall. Continental masons could not build high central towers because their buttressing was concentrated on supporting the nave vaults. In England, however, masons focused their skills (and their buttresses) on extremely tall crossing towers. Salisbury’s spire, at 123 metres (404 feet), is the tallest in England. At Lincoln, there is the astonishing tripartite vision of west-end towers at 61 metres (200 feet) apiece and the soaring central tower, England’s tallest at nearly 83 metres (271 feet) – and originally topped with a timber spire.

Since 1991, English Heritage has awarded £41.8 million in grants to English cathedrals in order to make up some of the £164m maintenance deficit identified that year. Most of that work is now completed and most cathedrals, unlike the vast majority of our parish churches, are well visited by tourists and have a significant income. Yet we cannot be complacent; these great and very English edifices require continuous work if they are to be enjoyed by future generations. We all have a responsibility to help keep them up.

© Dr Simon Thurley. A version of this article was published in the June 2003 issue of Heritage Today.

• English Heritage's Inspired! campaign is the most strategic and ambitious attempt yet to tackle the problems facing this country's 14,500 historic places of worship and is supported by all the faith groups with listed buildings in England. For more information about Inspired! visit www.english-heritage.org.uk/inspired