There is a crisis. A large slice of our cultural heritage has fallen victim to the closure of churches everywhere in the British Isles.  The institutional Churches, of all denominations, are selling off ‘redundant’ churches of all sizes and ages and putting their contents in great peril.  Among their furnishings are very expensive and amazing pieces of craftsmanship, memorials to a once-thriving community musical structure that is also, as a result, fast disappearing.  An organ building industry that exported all over the world at its peak in the decades before the first world war, employing around twelve thousand highly-skilled workers, has now been reduced to shreds. Death and retirement have now reduced the number of people who know how to design and make an organ, and capable of doing so themselves, to a tiny handful. Organ making should now be placed on the national at-risk crafts register.

With at least eight churches closing every week, and most of these having organs, the present situation is bleak. Add to that the rising number of churches who cannot or will not maintain an organ they have, or find someone to play it, there is the added risk that an instrument once a central, integral part of musical and social culture will become merely an historical or niche interest. In Britain this is a fate particularly hard to bear, since organs played to the public in their 19th century town halls were vital elements in restoring and then fostering the revival of a widespread musical culture. Andrew Carnegie, in the very first iteration of his early 20th-century benefactions, gave half the cost of over four thousand organs in the British Isles, specifically ‘to extend the knowledge of and love for music throughout the community generally’, as he put it.  These organs became local community assets, installed in chapels and like them built with working people’s pennies. They were used not only for services but also for rehearsals and concerts by choirs of all kinds, and were vital in spreading culture to all parts of the country,.

Organs are now collateral victims of institutional asset-stripping.

An organ I lent to Christ Church cathedral for over five years, from January 2019 to April 2024, started life in just such a community, a small mining village called Billy Row, near Ushaw and Durham.  It was made in the workshops of Henry Nelson in Durham, along with many others with sensibly-designed and agreeable key actions and very characteristic voicing of the pipework, producing an organ useful in all sorts of accompanimental roles.  In the Methodist church of the early 20th century, it would have supported the performance of oratorios by Handel, Mendelssohn, Stainer,  Gounod et al; in the cathedral, this meant that even this quite small organ was able to accompany the whole Anglican repertoire.

Such working-horse organs, the organs that Carnegie funded, have been denigrated in superior circles, but this one demonstrated to organists from all over the country why they were so prized in their time and place.  But as these churches since the 1950s have failed to keep up the traditions once so prized, these organs – and now the churches themselves – have become ‘redundant’ and are being scrapped and skipped every week.

Without the slow training of youths as singers in choirs, and encouragement of them to play organs, the glaciers that produce a mass-public cultural scene melt into nothing, and such icebergs as survive to support the visible and audible musicians of the future also melt away.

This has happened before : British church music, admired throughout Europe for its variety and high proficiency, was killed by the burning of thousands of Latin MSS by order of Cranmer in 1548 and 1549, to prepare for his Book(s) of Common Prayer.   A few meagre remnants and fortunately the Eton Choirbook (2/3 of it) and some other choir books (including some from Cardinal College/Christ Church) survive to show what riches were destroyed then.  By 1644, thousands of organs had followed their music into oblivion, followed by two hundred years of cultural Dark Ages.  Oxford men then painfully re-started the machine which produced fine home-grown musicians, together with their ‘free’ church counterparts, re-creating a system that flourished until the 1950s.

Organs are the icons and bell-wethers of a generalised culture ; if they go, the culture will have gone as well.  If churches cannot or will not take responsibility, we have to find new ways of introducing organs as pathways to creating musicians.

An organ I placed two years ago in London Bridge station, the first such in the world I believe, has had a success beyond my wildest expectations.  Played up to fourteen hours a day by all ages, ethnicities and by people from all over the world, it has introduced huge numbers to the joys of playing a living, breathing instrument, either in person or in social media views.   There is another ‘open’ organ in the Whitgift shopping centre in Croydon and these two will soon be followed by one in a barn in Devon and another in a new cultural hub recently set up at Headcorn in Kent in a former Methodist chapel.  Organs are being used as backing for Doom Metal and other bands, for ‘organ-oke’ and increasingly to accompany ‘silent’ films – as indeed the earliest cinema organs were created to do.

With the foundation three years ago of a charity, ‘Pipe Up for Pipe Organs’, a group of us are trying to find new approaches to alleviating a serious gap in public culture.

Workshops to show how organs might be revived in churches where they have been neglected are already in place, and hands-on experience of dismantling, wrapping and moving organs is now available.  Collaboration with Friends of Friendless Churches is proving fruitful ; they have lent us a church on the Oxon/Warwickshire border to store organs in transit, and I am currently helping them with the restoration by volunteers of an organ near Abergavenny. ‘Pipe Up’ also hopes next year to run spring and summer ‘organ-cation’ courses at attractive locations, during which silent organs will be brought back to life.

But it remains that among the hardest challenges we face is the need for organs made redundant by church closures to find new homes.  So far there is only a very small ‘market’ for doing this, and meanwhile many hundreds of valuable organs are being lost.  Moving a good organ is not necessarily any more expensive than buying a short-lived electronic substitute and is almost always less expensive than ‘re-building’ a mediocre and/or over-sized organ that has outlived its mechanical or electrical life.

Charities that maintain many organ-less churches are I think gradually seeing that having an organ will bring in more life and visitors to their buildings.  More railway organs might be possible, but this needs local initiative as well, and so far - perhaps not surprisingly, given the present climate of despair over getting anything done - this is not sufficiently forthcoming. We also need to find a place somewhere to establish an ‘Organ Experience’, with organs of all ages and styles available to play and hear, and to relate its fantastically interesting three thousand year history.  Britain is the only European country that does not celebrate its ‘intangible’ history in that way - yet.  Any ideas of a suitable location for this would be very welcome at Pipe Up.

Above all, dear reader, we need your imaginative help and at least occasional muscle to help soften the blows that organs are taking.  Please have a look at, and sign up on the ‘Pipe Up’ site, and come along and join in what many are finding to be rewarding and fascinating events.

The ‘rescued’ organ used in Christ Church cathedral for over five years is one of the lucky ones.  The documentary film 'Organ Stops' (previously available on BBC iPlayer) includes sequences with a very similar organ and the enchanting person who played it for over 80 years, but this did not save it from being pillaged for its attractive front pipes and stop-knobs ... and the organ used in the cathedral might have finished its useful life there.  It was only by good fortune and through personal contacts that an excellent new home has been found for it, in the parish church of Widecombe in the Moor, in Devon. It has now been fully restored and I will install it in August this year.

In June 1944 the cathedral organ of Orvieto became the unexpected catalyst for saving the city from destruction by the retreating German army.  A play about the true events surrounding this will be read in public, with free entry, for the first time in Britain at Hampstead Baptist church on Tuesday 17 September 2024 at 7.30pm, with the appropriate organ music played live. 

Now the organs, in their turn, need to be saved…

Martin Renshaw (1964, English Language and Literature) was brought up in a west-Leicestershire mining village before gaining a free place in the choir school of St Paul’s. Setting up his own organ making business in 1987, singing as a lay-clerk at Canterbury cathedral and with Kent Opera and the trio ‘The Canterbury Clerkes’, he went to live and work in France for 26 years before returning to London.  He now works in Britain, France and Italy and is preparing two books on the practice of music in the medieval church, based on entirely new research carried out over the last 15 years.

Image: ‘Pipe Up’ in action, getting local volunteers to help to ’save' an organ. The organ shown was made by Henry Nelson, like the one Martin Renshaw lent to the cathedral. In this case it was loaded to begin a long journey to the Philippines, three other expressions of interest for places in UK having failed!