Finally we asked various questions about the future development of the journal.
When asked about their ideal model for Ecclesiology Today, just one in seven (16%) selected ‘a learned journal’, a lower percentage (11%) wanted it to be ‘more like a magazine - fewer learned articles and more news, updates, and informal short articles’ and the great majority (72%) wanted it to stay ‘much as at present’.
When asked how space should be allocated to various types of content, there were a good many neutral responses. For example, almost three-quarters of respondents were neutral whether there should be more or less space devoted to longer articles (and the remainder were split both ways). However, three areas where there was a noticeable request for more space were updates & news, Church Crawler, and book reviews. In each of these cases the balance was firmly in favour of more space – more than 40% of respondents wanted more space for these, and the very great majority of the remainder were neutral.
We also tried to assess what ‘flavour’ the articles in the journal should be, by asking people to agree or disagree with the statement that it should contain more of a particular type of article.There was a lot of neutrality here as well; but many agreed that there should be more specialist and introductory articles, and articles on current issues; and the journal should try and break new ground (Fig. 6).There was a notable level of disagreement to the suggestion that there should be ‘more informal articles, like a colour supplement’.
Finally there was space for people to make their own suggestions as to the contents of the journal, and the changes and developments they would like to see.There was a terrific range of suggestions, too many to repeat here, which will be very useful going forward. The tone of the suggestions was almost entirely positive, and there were also many kind remarks about the journal in its current form.
So what . . .
As the Council takes steps towards the appointment of a new editor, we are actively considering how our journal might be taken forward in future.This questionnaire has been most helpful in understanding what a random sample of members thinks about it, and how it might develop.
The Council is very grateful to those members who returned their questionnaires so promptly, and to Society member Anne Willis who saw the project through.
James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner,The Buildings of England: Essex.
Yale, 2007, 939 pp., 123 col. pls, £29.95 hdbk, ISBN 978 0 300 11614 4. As preparation for the first Essex volume in 1954, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner travelled around the county for 6–8 weeks, living in a caravan borrowed from H de C Hastings, his colleague at the Architectural Review.The new volume took James Bettley five years, and is twice the size of the original, despite the southwest corner of the county having been colonised by Greater London.
In his introduction to the first edition Pevsner wrote:
Essex is not as popular a touring and sight-seeing county as it deserves to be. People say that it is due to the squalor of Liverpool Street Station. Looking around the suicidal waiting room on platform 9 and the cavernous left luggage counters behind platforms 9 and 10, I am inclined to agree.
Since then of course Liverpool Street has been refurbished and redeveloped in some style, although as a frequent traveller to East Anglia, I’m sorry to report there is no longer a waiting room on platform 9, suicidal or otherwise.
Essex has recovered from the post-war drabness that Pevsner witnessed, and the greatest threat to the county now results from its prosperity and proximity to London. Witness John Prescott’s dream of half a million houses in the flood plain of the Thames, or BAA’s dream (nightmare?) of a further runway engulfing the villages and countryside around Stansted.
There are about 14,000 listed buildings in Essex, 40% more than in Norfolk. A high percentage of these are timber framed, and Bettley is able to take advantage of the great advances in knowledge about these since the earlier editions (revised by Enid Radcliffe in 1965). Here he is helped by Dr David Andrews of the County Council’s historic buildings section, which has done so much to advance understanding and protection (not least in the rescue of the medieval barns at Cressing Temple and Coggeshall). Bettley also benefits from the revelations of dendrochronology – thus my 1979 edition of Pevsner/Radcliffe states with some confidence that the split log walls of the church at Greensted date from c1013 or possibly c850 – whereas Bettley is able to report that more recent tree-ring dating has confirmed a felling date of after 1063 (disappointing maybe, but still the oldest standing wooden building in the country).
Ecclesiologists will be well served by this volume. Dr Bettley is Chairman of the Chelmsford Diocesan Advisory Committee, and is careful to include major reorderings and extensions in his church descriptions. His Courtauld thesis was on the Essex architect, artist and priest Ernest Geldart, whose work appears all over the county, but most notably at Little Braxted. Unlike his predecessor, Bettley is not