1982: Zion City of our God

Simon_K has added a photo to the pool:

Hyde Park Flats, Sheffield

Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God;
God, whose word cannot be broken,
formed thee for his own abode.
On the Rock of Ages founded,
what can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation's walls surrounded,
thou mayst smile at all thy foes.

- John Newton, 1725 -1807, former slave trader and convert to Anglicanism

I love hymns, especially the triumphalist ones of the Anglican revival in the 19th Century, and although I am not an Anglican myself, I mourn the passing of the Church of England, and its descent into inclusiveness and vulgarity. As a child, I had been a choirboy in a High Anglican church in the busy working class suburbs of north Cambridge. The church had been at the centre of our lives - we played football for the choir team, we played hide and seek in the graveyard, we helped out at jumble sales, we went to fetes in the walled gardens of the huge Georgian Vicarage. Most of our parents were blue collar workers, apart from the occasional teacher or office worker. Many mums worked on the production lines of the Pye Telecom factory. Blocks of flats shadowed the Vicarage walls. Most of the boys in the choir were not even Anglicans, but from Catholic or non-conformist families, or even from families of no faith at all.

The parish church was at the centre of all our lives, the touchstone that ordered them. It had a sense of the eternal about it - but this was nonsense, of course. The robed choir and intoned services were Victorian inventions, based on what was thought traditional Cathedral worship. They were a mid-19th century response to the teachings of the Oxford Movement. Like Christmas, the High Church CofE was an invented tradition. But it was a comforting one. It wasn't even religion really.

We never presumed to understand much of what we were singing. The English was solid Cranmer. Grammar school boys like me could unravel some of the Latin, but the theology was probably beyond any of us. But what touched the heart was the mystery, and what captured the soul was the sense of permanence and belonging.

I've been looking at photographs I took thirty years ago. This photograph was taken in the rain in May 1982, with a Soviet-made Zenit SLR I bought for £15 from Cambridge Resale on Mill Road, Cambridge. Cheery stuff. The flats were demolished in the 1990s.