Architectures of Awe
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Last Thursday I got to see one of my lifelong musical faves, Sigur Rós, live at the Royal Albert Hall with a full symphony orchestra. Sigur Rós are an Icelandic post-rock band that were big in the early 2000s, and they sound like if you could hear sunlight glistening off a glacier. The cells of my body are still throbbing with the sounds of the swelling violins and lead singer Jónsi's ethereal elvish falsetto.
In the final few songs of the night, the darkness behind the stage lit up and something magical happened: the ceiling-high organ came to life.
I frigging love a pipe organ. Roger Sayer, the organist who collaborated with Hans Zimmer to compose the soundtrack for Interstellar, said that when you play a pipe organ, you're really playing the building. The pipes are only a part of the sound that's produced; the rest comes from reverberations of stone, wood, mortar. An organist-in-training has to come to a specific building to practice, and learn to play that specific instrument, which will sound subtly different to every other organ in every other building in the world. A pipe organ can't be disassembled and taken somewhere else. It belongs to its space. It is its space.
Apparently Hans Zimmer wanted a pipe organ for the Interstellar soundtrack because it evokes the divine. For most of us, the only place we ever hear a pipe organ is in a church, so we associate the sound with the part of ourselves that reaches for the sublime. It is the sound of awe.
England is full of beautiful old churches that are barely used any more. Only half of Britons believe in God, and only about 1 in 10 people attend a religious service regularly.
Two weeks ago, I visited one in a tiny Sussex village that had stained glass windows painted by Marc Chagall. It's exquisite, coloured light skipping over stone. Someone had left little seasonal offerings of fresh fruit and bundles of wheat in the windows in gratitude for the harvest, which struck me as charmingly pagan.
But many of England's little village churches feel much sadder. Neglected, crumbling, musty places full of dusty hymn books and echoing silence. Pipe organs gathering dust. Waiting for a congregation that's not coming back.
It's been a slow decline of decades. Philip Larkin - the grumpiest poet who ever lived - wrote a poem all the way back in 1954 cleverly called "Church Going" where he writes about stepping into an old village church and finding it an archaic place, little used, of little relevance to the modern world.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long.
...
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
He wonders: "when churches fall completely out of use, what shall we turn them into?" Imagining that people might develop superstitions and ghost stories about them, long after they've forgotten what they were originally used for, or if eventually they'll just revert to "grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky".
Hundreds of churches close every year in the UK. Many of them have been converted into expensive private flats, which I find deeply sad. Some, like MEATliquor in Hoxton, are now restaurants. There's a church in Redbridge that's been converted into a Virgin Active, so you can sauna in the old confessional. A lot of them are, unsurprisingly, concert halls, because of the great acoustics.
Other places are trying to retain some of the community functions of church without the religion bits. I sometimes go to Sunday Assembly, adorkable weekly secular meet-ups where people sing pop songs together, listen to interesting talks and co-ordinate volunteering efforts. But they're often held in simple spaces: comedy clubs, school halls, pubs - places where it's harder to access the sublime.
Still, I can't help walking into any church I pass by. I've had a long fascination with religion, though always from the outside looking in. My mum's devoutly Catholic but throughout my childhood, she believed that she wasn't in a state of grace and wasn't welcome in a church, so we never went. That was a frightening belief to grow up with, believing that 1. God is real but also 2. God can hate you; in fact you can do something so unforgivable you'll be banished from his house forever.
Don't worry, Mum's worked it all out with God now and they're homies again. But I think as a kid this left me feeling both unwelcome in religious spaces and hungry for them. I sampled all sorts as a teenager. Buddhist monasteries, shuls, Evangelical meet-ups in windowless basements, modest Methodist chapels, Hare Krishna temples, grand Anglican cathedrals. I made little pagan shrines in my bedroom and got super into Wicca and the I Ching. I followed this hunger to university, where my undergraduate major was religious studies.
I've never found a religious community that fit me right, but I have found many places that have, places where I've felt like I'm looking at God. Most of them are outside. The kelp forests around Cape Town. A patch of redwood trees in Northern California. The Wye Valley in Wales.
There are some secular buildings that inspire that same sense of awe in me. Constitution Hill in Johannesburg makes me feel all sorts of huge feelings. London's Tate Modern. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. When I was a teenager, visits to the one good CD shop in Menlyn Mall were pretty bloody moving.
Actually, right now I'm writing from one of those secular buildings so lovely I could compose an ode to it: The British Library. I work here often. Architecturally, it's not particularly beautiful. The nicest thing one can say about the structure is ... uh ... it was built in 1997? And I guess it has a certain red-brick confidence in its jutting shiplike shapes? But its function! Oh man, that moves me beyond words. Anyone can get a reader pass and come sit at a leather-bound desk with free unlimited wifi and read literally anything. Every book ever published in the UK and Ireland is stored in its labyrinth basements, 746km worth of shelving. They have every single newspaper ever published in South Africa (and many other places) on microfiche. They have old pornography collections and radical pamphlets and ship's logs. A few weeks ago I spent an hour reading some of A A Milne's old handwritten letters, ostensibly as research for a paper I'm writing but really just because I'm a little sentimental Cancer at heart who loves Winnie the Pooh. You can just do that at the British Library! You don't even have to have a reason! It costs nothing!
But many religious buildings were built precisely to inspire awe, and the good ones achieve this like no other architecture can.
My favourite place on this earth is a particular bank on the Orange River, where my best friend Melanie and I used to play as children, but my favourite building on earth is the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. I've been inside it three times, and each time I've wept. I find it so overwhelmingly beautiful. It makes me love everything about humanity and the world. The Spanish have been building it for 143 years and counting, which is maybe everything you need to understand about the Spanish. If you built a pipe organ inside it, it would sound like Stravinsky, strange and multilayered. It would sound like a forest.
Even grumpy Philip Larkin gets quite romantic about village churches, by the end of the poem. The thing about a church, he ponders, is that all aspects of human existence - marriage, birth, death, our private thoughts - all belong equally within their walls. "A serious house on serious earth it is", which dignifies the everyday ordinariness of our lives into something greater.
Maybe part of what's so lovely about a village church is just the village part of it. Every community once had a space that wasn't for work, home, or recreation, but for everything remaining - the messy, tender parts of life that don't fit anywhere else. I love that we built these rooms and made them open to anyone, places where the hungry could get some food and the joyful could sing and the sad could find solace, places we could gather to mourn our dead and celebrate our births and talk about our values, and try to make contact with a feeling that there's something bigger and more important than ourselves, and this all used to happen in one place, places we made beautiful, places we made holy.
We still have all these feelings, but here in England, we have fewer physical places to put them. In losing the old churches, or losing our sense that they belong to us, we've lost places for those feelings to live.
Pipe organs, and the buildings they sing with, are public instruments. They belong to a community, not to a person. They belong to a place. They belong to us. I'd love to see more communities refusing to let them be sold to private developers, reclaiming them, breathing life back into them, playing those organs.
Some other lovely things recently!
I had the best best time hanging out with fellow writers Samantha Shannon, Natasha Siegel, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson and Sarah Mughal Rana, as well as my wonderful brilliant editor Vicky Leech Mateos, at the launch of Bloomsbury Archer - the new imprint that's publishing Femme Feral in the UK in April 2026. I'm so honoured to be releasing my debut adult novel amongst such company.
Marmalade is Missing (Again!)
I have an exciting update about Marmalade is Missing (Again!), the film script I wrote last month: we've just launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise a bit more development funding. There are some great rewards available if you've got some extra cash lying around, and our producer wrote lovely description about the origins and themes project if you're intrigued (basically, it's a traditional 2D animation about a burlesque troop in 1930s Europe, a flamboyant queer and feminist comedy about solidarity, joy, resistance, and sequins).
I had so much fun writing the script, and I've been blown away by the skill of the team I'm working with. I'm excited to show you more over the coming weeks. Even £3 would be much appreciated as a show of support!
Manage Your Money Apps
If you're a Manage Your Money reader, you'll be pleased to know I've updated the list of suggested apps and tools to use to track your spending. It was overdue! New top suggestions include Finwise and Lunch Money, and I've signposted some apps that work specifically for people who've ended up with pots of money in different countries. If you're still using 22seven, now called Vault22, I've also made a suggestion there about changing one of the settings.
Some final quick recommendations:
- Something to read: this hilarious short piece, "One must imagine Sisyphus doing 'The Artist's Way'"
- Something to watch: I cannot recommend the TV show Dying for Sex highly enough. It's about a woman with terminal cancer who breaks up with her husband to finally try to have an orgasm, and it's screamingly funny but also such a profound meditation on friendship, desire, death, and I loved it so much. Please please would everyone watch it (not with kids in the room).
- Something to listen to: Here's my favourite song by Sigur Ros. It helps if you imagine it with a pipe organ.
Don't forget to watch your inbox around 10am tomorrow! I'll be sending you something yummy.
Wishing you awe, stained glass, and a place to put your biggest feelings,
Sam
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