Book Review - Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space

Preaching at the opening of his new church at Littlemore in 1836, John Henry Newman described the church as ‘a holy book, which you may look at and read, and which will suggest to you many good thoughts of God and heaven’ (p. 33). Rather than an enclosed place to hear sermons, the building was for Newman a text to be read, its architecture and furnishings forming a coded language. In this engaging, eloquently written book, the distinguished historian William Whyte explores the symbolism and sacred space that informed the large-scale movement of church building and restoration in Victorian Britain