Being Vicar of Halifax must be exhausting, but tomorrow’s episode of Songs of Praise has re-charged the batteries of the hugely energetic holder of that post, Hilary Barber. “The BBC lit the church with arcs of light, and for the first time I had a proper sense of it as a 16th and 17th century church,” he says.
The Minster’s own lighting system is out-of-date and deeply unflattering. To update it and to reveal the place in its proper glory, Rev Barber and his team launched an appeal, A Million for the Minster, and appointed an architect. An appearance on TV can do that fund-raising push no harm at all.
Who’d be the Vicar of Halifax? It must be one of the most daunting jobs in the Church of England. To start with, it’s a Crown appointment, so the phone call comes from Downing Street. Then there’s the sheer size of the parish – for a long time it was the third largest in the country, stretching over a hundred miles.
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