The Church Buildings Council guidance on the floodlighting of churches, A Brief Guide to Floodlighting Churches (May 2022), observes:

“Many rural and urban churches are floodlit successfully by night to dramatic effect and it can be an important tool in ensuring the visibility and longer term sustainability of a church building in the community. However there are obvious environmental impacts and floodlighting should not be used for purely decorative purposes.

In addition to light pollution there are high energy costs associated with floodlighting your church building. These can be mitigated to some extent by low energy light bulbs and time switches. However, it is important that given the Church of England’s target of Net Zero Carbon by 2030, parishes think carefully what they want to achieve and how else it could be done before embarking on a floodlighting programme”.

Although CBC guidance has been available since 2012, relatively few consistory determinations have addressed the external lighting of churches[1]; early concerns in this area focussed on the disruption of bats, and more recently the associated carbon footprint has become a feature. These, and the issue of “neighbourliness” were considered in Re All Saints Chelsworth.  Continue reading →