Parish Churches
A searchable photographic archive of English parish churches.
Inside the app
Browse the map, or search by county, place, and dedication. View a photographic record for each church including full exterior and interior views, and its contents — monuments, woodwork, stained glass, etc. — along with text descriptions. In addition, you can search for artists, architects, sculptors, and the people they commemorated. Just over 1,000 churches and 60,000 images are in the archive so far, representing ten percent of the Survey's current image library. More will be added in future. One subscription covers your phone, tablet, and desktop, though you'll need a phone or tablet to subscribe — payment isn't yet supported on the desktop app.
Other desktop downloads: Windows · Mac (Apple Silicon) · Mac (Intel)
Version 3.1.0 · Released 2026/09/28
What the app does
See your results at a glance
Every search returns a scrollable grid of results, each with a thumbnail, place name, county, and dedication — so you can scan a whole set of churches or features before opening any single record.
Select as many as you need and export the list as a spreadsheet of dates, dedications, and grid references, for reference or for planning a field trip.
See it on the map
Pan and zoom to explore coverage, or jump straight from a map pin into that church's full record. Results from your searches can be plotted on the map. Export the map for a whole county, or all of England and Wales, as a shareable file complete with historic county boundaries.
Search by county, date, and keyword
Narrow a search by county, by a date range — using period names like "Perpendicular" or exact years — and by keyword, from architectural terms to specific fittings and monument types. Separate tabs search Churches, Features, Places, and People.
Architects, artists and those commemorated
Switch to the People tab to search the database using biographical information: everyone recorded in a church's monuments, from a family name to a named stained glass artist, sculptor, or craftsman, with dates of birth and death where known.
Subject records include dates of birth and death, a description of the relevant memorial or work, and photographs.
A full record for every church
Grid reference, coordinates, and an original architectural description. Export any record as a self-contained page you can save, print, or cite offline.
Tens of thousands of photographs
Scroll down a church's record and each individually catalogued feature — a font, a doorway, a wall painting — sits alongside its full photographic record. Images are served at a resolution suited to screen use; the full high-resolution archive, typically 10–22 megapixels per image, is available for licensing.
All photographs are the copyright of C. B. Newham. See the fees page for image licensing and commissioned photography rates.
Built for research and reference
Your subscription and searches work the same way across every device — start looking something up on your phone in the churchyard, then pick it up again at your desk.
Subscription
The app is free to download. Without a subscription, basic information is available for all churches in England and Wales — including links to external resources such as A Church Near You, the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture, the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, and others. Full photographic and subject records from the survey archive require a subscription, with Rutland county available in full for free.
One subscription covers Android, iOS, and desktop — sign in on any device to pick up where you left off. Subscribing itself currently requires a phone or tablet, as payment isn't yet supported on the desktop app.