Nor should we forget our villages, where the need to preserve the fundamentals of village life is just as important. It is heartening to know that village halls are already the subject of a number of applications to the Millennium Commission. I hope very much that imaginative and sensitive design will be encouraged in these smaller projects. And I should like to see money going to help restore specially worthwhile buildings not just because they are 'old buildings', but because they are invariably imbued with those deeper values which I have already mentioned and which strike a particular chord in our hearts. There is still a huge task before us to restore the ravages of that period in the 1960s and 1970s which represented a strange aberration in men's souls.
Community planning is one proven way and a start has been made up and down the country.
But we also need to be teaching in a more sensitive and imaginative way the architects, planners and designers of tomorrow, to say nothing of the property developers, road engineers and volume housebuilders, so that we can foster a less dogmatic approach to creating and designing buildings. All this is an enormous challenge, and it is one of overwhelming importance, but there is nothing in this process exclusive to Christianity or to western society. While the year 2000 has no significance in itself for Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and the people of other major religions, the urge for spiritual and material renewal applies as much to the non-Christian as to the Christian. This powerful mood for renewal is one from which all faiths and countries can benefit. The forces it represents bind us all together.