There is still a notice on the church’s website appealing for information, but
the parishioners of St Michael’s know they will never see their bell again.
“We assume it was taken, like all these others are, for melting down,” says
Mrs Norman.

At St Oswald’s, in Malpas – 14th-century, Grade I-listed – the thieves got so
comfortable that they installed leisure facilities. “They took the lead from
the organ chamber roof. When the police got up there, they found a sofa,
with cigarette ends strewn around it,” says Hilarie McNae, a Chester
councillor, magistrate and the borough’s heritage champion.

At Christ Church, in Willaston, metal thieves took a plaque from a war
memorial naming 43 men who died for the country. For some of the fallen,
whose bodies were lost, the plaque was the only monument they had, the only
public acknowledgment that they ever existed. It has never been found,
though mercifully a record was kept of the names.

Ten other churches in the area have been hit in the last year, and Chester
Cathedral itself lost a part of its roof. Listed manor houses, barns and
halls around the city have been attacked. Even the very lamp-posts in the
streets are being stripped of their metal covers, entire roads at a time.
Things, says Mrs McNae, have got “phenomenally worse”.

Chester is unusual only in that it keeps better records than most places. This
week, the first national survey of the problem revealed an equally striking
picture. Thirty-seven per cent of old churches said they had been victims of
“heritage crime”. You start off thinking that this may not be great, but
it’s not quite as bad as you expected – and then you look closer, and
realise that the 37 per cent is just for the last year. Not far off a fifth
of all listed buildings were physically affected by crime – also just in the
last year.

Ecclesiastical Insurance, which covers 97 per cent of the country’s Anglican
churches, says that until 2004 there were 20 metal thefts a year from places
of worship. Last year, says its spokesman, Katri Link, there were 2,600.
Ecclesiastical has refused to increase its premiums or deny anyone cover,
but it surely cannot bear such losses for ever. “We don’t want to get to a
point where we won’t be able to offer insurance,” says Ms Link.

The reasons that it’s been happening aren’t complicated. It is profitable.
Metal theft tracks pretty precisely the rising price of metal; in 2009, when
metal prices dipped, so did thefts from churches. More important, it is, or
at least has been, easy. People know, or knew, that they will probably get
away with it. Sometimes they may not even think what they’re doing is wrong.

Chester’s biggest heritage threat, though, is not theft or deliberate
destruction. It’s public urination. The city’s other unique feature, after
the walls, is four medieval arcades called the Rows. At ground level, there
are shops in the normal fashion. Directly above is a continuous covered
walkway, with further shops along it. On Friday and Saturday nights, the
first-floor Rows are pissoirs for the city’s bladdered youth. The Chester
heritage retail experience now includes urine seeping through into the
ground-floor shops.

“We’ve got a patch of urine on our ceiling at the moment,” says Chris Cooper,
manager of the Bridge Street branch of Thomas Cook. “It’s not nice,
especially when you’re dealing with the public. Sometimes on Saturday
mornings, it does smell. We’ve refurbished the whole ceiling, but it’s come
back.”

The urine – together with other depredations, such as youths burning their
names into the beams or setting little fires to see what happens – is
rotting the Rows’ medieval wood. Lynn Riley, the council’s cabinet member
for the environment, says the “very fabric of the Rows is being destroyed”.

Courts and police haven’t taken heritage crime seriously in the past. They’ve
graded crimes by their monetary value. But the monetary value of these
offences, to the victims, to the vandals and to the thieves, is in
heartbreakingly inverse proportion to the amount of distress they cause.
“The financial worth has nothing to do with it. It goes to people’s very
sense of themselves, of what they are,” says Mike Harlow, of English
Heritage. “Getting that across is one of the things we’re trying to do.”

Progress, fortunately, has been good. There was a national conference on the
subject this week. At it, the Tourism Minister, John Penrose, gave his
passionate support. The police have realised that heritage is a way of
getting the public to care about the much broader problem that metal theft
could cripple Britain’s railways and power supply.

And in Canterbury, another historic jewel, you find Andrew Richardson and
Michele Johnson, first of a new breed we might call “heritage detectives”.
They’re professional archaeologists working as accredited police support
volunteers. They use their knowledge to help officers secure convictions,
and prepare “impact statements” so courts realise just how much harm has
been done. “As a nation, we were dismal at this stuff,” said Dr Richardson.
“There was a sense that it wouldn’t be investigated and the law wouldn’t be
enforced. Now, we’re becoming world leaders at it.”

When they go to, say, a prehistoric barrow that’s been trashed by vandals, “we
now treat it as a crime scene,” says Dr Richardson. “We turn over the spoil
heap for cigarette ends, anything with DNA, discarded wrappings,
footprints.” At Thurnham Castle, near Maidstone, they followed a man digging
a mysterious trench as he went back to his car. Armed with his registration
number, they and the police raided his girlfriend’s house – uncovering a
massive hoard of stolen artefacts from dozens of sites around England. “The
criminals network, so we need to network too,” Richardson says.

The analogy sometimes made is with bird-egg collecting. When the RSPB mounted
a few high-profile prosecutions, an entire subculture suddenly took flight,
and birds’ nests became a whole lot safer. High-profile prosecutions of
heritage thieves, too, are now imminent, and sentences have already got
tougher. The Thurnham Castle man only got a conditional discharge – but more
recently, a youth who spray-painted Cliffords Tower in York collected four
months in jail. In Chester, 170 people have been prosecuted for urinating in
the Rows. Some of the offenders are taken on a “walk of shame” to share in
the nightly clean-up – at 4am.

Not before time, thinks Andrew Richardson. “The importance of this is that the
harm is irreversible,” he says. “When an item of our heritage goes, you
can’t make a new one.”