28 C O N T E X T 1 2 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 STEPHEN BROTHWELL The plight of Leeds’ and Liverpool’s religious heritage A study of two cities underlines the need for more emphasis on the collective value of places of worship and the preservation of redundant religious buildings. Religious buildings from the industrial era have rarely been considered collectively.While the loss of a medieval church in rural England would likely cause national uproar, very little is known about the fate of thousands of urban churches and chapels built during the 19thcentury religious boom. Even locally this information can be hard to access. The Church of England is the only denomination which keeps accurate records about its churches, including those which have been deconsecrated. But 60 per cent of Anglican churches are rural, of which the great majority are medieval, and the Anglican Church Commissioners control funds which are incomparably greater than the resources of the other denominations. The only religious census ever conducted in the 19th century was undertaken on Easter Sunday 1851. It showed that half of those attending a service were not Anglican, a result of the wave of non-conformism emanating from England’s industrial centres. Strangely, with an almost complete lack of reliable information available about all aspects of this heritage, the most comprehensive records about these buildings are the Ordnance Survey maps. From 1846 they have recorded the location and denomination of each place of worship across the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, accessing this information is not easy. First it is important to delineate areas of study. In my case these were the central 25 square kilometres of Leeds and 26 square kilometres of Liverpool.Then the information must be painstakingly collected.The intervals between survey dates are not always the same, making a degree of error inevitable. The data is not without its problems. Most challengingly from a heritage perspective is that the maps only record places of worship in use. It is necessary to visit the site on foot to know for sure whether a church that has disappeared frommore recent maps was demolished or adapted to an alternative use. These industrial-era religious buildings can tell their communities’ stories better than any other surviving source. The plain Catholic churches in the north of Liverpool, for example, remain as testament to the period when this area was an Irish-Catholic ghetto. Irish-born immigrants formed a quarter of Liverpool’s population by 1851.They lived in squalid conditions, facing severe prejudice because of their religion. Likewise, in the wealthy southern suburbs of Liverpool, the neo-Byzantine Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas, the soaring gothicWelsh Presbyterian Church and the orientalist Old HebrewCongregation Synagogue survive as proof of the relative success of these immigrant communities. In contrast to Liverpool, Leeds’ religious buildings testify to its remarkably different history of 19th century Protestant nonconformity. Leeds remained a single Anglican parish until 1844, by which time the The Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas, Liverpool
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