The focus of this chapter is industrial southeast Lancashire, a triangle bounded by Preston, Whalley and Manchester, and including Blackburn, Bolton and Rochdale. It was an area of prolific post-Waterloo church construction, one that reveals many of the issues encountered across the country, but which were here brought into sharp focus. It was a situation exacerbated by dramatic shifts in population caused by the huge growth of the cotton industry. Specifically, this was an area desperately short of accommodation and one deeply concerned about the aggressive spread of Nonconformity, and of Roman Catholicism in some of the towns. An examination of the region also demonstrates the late-Georgian shift of Anglican ambitions which gravitated from building for genteel middle-class congregations to the provision of seats for the poor. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into attitudes to style, for while Classicism dominated those churches built during the Napoleonic Wars, after Waterloo Gothic quickly became the preference. Central to this development were the area's senior clergy who assumed a major role in the organisation of church-building projects. This is one of the key themes of the chapter and an explicit case of clerical involvement in architectural matters. This is in sharp contrast to London – as noted in the last chapter – where post-Waterloo new churches mainly came about from the combined efforts of the Commissioners, vestry committees and large donations from friends of the Established Church, with the clergy playing only a modest and, occasionally, an obstructive part.

This part of Lancashire was home to a series of clerics who believed that if sufficient new churches could be built, the Established Church could emerge triumphant. One of them, the Revd J. W. Whittaker, vicar of Blackburn, wrote to his bishop in the late 1820s urging the erection of a new church for the village of Tockholes in his parish: ‘If we build a proper church the sectarians will return’. And by ‘proper’ he undoubtedly implied Gothic, a point which will be revisited. At the foundation-stone laying of St George, Chorley (Thomas Rickman, 1822–5) (see Fig. 2.21), the Manchester Mercury reported, ‘many of the inhabitants of this populous district who have hitherto, from want of accommodation in their parish church, been led to conventicles,’ will be moved to return to the Established Church. Not surprisingly, the area was the recipient of generous funding from the Commissioners.