Aside from the often challenging legal, administrative and financial issues that surrounded church building in this period, questions surrounding the appearance of the new building needed to be settled. These involved far more than fashion or connoisseurship: style conveyed messages. And in the Establishment's endeavour to reclaim its central place in the heart of the nation, perception was crucial. What style best engendered reverential awe and conveyed notions of tradition – of Anglicanism's central place in the nation's triumphant history – as the Church endeavoured to reassert itself after decades of inactivity and arrest the worrying spread of Nonconformity and atheism? And symbolically, a new church was as important to those who merely walked past it as it was to those who worshipped within it.

In 1790, Classicism was, by far, the dominant style and relatively few Gothic examples were to be found. By 1840, Gothic was overwhelmingly the style of choice and Classical examples were rare. This half-century witnessed the real Gothic Revival, the battle for hearts and minds; by 1840, the new generation of Gothic advocates were pushing at an already opened door. The principal subtext of this chapter is, to a considerable extent, the rediscovery of Gothic as the perfect accompaniment for Anglican worship. However, in the move from Classicism to Gothic, explicit stylistic leadership could not be taken for granted.

Stylistic neutrality?

The Commissioners’ 1819 grant application form asked, ‘Whether the Church or Chapel to be Grecian and of what Order, or Gothic and of what century?’ Simultaneously, the Incorporated Church Building Society's Suggestions contained ‘Ornament, external … none preferable to the simplest Gothic. The Grecian Doric is also eligible’. These imply a clear, binary choice; they also imply some indifference to the question of style within the CBC and the ICBS.

Stylistic ambivalence is also apparent when new parochial chapels were financed by subscribers. Acts associated with their building often included words to the effect that the Trustees of such endeavours were to build the new church ‘in such manner as they think proper’, or in a ‘decent and commodious manner’. Similar neutrality is often found in contemporary publications which relied heavily on adjectives like ‘dignified’ and ‘neat’ to describe recent churches; redolent with ambiguity, they were actually remarkably useful.