Late-Georgian church building began with real confidence and the years around 1790 witnessing the construction of a succession of outstanding churches. They reveal architectural ambition supported by confident vestries – the bodies responsible for parish administration – ambitious speculators or generous benefactors. The most memorable of them were Classical with innovative plans: circular, octagonal or Greek cross. In addition, there were some serious Gothic designs, usually referencing tradition in their layouts and revealing that the style was far from marginalised. The best of all these churches were buildings of the highest order displaying a degree of vision reminiscent of the Queen Anne churches erected earlier in the eighteenth century. While this might suggest a continuous ‘golden age’ of Georgian church building, the reality was somewhat different: the half-century after 1740 saw the completion of few churches, remarkable or otherwise. The desperate need for additional church accommodation was a theme that ran through the century, but several significant factors came into play around 1790 and were central to this church building revival, brief though it was.

Some of the new churches were replacements of old ones that were in poor condition, others were the victims of road-widening schemes, and elsewhere the old church was deemed just too small. More significantly, the expanding urban middle classes – whether in London, Manchester or Leeds – were increasingly moving to new, exclusive suburbs and a church was seen as a crucial marker of the community's prestige. Many of these new ‘churches’ had the status of parochial chapels of ease – that is, they were part of an existing parish and came under the jurisdiction of the bishop – while others were proprietary chapels – run as businesses – and were entirely independent. However, these proprietary chapels provided little, and often no, accommodation for the poor, and the rebuilt parish churches, while generally bigger than the ones they replaced, almost never had sufficient seats for the poor. Only in rural parishes might the poor be well provided for. This might be in a large, ancient church, but also landowning families – increasingly wealthy as land values rose – came to see the rebuilding of their old parish church or the erection of an additional chapel as part of their responsibility to their tenantry.

Central in this building boom was the availability of finance.