Never before has a monograph addressed late-Georgian church building, and there will be many revelations. The study begins around 1790, when, after decades of only limited church building, there was a stunning outburst of imaginative designing which produced churches of a quality almost without parallel anywhere in Europe according to Terry Friedman; it ends in 1840 with the birth of Ecclesiology, which took Anglican worship in a very different direction. This was a half-century when the scale of building was massive and when almost all the country's leading architects were involved. Among approximately 1,500 new churches are some outstanding examples, buildings of the very highest order architecturally, for instance St Luke, Chelsea (James Savage, 1820–4) (Fig 0.1; see Fig. 14.25) and St Chad, Shrewsbury (George Steuart, 1790–2) (Fig 0.2; see Fig. 9.7). However, the late-Georgian church remains one of the most neglected topics in architectural history and there is much to be discovered and celebrated.

These Anglican churches were the most numerous among all major public building types during this half-century and for many a community, the new church was their most prominent building and one certainly to be celebrated. However, in the early years of Victoria's reign – with the plaster barely dry in some of them – these buildings and the liturgy for which they were carefully designed were pilloried mercilessly by the Ecclesiologists, dynamic Anglican reformers, active from 1839 and intent on (literally) building on the theology of the Oxford Movement to push the Church of England in a Higher direction. This they did with remarkable success. In order to promote the cause, supporters sought to denigrate the architectural and liturgical traditions their generation inherited. In particular, they despised the late-Georgians’ auditory worship, their ‘rational religion’, the often restrained, predictable services and the ‘preaching box’ churches built to contain them. Instead, the group encouraged greater ceremonial and the reintroduction of a number of pre-Reformation liturgical practices, while architects were expected to follow medieval precedents in both the layout and the details of their churches. ‘Gothic authenticity’ became the order of the day and there was certainly no place for a Classical design with its pagan connotations. Withering attacks regularly included such phrases as ‘wretched’, ‘absolutely wretched’, ‘very objectionable’ and ‘miserable’ to describe late-Georgian churches.