The Works Chapel

1880 · Works Church · Work 386 of 1,871

The Works Chapel, 1880, Works Church

A congregation of mill families filling the pews of a brick works chapel, a harmonium at the front, the banner of a friendly society hanging from the gallery rail.

What it was used for
The church endowed by the employer in the company village. At Saltaire the Congregational Church was built between 1856 and 1859 by Lockwood and Mawson; according to the Saltaire Collection with £16,000 of Salt's personal fortune. A few miles away the textile manufacturer Edward Akroyd endowed All Souls, Haley Hill, Halifax: foundation stone laid 25 April 1856, consecrated 2 November 1859, architect George Gilbert Scott, standing beside Akroyd's model settlement Akroydon. The Church of England's own Church Heritage Record gives the cost as an estimate with two competing figures, either £40,000 or £70,000 — that is, two and a half to nearly four and a half times Salt's church, in the same trade, the same county and the same years. Whoever paid for the church settled its denomination: nonconformist for Salt, Anglican for Akroyd.
What was new
What matters here is not priority but simultaneity: two manufacturers used the same instrument in the same years and in opposite denominations. What becomes visible is that the choice of denomination passed into the employer's gift. Most plainly with Lever at Port Sunlight, who arranged his Christ Church so that all Christian people, except those of extreme views, could share in it — and who lies buried there with his wife in an ornate marble tomb with life-sized bronze statues. The church of the workers' village ended as its founder's monument at the centre of his firm's village; note the dating: church 1902 to 1904, two decades after this work's date, tomb narthex 1914. At Saltaire the secular counterpart cost more than the church: Victoria Hall, 1867 to 1871, £18,366 — and it was claimed to have all the advantages of a public house without any of its evils, a sentence the UNESCO dossier attributes to no named person.

Connections

Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.

  1. Works withThe Works Village1880The church stood inside the company village and was paid for by the manufacturer: the Congregational Church at Saltaire was built in 1859 with £16,000 of Salt's personal fortune and stands in its own grounds with a small churchyard, in the Italianate style of the rest of the village.Source: Saltaire Collection / Saltaire Stories, Heritage Trail Saltaire (PDF), Nr. 3 United Reformed Church · UNESCO, Nomination Dossier Saltaire (Nr. 1028), Zitat aus The Builder, 1852 (Kirche im Bauprogramm)

Further reading