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Church and City Revisited: New Evidence from the North of England, c. 1815–1914

‘IT IS NOT that the Church of God has lost the great towns. It never had them.’ Thus, A. F. Winnington-Ingram, speaking in 1896.1 Seldom can so pious an invocation to ingenuous effort have passed with such speed into melancholy reflection on seemingly unmoveable fact.2 This is ironic. For the then Suffragan Bishop of Stepney was no prophet of the secular society; not even a contemporary Jeremiah. To the contrary, he was an incurable Christian optimist; and a Church partisan to boot.3 His rallying cry — for that was what it was — meant only to fortify evangelical effort in the immense task that lay ahead. That such righteous toil, suitably deployed, might fail to secure its just rewards never occurred to him. Had he paused to consider the altogether more complex arguments being formulated even at the time by new-fangled (urban) sociologists, about an ‘intimate connection’ between urbanization and irreligion that his