Spen Valley Magazine Spen Valley Magazine (draft) | Page 4

The Metropolis of Dissent
In theory at least the sizes and locations of places of worship are determined by demography!
In Saxon times the Spen Valley had a sparse, widely
dispersed population. The early Christians erected
tall and brightly coloured “Preaching Crosses” to
mark their few, open-air places of worship. The base
of such a monument, Walton Cross, remains beside
Windy Bank Lane in Hightown. 
In the sixth century the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Theodore of Tarsus, created an administrative
structure for his expanding church: he used the
Anglo-Saxon settlements as the boundaries for
the church’s “parishes”. The Spen Valley fell within
he ancient settlement of “Burgsteal”– today’s Birstall. 
By the C.XV several “Chapels of Ease” had been built
in the Birstall parish to provide more convenient
places of worship for a growing population: the only
such church in the Spen Valley was “Ye Olde White
Chapel in the North”.
Spen Valley’s first
Anglican Church to be
built in over 300-years
was Christ Church in 1816:
the £7,500 cost of the Liversedge church
was entirely borne by the Rev. Hammond
Roberson who also had to procure the
necessary Act of Parliament (The Birstall
Church Bill of 1812) to erect a Chapel of
Ease within the Birstall Parish.
Two years after Christ Church was
consecrated the Church of England
belatedly recognised that the Inclosures
Acts and the Industrial Revolution had
concentrated the population into
the industrial areas while the parish
boundaries remained from agrarian
Henry VIII’s 1534 “Act of Supremacy” which created
the Church of England was a consequence of his
wish to divorce Anne Boleyn but it was also a
response to the teaching of the “Reformist” cleric,
Martin Luther in Germany. Whitechapel, like all
English churches, had to make a rapid transition
from the Catholic to Anglican liturgies. For 150-years
thereafter, religious priorities may have fluctuated in
response to successive monarchs but all non-Anglican
“Dissenting” worship was forbidden The Toleration
Act of 1689 finally gave the “Dissenters” the right to
pray in their own chapels. From the early 1700s
Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, Quaker,
Plymouth Brethren and Moravian chapels started to
appear throughout the Spen Valley. 
times. The Church Building Act of 1818
empowered the Church to sub-divide
the parishes and provided £1,000,000
to build new Churches. around sixty chapels in the Spen Valley:
it is no wonder that in 1895 the famous
local historian, Frank Peel described the
Spen Valley as “The Metropolis of Dissent”.
The Rev. Hammond also secured £9,000
from the so-called “Million Fund” to build
the new churches of St. James in
Heckmondwike, St. Johns in Cleckheaton
and St. Pauls in Birkenshaw: he also
helped secure funding for All Saints in
Roberttown. By 1893 there were nine
Anglican Churches in the Spen Valley
including Birkenshaw). It was the sheer size of some of the locally-
funded chapels that provided some of the
Spen Valley’s most spectacular landmarks.
The United Methodist’s Central Chapel
(Greenside, Cleckheaton) built in 1879 had
seating for 1,768: the Congregationalists
erected Providence Place Chapel (today’s
Aakash Restaurant) in 1857 with 1,500
seats but within 20-years had to build
Westgate Chapel as an overflow with
seating for a further 1,000 souls. Upper
Independent Chapel in Heckmondwike
was opened in 1890 with seating for 1,500:
this is now converted into apartments.
However impressive this building
programme may appear it was modest
compared to the combined efforts of the
many Non-Conformist congregations in
the area, By the end of C.XIX there were