Six Hundred New Churches: The Church Building Commission 1818-1856

Professor Ports study of the early nineteenth-century Church Building Commission and its churches first appeared in 1961 and has long been difficult to obtain. He has now thoroughly revised it, adding much new material and a wealth of illustrations, many of which have never been published before. The book tells of the setting up of the Commission to build churches in the godless new towns, its trials and tribulations as it went about its work, the buildings it erected, and the architects who designed them. Historic and modern photographs, plans and drawings all reveal a huge diversity of architecture, much of it of the highest quality. It is now clear that, far from being a modest prelude to the full-blown Gothic Revival, the Commissioners churches were an essential factor in making the great Victorian explosion of church-building possible.