Ship of Fools: St Stephen's on the Cliffs, Blackpool, England

The Mystery Worshipper

Ship of Fools: St Stephen's on the Cliffs, Blackpool, England

God’s search and rescue – but no sherry for our Mystery Worshipper!

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Box Pew

Thanks for your interesting report - I have often wondered about this church - I used to visit Blackpool for work but always found it firmly closed.

I think of Blackpool as lying on the Roman Catholic belt, centred on Preston, which runs across Lancashire and which I believe was historically a product of the high level of Irish RC immigration. Perhaps the small numbers in attendance at St Stephen's bear that out.

Bishops Finger

Maybe, although the report does refer to a large Sunday School, so presumably there's a good mix of ages. We're not told how many folk there were, in total, though.

Mind you, C of E attendances, in many churches, are not exactly high these days...

Enoch

Box Pew wrote: »

... I think of Blackpool as lying on the Roman Catholic belt, centred on Preston, which runs across Lancashire and which I believe was historically a product of the high level of Irish RC immigration. Perhaps the small numbers in attendance at St Stephen's bear that out.

I'm not sure that's the reason. The Fylde always had quite a lot of recusants.

Kirkham was Protestant and I think the living belonged to one of the Oxford colleges. It also had an old Grammar School. However, there's an RC church in a village next door which appears to have been built virtually immediately on emancipation. Interestingly, and unlike RC churches later in the century, it's built to look from the outside as much like a traditional English church as possible, with a conventional square ended chancel, not the curved one favoured by the RCs later on. The only thing from the outside that draws attention to its being RC is the way the gravestones, many from the same era, have 'pray for the soul of' on them.

It looked almost as though it is deliberately making the statement, 'we've been here all the time and we're as English as the rest of you'.