ARCHITECTURE
St John's Church viewed from Standishgate. The red building on the right is the original presbytery and is now the parish club. The Walmsley Cross in the centre marks the position of the 1785 chapel
Church of St John, Wigan Paul Waddington tells the story of how Wigan came to have two Catholic Churches practically next door to each other, and looks at the architecture of one of them
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esistance to the English Reformation was nowhere stronger than in the County of Lancashire, where the Mass continued to be offered throughout Penal Times. Mostly, this was made possible by the gentry creating clandestine chapels in the attic of their houses, where they were also able to hide priests. Many of these priests were Jesuits, which accounts for the preponderance of Jesuits in the area even into the modern era. Catholicism was particularly strong in the rural areas, where priest holes and secret chapels could more easily be concealed. In the eighteenth century, the inhabitants of rural Lancashire, many of whom were Catholics, flocked to the towns to find work in the newly built mills, where they often lived in
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slum conditions. Nowhere was this so pronounced as in Wigan, a former Market Town, which expanded rapidly due to its location at the centre of the Lancashire coal field. Provision had to be made for the newly arrived urban Catholics, and it was Jesuits who took the lead. Still outlawed In 1740, Fr Charles Brockholes SJ, built, at his own expense, a house with an upstairs chapel to serve the 300 Catholics living in Wigan at the time. Although Catholicism was still outlawed, it seems that, by exercising discretion, he was able to do this quite openly, as the house, which still exists, occupied a prominent site in Standishgate close to the town centre. Nevertheless, Fr Brockholes took
the precaution of including a priest hole in the building. This chapel served the Catholic population of Wigan until 1785, when a larger, but still illegal, chapel was built at the rear of the house. By 1817, this chapel was inadequate for the Catholic population of Wigan which had risen to 3,000. Since the Catholic Relief Act of 1791 had legalised the building of Catholic Churches, it was decided that a much larger building, capable of accommodating a congregation of 1000, should be built. In order that the 1785 chapel could continue to be used during construction of the new church, a site was chosen even further back from the road, which explains why to this day, the church of St John is hardly visible from the street. The former chapel was later demolished.
SPRING 2019
