Cities and towns -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- History, Local; Great Britain -- Social conditions; Villages -- Great Britain
7. In other parts of the country Wren's work was imitated in some of
the new churches then built, and in some of the old ones which were
altered or rearranged. One of the best specimens of work done at this
time is to be seen at Whitchurch, in Middlesex.
8. Not very many new churches, however, were built until the beginning
of the nineteenth century, except in some of the towns which had grown
up from country villages. In and round London most of the villages
increased so much in size that the little old parish church was much
too small for the population. Galleries were put up in them in all
sorts of queer places, to provide more seats. More room still being
wanted, many churches were pulled down, and larger buildings set up.
9. The new churches of the latter part of the eighteenth and the early
years of the nineteenth centuries were simply big oblong rooms. The
outsides were often copies of parts of Grecian temples. They were
crowned with towers and spires somewhat like those on Wren's churches,
but not nearly so handsome.
10. Inside, the church was fitted up with a gallery running along
two sides and across one end. In the end gallery a big organ was
placed, and on either side of it, high up, near the ceiling, were
smaller galleries, one for the charity-school boys, the other for the
charity-school girls of the parish. The galleries and floor of the
church were filled with high pews. On the floor opposite the organ were
three huge boxes, rising one above the other. The lowest box was for
the parish clerk, the middle one was the reading-desk, and the highest
was the pulpit, which was often provided with a sounding-board, not
unlike an umbrella. The altar was in a little niche behind the pulpit.
Chapels were fitted up in much the same way.
11. Under all these churches and chapels were =vaults=, in which people
were buried, but not in the earth. The coffins were placed on shelves,
one above the other, round the vault. On the walls of the church above
were often =tablets= to the memory of people lying in the vaults below.
These, by the nineteenth century, were for the most part simply slabs
of white marble, with black or grey borders. There was hardly any
carving at all on them; only inscriptions or epitaphs, and texts.
12. The =churchyards= were used for burials, and by the middle of the
nineteenth century most of them were crowded with tombstones. In London
nearly all are now laid out as open spaces; many of the grave-stones
have quite disappeared, and those which remain are rapidly perishing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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