The event proved that he had judged rightly. His first works of any consequence were two churches built for the Commissioners, one at Prestwich, and the other at Campfield, Manchester.[29] His letters show the exultation with which he hailed the first success, and the complacency with which he regarded his first church designs, a complacency justified by the high opinion formed of them by others, but destined to undergo a woful change in after years, when these churches served as a continual subject of laughter to his friend Mr. Pugin and to himself.[30] The first stone of the Prestwich Church was laid by Lord Wilton,[31] on the 3rd of August, 1822, and that of the Manchester Church (Campfield) by the Bishop of Chester, on the 12th of the same month. The designs seem to have been then well received, and to have given him his introduction to Manchester, where he found warm friends (especially the late Sir J. Potter), and afterwards did a good deal of work. They, of course, showed little acquaintance with the spirit of Gothic detail. But they were considered to have elegance of proportion, and some originality of design. The fronts of churches appeared to him deficient in extension, and he attempted to obtain this by means of an arcaded porch at Manchester, as afterwards at Brighton by spreading the lower part of the tower. In this, as in other points, he carried out principles fixed in his own mind, without shrinking from ecclesiological heresies. On the other hand, in spite of his admiration for the horizontal lines and regular forms of Egyptian and Greek architecture, he entered so thoroughly into the vertical principle of Gothic, that he felt unsatisfied in carrying out any Gothic building without a spire. In his first church at Prestwich, as afterwards at Brighton, he did his utmost to secure the erection of one, though in both cases economical considerations prevailed against the architect’s protest. In his last work at the New Palace at Westminster, as soon as he felt himself “master of the situation,” the castellated character of the original design faded away, and a forest of spires sprang up, which he at times longed to complete by some spire-like erection on the Victoria Tower itself. His success with regard to these churches was the more welcome, inasmuch as it enabled him at last to conclude his marriage, on the 7th of December, 1822, and thus to enter on the domestic life which he so much desired and prized. The small house in Ely Place continued for a time to be his home. Economy was still a necessity, and in that economy he had a prudent and affectionate coadjutrix. But, indeed, except for his art, he was never lavish; and in spite of his enterprising and sanguine temperament, he had a horror of embarrassment and debt.