In 1860 the Diocese of Durham launched a new mission to bring Christianity - and specifically Anglicanism - to the teeming population of the Durham coalfield. Over the preceding fifty years the Church of England had become increasingly marginalised as the coalfield population soared. Parish churches that had been built to serve a scattered, rural medieval population were no longer sufficiently close - or relevant - to the new industrial townships that were being constructed around the coalmines. The post-1860 mission was a belated attempt to reach out to the new coalfield population, and to rescue them from the forces of Methodism, labour militancy and irreligion. It was posited on the need to build new churches, to delineate new parishes and to recruit a new type of clergyman: working-class and down-to-earth in origin and outlook, and somebody who could make an empathetic connection with his new parishioners.

This book is a detailed exploration of the way in which the Church of England in Durham handled its mission. It follows the Church's relationship with the coalfield, which ranged from an early-nineteenth-century aloofness to an early-twentieth-century identification which many church leaders considered had gone too far, and in so doing reveals how the Durham experience relates to national attempts to maintain Anglicanism's relevance and presence in an increasingly secular and sceptical society.

Dr ROBERT LEE lectures in History at the University of Teesside, Middlesbrough.