Materiality and the extended geographies of religion: the institutional design and everyday experiences of London's Wesleyan Methodist circuits, 1851–1932

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Highlights

  • Promotes material approaches to extended geographies of historical religious practice.

  • Uses and adapts material religion approaches.

  • Investigates the everyday experiences of nonconformist congregations.

  • Compares the official design and lived experience of religious spaces.

  • Identifies differences between the design and lived experience of Wesleyan circuits.

Abstract

Using and adapting the ideas of material religion, this paper considers Wesleyan Methodist circuits: the organisation of chapels within specific geographical areas into co-dependent communities. Interested in circuits as an example of the extension of religious space beyond institutional contexts – the extended geographies of religion – it highlights the importance of thinking about such spaces as material things. Using two circuits in London (Bow and Highgate) as case studies, this paper focuses on representations of circuits and their visual and material qualities. It then explores how material approaches facilitate insights into the differences between how religious leaders designed these spaces and how individuals experienced them. Taking a material approach to congregational bodies, objects and (sub)urban landscapes, it simultaneously considers how material things gain meaning through their participation in humans' social networks and as a result of their inherent material properties. In particular, it argues that taking this material approach to the extended geographies of religious practice is an effective method of gaining insights into individuals' everyday experiences of religious spaces. Most specifically, it emphasises how the insights that material approaches provide into everyday religious practices are especially useful when studying individuals in the past, as their voices are generally unrepresented in the official archival documents of religious institutions that historical research into religious communities is often dependent on.

Section snippets

The Highgate and Bow circuits

The Highgate Circuit developed in north London during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a largely middle-class suburban area. Its first chapel was built in 1821 and by 1905 it had six chapels serving the area's increasing population (Fig. 2).37 The Bow Circuit – established in 1861 – initially served a largely middle-class community in a relatively affluent area of east London. However, during the latter decades of the nineteenth century the demographic

Circuit plans and the movement of people

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wesleyan circuits were regularly represented in circuit plans: ephemeral administrative grids created to convey information about the chapels, services and preachers in a circuit community.43 Although circuit

Circuit schedules and the exchange of material things

Circuit schedules provide a second visual and material illustration of Wesleyan circuits as extended geographies of religious practice. Administrative tools created by the central Wesleyan Church, circuit schedules were pre-printed logbooks that provided labelled rows and columns to direct and regulate the information collected about chapels' finances and membership figures. Collated at circuits' quarterly meetings, this information was then presented at the Wesleyan Church's annual Conference:

The Wesleyan Atlas and the role of the local landscape in Wesleyan circuits

Finally, The Wesleyan Atlas provides a third visual representation of how the Wesleyan Church envisaged circuits as extended geographies. Produced and published during the 1870s, the atlas marked the geographical location of every chapel in England and Wales using small red, yellow, blue or green dots (Fig. 6). These different colours were used to denote which circuit each chapel belonged to and therefore illustrated the distances between circuits' chapels and the peripheries of circuit

Conclusions

This paper has used material approaches to consider how extended geographies of religious practice were designed by church leaders and experienced by congregation members. Employing visual analysis, consideration of the social meanings gained by material things when integrated into human relationships, and the inherent material characteristics of material things, it has demonstrated how material approaches to the extended geographies of religious communities can reveal something about

Acknowledgements

This article has been written using research undertaken during my PhD, conducted at University College London with funding from a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Humanities Scholarship (2013–2016). I would like to thank my two supervisors, James Kneale and Claire Dwyer, and numerous others who commented on my work, including Caroline Bressey, Angela Connelly, Richard Dennis, David Gilbert, Carmen Mangion and William Whyte. I would also like to express my gratitude to this paper's anonymous

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