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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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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