Description
Holiness Tabernacle and chimney, Southend St, Bolton.
This church was built in 1932, replacing a tent which had previously housed the congregation on Daubhill’s former market place. The building has been demolished and the Church of the Nazarene now stands in its place.
Mass Observation planned to publish a study of religious life in Bolton to follow on from John Sommerfield’s The Pub and the People. It was planned that Humphrey Spender’s photographs would be used to illustrate this survey, as they had been in Sommerfield’s book, and so many of the Worktown photographs are of religious buildings and services. The start of the Second World War interrupted the plans for the book which was then never completed.
The chimney is at Tootal’s Sunnyside Weaving Mill, at the west end of their vast site. It was taken down brick by brick in 1962. The square base was left for several months, and I wondered if it would be preserved like the famous one on Worsley Green. However, one day I passed and it had gone.