Chorlton’s Lych Gate .......... a collaboration between a local artist and writer

Yesterday I announced the collaboration between Peter Topping the artist and me the writer. We decided to tell the stories behind some of his paintings and the one we decided to start with was Lych Gate on the green at the entrance to the old parish churchyard.
I suppose for most of us it is one of the iconic images of where we live and conjures up that timeless English rural scene. For centuries in villages across the country people have walked through a Lych Gate on their way to worship. It is as traditional as the harvest festival, cricket on the green or the taste of warm beer and cider after a day in the fields.

And yet our Lych Gate dates only from the last quarter of the 19th century and was both a recognition of the old Queen’s Golden Jubilee and another round in the fight over where the parish church should be sited. The gate was the gift of the banker Cunliffe Brooks who lived at Barlow Hall. He and his wife had special reason to feel close to the church on the green because two of their children were buried there.
But in the 1860s the old church had become too small and there had been a plan to rebuild it on the corner of what are now St Clements Road and Edge Lane. A committee was formed, money raised at a special bazaar in the Royal Exchange, but a breakaway group refused to move and so despite the erection of the present church, the old church on the green beside the ancient graveyard stayed the official parish church. Cunliffe and his wife Jane Elizabeth continued to support it with generous gifts including a new east window, which people remember as a splendid affair. All of which makes the Lych Gate rather more than a celebration of Victoria’s 50 years on the throne but a clear statement of the importance of the old church.
And people did adopt sides. Marjorie Holmes who remembers the old church just before its demolition in 1949 preferred to worship there and I believe never stepped foot into the new one.
Despite such loyalty the age of the old church and its graveyard came back to challenge its supporters. In the 1880s the great burial scandal hit the national newspapers and the Home Secretary intervened to close it, and sadly the church itself suffered from severe frost damage in 1940 and was closed.*
Peter's work hangs in a number of venues across Chorlton and can also be seen on his facebook site Paintings from Pictures https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Picture © Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk


*The story of the great burial scandal will appear soon