Faith in the town: lay religion, urbanisation and industrialisation in England, 1740-1830

Religious affiliations and beliefs are increasingly seen as central to understanding contemporary global politics and society. This modern focus on faith stands in sharp contrast to our knowledge of, and interest in, lay religion in an earlier period of wide-scale transformation in England. Historians studying the period from the mid eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries often overlook faith, whilst those that do consider it tend to confine themselves to the structures and leaders of organised religion, rather than its followers. Though recent scholarship by historians of religion and the supernatural has indicated the continued importance of religious faith and other forms of belief amongst lay people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dominant interpretations of urban society continue to follow older narratives of secularisation. Most historical studies thus describe a process of religious decline between 1740 and 1830 coexisting with the advent of 'modernity'. The continued influence of this interpretive model of secularisation on social, cultural and economic historians obscures not only our understanding of the lived experience of ordinary people, but also the ways in which many of the changes that we most associate with the development of modern society were shaped. By placing lay religious belief centre-stage, this project will demonstrate the influence of faith in the formation of some of the most important interpretive categories for examining modern society, including identity, family, space and trust. This will alter our understandings of the ways in which such societies functioned and provide a broad-ranging and ambitious re-evaluation of urban historical development of interest to a wide range of academic and non-academic audiences.

Planned Impact
Schoolchildren and schoolteachers
The project findings will be used to contribute to school teaching at both primary and secondary levels through a series of interventions into religious education. This is a way of enriching the school curriculum by helping teachers and other educational providers to acquire new knowledge and by providing teaching materials that fit with recent curricula reviews. In addition, pupils will benefit as topics are made more interesting and stimulating - specifically in terms of the incorporation of the accounts of children and young people into our teaching materials, whilst the use of local case studies will act to increase the relevance and meaning of what they are studying. The proposed approach is closely linked to the PI's previous work with Historic Schools (formerly part of English Heritage) in Key Stage 3 teaching. This new project will produce a more ambitious set of lesson plans and teaching materials, aimed at teaching at Key Stage 2 (primary), KS 3 (secondary) and KS 4 (secondary, GCSE).

Providing teachers and other education providers - specifically Cathedral education teams in the case of KS2 - with high quality teaching resources that meet the changing needs of the new school curricula is an important way to improve the quality of Religious Education for children. We hope to help address some of the uncertainties identified on the part of teachers in approaches towards topics related to Christianity and to produce lesson plans and resources that encourage debate and critical enquiry. To make sure that these resources meet the needs of both teachers and their pupils, our teaching materials will be formulated in collaboration with a skilled education consultant and in collaboration with other specialists and with reference to recent pedagogic research on religious education in schools. We also expect that our inputs will assist children in understanding the role of faith communities in modern towns and cities, thus helping to promote social cohesion in line with both recent Church of England reports and the teaching of 'British values' in schools which explicitly seeks to improve the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils by inculcating mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.

Family and local historians and faith groups
We will publicise our research methods and findings as the project develops in a series of blogs linked to the project website and publicised via both Facebook and a dedicated Twitter feed. Our social media outputs will be aimed at non-academic audiences interested in both local and family history and in religion. Learning more about the history of lay piety will help family and local historians better understand how people in the past understood their world, and for family historians, how the religious beliefs of their ancestors would have affected their behaviour and worldview. Such learning does not just contribute to increasing individual knowledge but has wider social benefits: as the recent RSA/HLF report on Networked Heritage (2016) has stated, 'heritage provides the roots of our identities and enriches the quality of our lives'. This also links clearly to the AHRC priority area of heritage, and specifically the value of cultural heritage in shaping identity in increasingly diverse societies. We will also aim our online outputs at faith audiences for whom we hope engaging with our research will provide similar benefits, specifically by exploring the commonalities of religious faiths. In particular we aim to support the Interfaith Network's aim of increasing understanding and cooperation between people of different faiths and broadening public awareness of the distinctive religious traditions as a means to increase community cohesion. Such ambitions are particularly timely during a period of social fracture around the issues of migration and religion.