Church Heritage Record 624333

West tower, nave, chancel with north and south vestries.

Heywood was recorded as a hamlet in the C12, but the settlement is probably older still. The lords of the manor were the Heywood family, who built Heywood Hall in the C13. The hamlet continued as a small rural settlement, largely pastoral but with some weaving industry, until cotton manufacture started locally.

The first spinning-mill, Marking Mill, was at Wrigley Brook, in the late C18 and was later converted to a cotton mill by Robert Peel (father of the Prime Minister), but the place did not grow into a town until the mid-C19. By 1833, shortly before the church was built, there were 27 cotton mills and an increasing urban population. The Topographical Dictionary of England reports that in 1845 there were 36 cotton-mills in the town, all, with one exception, for heavy fustian goods, producing 8,506 tons of cotton annually, and consuming 71,101 tons of coal. The size of the town can be judge from local employment: in these mills and in two paper-mills, 7510 persons were employed in 1848. There was also a coal company and quarry, using a branch of the Rochdale canal at Blue Pits, and a branch of the Manchester and Leeds railway. In 1881, the newly created Municipal Borough of Heywood included 67 cotton mills and weaving sheds, 22 churches and chapels and a population of c. 25,000.

Growth continued into the C20, with the foundation of Plum Tickle Mill in 1905, the largest mule-spinning mill in the world under one roof. However, the later C20 saw a period of sharp decline as the cotton industry underwent a period of reform and devastation. From the 1960s-80s more and more mills closed, and most have now been demolished. The surviving "Mutual Mills", a complex of four, are Grade II listed.

The town was originally served by St Lukes, a chapel to Bury first built in the C17 but extended in 1805 and rebuilt in 1859 by Joseph Clark. The construction of St James in 1837-38 marks a period of intensive urbanisation as the cotton industry in the area expanded, exceeding the capacity of the chapel, despite its enlargement. The church is clearly intended to seat a large number of people for the lowest possible cost, with no piers and large galleries. Despite its date it is not a commissioners’ church. The funds came from local mill-owning families, including the Kershaws, and the church was presumably intended to improve the morals of their work force. A plaque on the north gallery records the gifts of Richard and Thomas Orford, John and Robert Kershaw, and Robert Kay. There are separate entrances for men and women, both screened, and with partitions in every pew to make mixing all but impossible. Had it been built a decade later the church would no doubt have appeared radically different, instead it is a late example of the kind of simple boxes with notionally gothic detailing that were still being erected until the arrival of the ecclesiological movement in the next few years.

Indeed, the expectations of the mid-decades of the C19 are expressed in the addition of the short chancel, not considered a liturgical necessity in the 1830s, in 1861. Unlike the simple Y tracery (in timber) in the nave, the east window has archaeologically correct geometric tracery, and two large vestries for the complex robing and processions demanded by the Victorians. On the exterior the vestries have well-detailed gothic doors with labels and headstops, while the earlier west entrance has a plain triple chamfer.

The church has a simple rectangular plan with later chancel leading to north and south vestries, an ante-chapel to the nave, and west tower.  The whole is constructed in coursed ashlar, presumably around a rubble core.

The two-storey tower is described, accurately, by Pevsner as being ‘undersized’. It has a two-centred triple-chamfered arched west doorway with early or original doors with blind tracery. There is a pointed arched window and clock face above. The tower has angle buttresses with two set offs. There are two lancet bell openings on each face and a parapet.

The church is seven bays in length, each containing a two-light window with Y tracery, plain in execution, apart from the western bay which contains a door in a pointed arch opening. There are seven very slender buttress along each side, with angle buttresses at the corners, and a plain parapet. The east end has a five-light window with geometric tracery and two buttresses, each with two set offs. It has a plinth and string course at dado level. The vestries have pitched roofs and small cusped windows, that to the south appears to be a later addition, that to the north original. They have angle buttresses and pointed-arch doorways.

The interior is vast open space with galleries on cast-iron columns of 1838. The galleries run around all three sides of the nave, with panelled fronts and banked seating, all movable benches. The single span roof is vast and dominating, but Pevsner is overly critical of it. It is formed of cusped scissor braces with extra struts and open-work tracery.  There are four purlins and a ridge piece. The walls are plastered and painted.

The pews are substantial Victorian objects, with some minimal decoration on the pew ends (stylised flowers), and on timber pew platforms. The choir stalls are slightly more ornate equivalents. There are parclose screens to the north and south doorways in the west, presumably to separate men and women, also with gothic tracery. The aisles are carpeted, probably over flags, with heating grills over channels to either side of the central aisle. They are of a single level, with chancel step.