ABSTRACT
Deep structural problems affected both the Church of England and the Free Churches in urban areas between 1851 and the 1880s. In the case of the Church of England, these structural problems were connected with churchgoing decline. By the 1880s problems that have persisted to the present day were already writ large in both the Church of England and the Free Churches. A fundamental problem for the Church of England was that, as in the countryside, even when it responded to urban population growth by erecting new churches and establishing new parishes, it characteristically continued to subsidize older churches. The Free Churches suffered rather from chronic diffusion and opportunistic expansion. By 1881, like the overall position of the Church of England in Liverpool, Independent chapels were on average only about a third full and by 1912 they were only a quarter full.
