ABSTRACT
Anglican churches constitute the most significant architectural legacy from the Middle Ages. The chief merit of St Michael's has been recognized as being an event in the central area streetscape, its stumpy tower a sort of foothill to the soaring sixteenth-century tower of the cathedral just along the road and to Pugin's fine Catholic Church of St Mary also nearby. The Roman Catholic Church also has a considerable architectural heritage throughout the country. Among its first post-Reformation churches are St John's, Bath (1685) and St Mary's, Bristol (1730), so again the preconception of essentially Victorian places of worship is by no means the whole story. However, it is true that the second half of the nineteenth century saw the richest period of building, its forms inspired by the more scholarly study of Gothic architecture introduced around 1840 by Pugin and the Ecclesiological Society.
