More About Holy Trinity Church
A brief history
The parish of Holy Trinity was formed in 1872 from St Michael’s, St Pter’s and Christ Church parishes. The church was built in 1876 at a cost of nearly £15,000 which was paid for by the late George Heginbottom of Ashton-under-Lyne. The site was given by the Earl of Stamford and Warrington. It is a brick building in the early English style which consisted of chancel with aisles, nave, transepts, north and south porches and a belfry containing three bells. There were over 700 seatings.
In the late 1980s, Holy Trinity Church was considered to be a big barn of a building, empty for most of the week, cold and used by only a handful of mainly elderly local people. The majority of the local population were Muslims, mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh.The church building, still dominated the locality, but the activity in it was increasingly marginal to community iife.
Church people talked about the possibility of dividing the building into two and letting half out to community groups to raise money. Driven initially by their own need to do something about the huge building a vision gradually took shape of a real sharing of the resource of the building with the community. The local authority had identified the area round the church as being one of the most deprived in the borough.
The congregation raised a substantial amount of money. £20,000 was raised by asking the congregation and friends to lend to the scheme in units of £50 to be paid back later. Substantial sums were also raised by an Anglican deanery in Surrey which was twinned with the parish.A grant was received from the Church Urban Fund.
The building now consists of a worship space in the eastern half of the building. The community rooms occupy the western half on two floors and are mananged by St Peter’s Youth (SPY) who are part of St Peter’s Partnership.
Stained glass windows
At the east end of the church there are a series of stained glass windows setting out the events of Jesus’ life - photos of these can be found in Holy Trinity’s gallery section of this site.