The Centre for English Local History

The Historical Geography of Religion

Professor K.D.M. Snell has recently published with his former colleague in the Centre Dr Paul Ell (now at Queens University, Belfast) the results of a major research project which analysed and mapped the 1851 Religious Census, the 1676 Compton Census, and many other socio-economic variables. The resulting book, Rival Jerusalems: the Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2000) was based on huge databases which form unrivalled research resources for examining the links between religion, topography, culture and society. The data comprise over 2,000 variables, covering many religious, socio-economic and demographic characteristics of 2,443 parishes in 15 counties and all 624 registration districts in England and Wales. This work, funded over many years by the Leverhulme Trust and the ESRC, is the fullest quantitative and cartographic research ever conducted into the contexts of British religion.

A second book using these data, by Dr Alasdair Crockett (another former colleague and now at the University of Essex), on geographies of secularisation, is due to be published soon by Cambridge University Press.