St. Francis, Kitt Green, a challenge and a pleasure

We have been researching this church for some time and are enjoying putting together its story. It’s entirely different to other Wigan churches – both in appearance and in the way it came into being.

St. Francis is a collection of buildings which have been adapted and added to in a piecemeal fashion over many years. The actual church we see now from City Road is a 1970’s brick-built structure with a golden fibre glass spire on top, there to tell us it’s a church.

There’s no wealthy individual who paid for the building to follow up and no one to our knowledge has written a history of the church before.  There’s no proud account of a grand Consecration Service to read in the Wigan Observer, no long list of worthy vicars to look up on Ancestry website.

All we have had to go on is people’s memories and paperwork hidden away in the church safe.  We thought until the other day that we had written the draft history and were about to share the story with the parishioners for their comments and corrections. But then we heard from a former parishioner who was there in 1964 when the church was dedicated and they have given us extra information which means we have to amend our account.

It’s a fascinating story which includes a school building funded by Norley Hall Colliery, a Sunday School which performed pantomimes (Aladdin, a real favourite) and the building of the wooden hut (sometimes referred to as ‘The Lounge’), as a much needed extension. Later it involves a billiard hall in the men’s institute, the determination of a group of parishioners to get a temporary church started to serve the new estates in the area, and is an early example of reuse with furnishings coming from closed local churches rather than being bought from new.

The parishioners and clergy just ‘got on with it’ and, with faith and prayer, built their own church. It’s been our pleasure to record and celebrate that story. We hope to ‘publish’ the full story soon but fully expect once we’ve done so someone to come long and say you’ve not quite got it right here and we’ll be happy to revise it again. This is fluid history, not history set in stone.

Read about the nearby church of St. John the Divine in Pemberton.

Exterior image of the church from Christine Thompson