St Walburge's Roman Catholic Church

Chief among these churches is Preston's Grade I-listed St Walburge's by Joseph Aloysius Hansom. Built between 1850 and 1867, the church is an impressive and, to some, unsettlingly individual testament to the rise of Roman Catholicism in Lancashire. With its 300 ft spire, its steep hammerbeam roof and its vast internal space, it astonishes those who visit it.

Designed for a large and expanding Catholic population, it now has one mass for 120 people a week. With stretched resources and dwindling congregations, the Diocese proposes to close St Walburge's and amalgamate the parish with the adjacent one, leaving this exceptional building, like so many other historic churches, empty, vulnerable and with no future agreed.