History
St Paul’s was opened in 1959 to serve the New Parson Cross estate which had been constructed on previous greenfield land in the late 1940s as the City of Sheffield cleared its slum housing and expanded into the countryside. The church was designed by the Scottish architect Basil Spence who was forced to work with a limited budget. Spence was working on his most famous design Coventry Cathedral at the same time that he was overseeing the construction of St Paul’s.
When St Paul’s was opened in 1959 it did not have its own parish and was purely a daughter church to St. Mary‘s, Ecclesfield. However the area around St Paul’s was declared a Conventional District within the Ecclesfield parish and in 1973 the separate parish of St Paul, Wordsworth Avenue was created. The new housing estate never had an official name, so the parish is one of the few which is identified by its street address rather than by its district. The parish was badly hit by the collapse of the Sheffield steel industry in the 1980s and a high level of unemployment was created and today “New Parson Cross is part of one of the most deprived areas of the city”.
Read more about this topic: St Paul's Church, Wordsworth Avenue
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)