ON THE St Helens History Channel on Youtube, a series, Where did it all go wrong?, can be found. It includes footage of a mass rally, held in 1995, in protest at the loss of hundreds of jobs at two local manufacturers, Pilkington and Beechams. The comments posted below include many reminiscences of St Helenians: fond memories, mixed with lament for the town’s reduced fortunes. The trajectory of St Helens is not unlike that of other areas in the north of England where industry once produced prosperity. Formerly a world-leading powerhouse — modern glass-production was invented there — the town is now blighted by deprivation. The conversion of the Beechams Building — the first factory in the world to be built for medicine production — into luxury flats tells a story about the British economy. But to reduce the town to a narrative of “grim up north” would be to flatten its recent history. St Helens is also home to the £54-million Glass Futures research institute, one of the most successful Rugby League clubs in the country, and a £150-million town-centre redevelopment.

Nor should nostalgia automatically incur a rebuke. Dr Andrew Rumsey — the bishop shortly to occupy the see of St Albans — has argued that “the nostalgia of the poor should prompt concern, not condescension, from those whose place, materially and socially, is assured” (Comment, 15 June 2018). A little “living in the past”, he suggests, “can be a vital means of regaining one’s bearings”. For the writer Francis Spufford, the past is “the grand narrative that has not melted” and “our sidelong indictment of the inadequate reality of the present”. It is where Britain goes to taste “the kind of collective, even coercive, experience that trumps, that renders moot, the autonomous self-definition that is supposed to be the pride of the present” (Features, 22 December 2017). In St Helens, the Church has much to be proud of in its past. St Mary’s, Lowe House, its large Roman Catholic church, is known as “The Poor Man’s Cathedral”, having been funded by money collected from working people during the Depression. St Helens Parish Church — now St Helens Minster — was also funded by the generosity of its parishioners and local industrialists.

Throughout the country, parish churches are repositories of local memory. The parish church is sometimes the one building that remains when other institutions have departed. The challenge is to balance affection for the past with hope. This is the tension held by clergy such as the Team Vicar of St Helens Minster, the Revd Rachel Shuttleworth. In scripture, the careful documentation of genealogies, commitment to dating (“in the time of . . .”), and the preservation of stories are a reminder that Christianity is not a religion that seeks to transcend time. It honours the heroes of its past. But it is also a faith of forward momentum, in which these heroes are Hebrews’ cloud of witnesses cheering on those of us running the current leg of the race. In St Helens and around the country, the Church is among and alongside those who look back wistfully, enjoined to look forward and upward, too.