St Mary the Virgin's Church, Leigh

St Mary the Virgin's Church stands at the very centre of Leigh, in Greater Manchester, beside the Civic Square — once the town's market place — next to the library and opposite the town hall. A Church of England parish church in the Diocese of Manchester, it is a Grade II* listed building, and for several centuries it was the ancient mother church of a wide parish, its origins reaching back into the Middle Ages even though the body of the church seen today is a fine Victorian rebuilding.

A church on this site is recorded in documents of the thirteenth century, though its foundation is older and uncertain — a list of parsons begins in the reign of Richard I in the late twelfth century, and it is possible there was a church here even at the time of the Norman Conquest. The first church, dedicated to St Peter, was known as the Church of Westleigh in Leigh, its dedication changed to St Mary the Virgin at the end of the fourteenth century. Curiously, the building straddled the ancient boundary between the townships of Westleigh and Pennington, with the nave and churchyard in one and the chancel in the other. For hundreds of years St Mary's was the mother church of six townships — Westleigh, Pennington, Bedford, Astley, Atherton and Tyldesley — whose people had to travel here for baptisms, marriages and funerals until daughter chapels were gradually built across the parish from the seventeenth century onwards.

The church's early history was bound up with the Westleigh family, lords of the manor, one of whom, John de Westleigh, served as parish priest in the reign of King John. The building was probably rebuilt in the fifteenth century, and its tower dates from about 1500. Within were two chantry chapels — the Tyldesley Chapel, dedicated to St Nicholas, and the Atherton Chapel — and the Royalist commander Sir Thomas Tyldesley was buried here after his death at the Battle of Wigan Lane in 1651. The tower was restored in 1721 and again in 1849, but by the late 1860s the church had become unsafe.

Between 1871 and 1873 the church, apart from its medieval tower, was rebuilt by the celebrated Lancaster architects Paley and Austin, at a cost of £8,738, providing seating for 710, and was reconsecrated by the Bishop of Manchester in February 1873. The same distinguished practice returned over the following decades, refitting the chancel and providing a new altar and reredos in 1890, and adding a choir vestry and recasing the tower in 1909–10. Built of hammer-dressed sandstone in the Gothic Revival Perpendicular style, the church has a six-bay nave and a two-bay chancel beneath a continuous roof with a clerestory and battlemented parapet, the castellated tower retaining its sixteenth-century studded oak west doors. Pevsner found the interior, with its octagonal piers, "impressive in scale", and inside the church the roofline of the earlier building can still be seen on the tower wall.

St Mary's preserves many treasures, some saved from the older church. Its tower holds a ring of eight bells, most cast by Abel Rudhall of Gloucester in the eighteenth century, said to replace bells reputedly given by Queen Elizabeth I; they were restored in 2010. The reredos and altar by Austin and Paley, "gorgeously painted" in gold, red and green by Shrigley and Hunt, were praised by Pevsner as "extremely handsome", and the stained glass is the work of Shrigley and Hunt and of Charles Eamer Kempe. One window, the Speakman window, is of particular local interest, for it depicts the industries on which Leigh was built — weavers, engineers and colliers. From the old church survive a historic organ by Samuel Green of London, an altar table of 1705, oak churchwardens' canopies of 1686, and a fine eighteenth-century brass chandelier that Pevsner thought "a cut above the norm", now converted to electricity. The churchyard's eighteenth-century boundary wall and gate piers are themselves separately listed.

From its uncertain medieval beginnings as the mother church of six townships, through its fifteenth-century tower and its careful Victorian rebuilding by Paley and Austin, to the rich furnishings gathered within it, St Mary the Virgin's Church remains the historic heart of Leigh — a building that carries the long story of the town from the market square into the present day, and continues as a living parish church in the Diocese of Manchester.