Pious Pleasure? Church-Based Leisure in a Working-Class Community, East Oxford 1870-1914

Centred on the growing working-class district of East Oxford, this paper makes a detailed analysis of how church-based leisure was organised and experienced in the period c.1870-1914 to discover what role it played for those it involved. Making use of church magazines (themselves little-used sources), it challenges the assumption that all working classes in this period had access to commercial leisure, contests the notion that church leisure was a tool of the middle classes to improve and contain working-class leisure time, and demonstrates the reach of church-based leisure beyond its religious mandate. The paper argues that the development of church-based leisure in East Oxford was born of its socioeconomic context and shaped by the local community into an affordable, accessible and inclusive means of collective enjoyment and personal achievement, sustained by creative and diverse financial strategies. Rather than reflecting a discrete church culture distinct from that of secular entertainment, the research reveals a complex interaction between spheres of influence reaching far beyond church and chapel. The way in which church-based leisure functioned in East Oxford brought clear benefits both to individuals and to the wider community-benefits which could not be accessed through commercial leisure-and demonstrate the unique role of church leisure in a working-class suburb, a function hitherto unexplored and poorly understood.