St Mary's Church

History of St Mary’s Church and Community Centre

In the nineteenth century the building of St Mary’s Church Cottonstones was initiated and part funded by Ellen Hadwen who was daughter of a local millowner, John Hadwen. The Hadwens engaged the Leeds architects William Perkin and Elisha Backhouse to design the Church, St Mary’s School in Mill Bank, and the Vicarage.  Perkin and Backhouse designed many other Gothic Revival-style buildings that are now ‘listed’ and also the Italianate-style Sowerby Bridge Town Hall.

Ellen Hadwen died at the age of twenty-six and did not live to see the completed Church in 1848 when her sister Eliza laid the foundation stone, along with a time capsule which contains coins of the realm. Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century St Mary’s Church was well supported with congregations of many hundreds of people and was a centre for community activities. Following the sudden failure of the Hadwen’s mill business at Kebroyd in 1901 the population of the area decreased dramatically over the following sixty years.

Modernising and restoring the Church as a Community Centre contributes to the preservation of a valuable heritage building that has seen Cottonstones and Mill Bank through extraordinary changes; from a densely populated area for mill workers, through a period of depression to the present time of revival.