Glory be to God for wrinkly tin

From cathedral to gospel halls, tin tabernacles are regarded with a special affection in Britain. Mary Miers discovers the ups and downs of corrugated-iron churches–the original flat-packed buildings

- Mary Miers

IT’S an enjoyable paradox that a material born of the Industrial Revolution should have become assimilated into the built vernacular and produced some of our most delightful small-scale buildings. Wrinkly tin, as it’s affectionately known, saw its heyday between the 1860s and the First World War, but hundreds of corrugated iron structures survive today, as photogenic when gently succumbing to shades of rust as when trim in their livery of colourful paintwork.

Foremost among them are tin tabernacles —that distinctive breed of portable chapels, churches and mission halls put up in response to the church-building boom of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Unpretentious by nature and assembled from kits, they are associated in particular with the burgeoning of non-conformist religion, with its myriad congregations of Methodists, Wesleyans, Baptists, Mormons, Plymouth Bethren, United Free Presbyterians and numerous other septs that required affordable places of worship quick to build and easy to recycle.

Many served predominantly working-class congregations in new industrial, as well as rural, communities and in the rapidly expanding cities. Some were funded by subscription or hired from their manufacturers; others were built by companies intent on keeping their employees on the straight and narrow. The Church of England also explored the potential of corrugated iron, particularly for army garrisons and the colonies, and for temporary use as permanent churches were being built.