There has been a church here since 1837, there is still a church here.
Almost.
Openshaw in the 60s was still a busy community of terraced homes and their occupants, tumbling cheek by jowl with industry, both heavy and light.
A tightly wrapped world of corner shops and sun-canopied Silver Cross prams.
The original imposing, imperious St Barnabas’s was demolished, to be replaced by a sharper space age architecture, embodying a new age of optimism.
Photographs from the Manchester Image Archive
At the same time the soot-blackened Victorian terraces, are in part replaced by newer brick and block homes, the future seemed bright.
The industry however, once so invincible, both light and heavy, begins to disappear, becomes weightless, invisible.
Slowly the assured social cohesion of that new age comes unstuck.
When the doors of one St Barnabas’s close, likewise eventually another closes.
modernmooch.com 
I am horrified to see how gravestones are laid haphazardly to form what appears to be a footpath in the church grounds. No respect for the Dead?! Those stones were at gravesides to remember those who had died, paid for by families grieving the loss of loved ones. What has happened to the graves and the bodies in those graves? One of those graves, the family grave of my mother, contained at least five bodies. I can only thank God that she was not buried there. What happened to all the rest of the gravestones?
LikeLike