St. Giles' Catholic Church, Cheadle

St. Giles' Church is a Roman Catholic church in the town of Cheadle, Staffordshire, England. The Grade I listed Gothic Revival church was designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

The history of St. Giles' begins with the establishment of a Catholic mission in Cheadle by Fr. William Wareing, a future Bishop of Northampton. He was an assistant to Fr. Thomas Baddeley at Cresswell, and in the early 1820s he opened a small chapel in a private house in Charles Street, Cheadle. Among those attending Mass there was Charles, Earl of Shrewsbury, when he stayed at Alton Abbey without his chaplain. As Fr. Wareings' efforts bore fruit, the room became inadequate for the growing numbers, and Lord Shrewsbury asked him to look for larger premises. Eventually he obtained, on the Earls' behalf, a building about 60 feet (18 m) in length which had been built as an armory for the local militia during the Napoleonic Wars, and the adjoining adjutant's house. This was converted into the new chapel, and the first resident priest was Fr. James Jeffries, appointed in 1827. In the same year the fifteenth Earl of Shrewsbury died and was succeeded by his nephew, John Talbot, as the sixteenth Earl. Earl John made Alton Abbey his principal residence and renamed it "Alton Towers".

The earl was zealous in promoting the Catholic cause following the 1829 Emancipation Act, and it was he who first bought Pugin to North Staffordshire in the autumn of 1837, initially as an architect and interior designer at the Towers. Convinced that Pugin was the greatest acquisition the Church had made for some time, the Earl soon resolved that he would make financial contributions only to churches designed by Pugin and built under his supervision. As the Earl's architect, Pugin paid frequent, and sometimes lengthy visits, to Alton Towers - a convenient base from which to supervise progress on his various buildings in the Midlands.

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