St. Lawrence Church

St. Lawrence’s church was established in the early 16th century as a chapel of ease of St. Wilfrid, Ribchester to serve the residents of Dilworth and Alston, and in 1868 it was made into a parish church.

In 1975, Brian Clarke designed ten pairs of stained glass windows after local scenes such as Pendle Hill, Longridge Fell and Fairsnape Fell, as well as the local reservoirs and quarries. The group of windows were intended to harmonise with the church’s architecture from both inside and outside.

In the 2011 BBC Four documentary Brian Clarke: Colouring Light - An Artist Apart, Clarke describes the project:

'Longridge was a whole series of windows on the upper gallery of a church that had particularly good light because there was nothing interrupting the light on either the north or the south walls of the church. It was the first time anybody had asked me to do a suite of windows, rather than an individual thing. There wasn’t any stained glass in those days that used such big sheets of colour. I based the thing on the kind of green and blue of those wonderful hills and reservoirs that exist around that part of Lancashire. It was really just a very youthful, joyous, celebration of the medium, in a building. I think that was the first time I really knew that I wanted to alter the building, I wanted to make a contribution to the building as a whole.'