From Lowry to fear and loathing: the battle of the chapel and the mosque

On a brilliant spring afternoon it is easy to see why, 50 years ago, L S Lowry's eye was taken by the cluster of sandstone buildings which stand on Lowergate in the rural Lancashire town of Clitheroe.

The belching chimneys he found here are gone and the red fire station he painted is now a whitewashed chippy, but the grandeur of the buildings is undimmed - especially that of the redundant clothes factory marked out by a rooftop cross as a former Methodist chapel in terrain which John Wesley knew well. And therein lie the roots of a raging controversy, which could hardly be further removed from the gentle scene of endeavour Lowry depicted in his A Street in Clitheroe.

After a long struggle to find a suitable place of worship in the town, the small Muslim population of Clitheroe has, by the narrowest of council votes, secured planning permission to convert the Mount Zion Methodist chapel into its first mosque. The stipulations are strict. No domes or minarets. No calls to prayer. But the 300 local Muslims, who have resorted to praying in a room at the town's council chambers after 30 years in futile pursuit of a mosque, are delighted and Sheraz Arshad, the young British Muslim whose campaigning efforts have secured the mosque, is determined that it should be a community facility where those of different faiths can find out more about each other. "We want it to become one of the first in Britain to incorporate a multi-faith facility," he said.

But Mr Arshad's gesture appears to mean little to those - including the far right, who will bid for political power in Clitheroe at next month's local elections - for whom Muslims are unwelcome here. The chapel, still vacant while money is raised to convert it, has come under attack three times since planning permission was granted, and leaflets for the English First Party, which is contesting the Primrose ward where the chapel stands, are explaining to voters why this mosque might presage an Islamic invasion.

The party knows it is on solid ground, since 900 people lodged objections to the mosque plan - 200 in terms deemed so offensive that the council would not publish their submissions. The editor of the local Clitheroe Advertiser and Times also stopped publishing letters on the subject two weeks before the planning decision, citing "legal issues over content, the length of letters and restrictions on space".

Had Lowry been back in his Clitheroe street yesterday he would have discerned more than enough of these suspicions. The building now occupied by the Pendle Club for pensioners is just within view, to the right of the chapel in Lowry's work, and as she prepared meat pies for last night's dinner dance there, 75-year-old Grace voiced her concerns. "There are that many churches for coloureds. Why can't they travel to them?" she asked, relating stories of how the Catholic children growing up with her in the village of Read - when Lowry was doing his work in Clitheroe - would go "over the hill" to Nelson to find a church. "They have cars, most of them. It wouldn't be difficult for them to do the same."

There was a time, six years ago, when nearby Burnley was aflame in some of the worst riots in a generation, when comments like these were unvarnished. But Grace stopped herself. "I suppose a lot of them have been here for 40 years, though," she added. "You'd say they are Clitheronians." She is right. Sheraz Arshad, who took up the mosque campaign after his father died in 2000 with his own efforts unfulfilled, is an articulate British-born project manager at the local British Aerospace plant, who appreciates the local concerns. "People are very resistant to those of an Islamic background and the fear a lot of people lodged was about Clitheroe, a predominantly white, Christian town, being flooded with Muslims from other towns," he said. "That's not going to happen, and we trying to reassure people about the demographics of people who use these facilities."

But no such succour will appeal to Tess Waterhouse, one of the most ardent and improbable opponents of the mosque. Ms Waterhouse, 40, is an American seeking dual nationality after nine years living in the town but, in the flawed belief that the call to prayer will soon be echoing across Clitheroe and its neighbouring royal estates, she canvassed 400 people in the area on the mosque issue and forwarded the results to the council.

"Most were against because they want Clitheroe to remain an olde worlde town," said Ms Waterhouse, an active member of the local Salvation Army church. "Sharia law disturbs me. Once they are into the building they will close it off from everybody else." Ms Waterhouse was with Lori Tomas, 30, an immigrant Romanian who, despite having arrived here only two weeks ago to take up work as a nurse, had also developed views. "It does seem that more Muslims will come over from Blackburn," she said.

Back in the Pendle pensioners' club, an explanation is offered as to why immigrants like Ms Tomas and the sizeable number of Poles are the subject of less suspicion than British-born Muslims. "Next-door-but-one to me is Slovakian," says Audrey, 77. "But they blend in. They don't stick out like a sore thumb."

If this kind of suspicion were not enough, in this most English of towns, which cherishes its Norman castle and Anglican church established in 1122, there is also the delicate issue of a Muslim group taking over a former Christian establishment at all.

Mount Zion Methodist Chapel survived for 55 years before it was given over to industrial use, and the choir stalls made way for Singer sewing machines. From 1992 until 2004, it was used by Lappet Manufacturing, making 40,000 headscarves a week for export to Saudi Arabia. But its use as a mosque highlights the respective fortunes of Christianity and Islam in Britain.

The chapel's closure, amid dwindling congregations 40 years ago, is a story which has since been replicated throughout Britain, with more than 1,700 Church of England establishments declared formally redundant since 1969, according to a recent investigation by Church Research. Over the same period, the number of mosques in Britain has grown to almost the number of Anglican churches that have closed. The Islamic website Salaam records a total of 1,689 mosques.

Covenants attached to redundant Anglican churches make it difficult for them to be used by another faith. None has become a mosque and just two have become Sikh gurdwaras and new uses tend to include concert halls and cafés. Another of Clitheroe's former Methodist chapels is now the Emporium wine bar and brasserie. It is a far cry from Lowry's time here, when the Christian church and chapel in Britain seemed unassailable.

A number of locals yesterday recalled the words of local Anglican vicar on the subject of the mosque. "He reminded us that we are not using our own churches. We only go to them for christenings and weddings," said George, 58, a Scottish retired police officer. That vicar was Philip Dearden of Saint Mary Magdalene Church, where the first stone was laid in the 12th century and the congregation has dropped to about 90 people (average age 75) on Sundays. "Lancashire is the last place to see secularisation in Britain,'' he said. ''We're seeing it now quite drastically. People don't have a conscience about religion, they don't come anymore.''

It would be wrong to say that plans to convert the 125-year-old building have not found support locally. The last secretary of the Mount Zion methodist chapel, Fred Braithwaite, who closed the door on the place as a chapel in 1940, said: "The council made the right decision in the end." The local conservative MP, Nigel Evans, says the council had not educated local pupils about what the multifaith facility is all about. To that end, he has declared his intention to hold surgeries there.

The chair of the planning committee which approved the proposal, Richard Sherras, said the Arshads' 30-year struggle for a mosque was, in part, due to their pursuit of premises which were unsuitable. "When a site was rejected we did offer help in finding an alternative," he said. "The opposition has been about planning issues like noise and car parking and nothing to do with people coming from other areas to worship there .... It's been a situation we can't win," he said. "Approve the application and we're accused of ignoring voters. Reject it and we're accused of being racist."

Mr Arshad does hide his frustration with what he considers to be municipal obfuscation over the establishment of a mosque. He says he and his father made six applications for a mosque and at one point, Ribble Valley council was criticised for maladministration by the Local Government Ombudsman for the way it decided not to sell land for one.

But he wants Clitheroe to understand his purpose. To that end, he has formed an interfaith scout group, Beaver Scouts, that marks many kinds of religious occasions, including the Taoist and Jewish new year. "Somehow this issue has got wrapped up in the general immigration debate," he said.

There will be no obvious changes to the exterior of the building, Mr Arshad said. Women will be welcome to pray in the main prayer hall, and though the cross at the top - not visible in Lowry's image - will come down, nothing will be erected in its place. "We don't want a dome. That might be fine for Egypt and Turkey, but, let's face it, here it would look like a big onion. As I've said from the start, what matters is what goes on inside.''

Local concerns

* Plans for a mega-mosque catering for 70,000 worshippers, situated near the Olympic Complex in east London, unveiled in 2005, were met by resistance from the local community. Its backers, Tablighi Jamaat, amissionary group, proposed the site as its UK headquarters. Opponents raised concerns over the group, which had come under scrutiny from security agencies since 9/11.

* In 1986, the East London Mosque, in Whitechapel, became of the few mosques in Britain permitted to broadcast calls to prayer (azan). Itfound itself at the centre of a public debate about "noise pollution" when local non-Muslim residents began to protest.

* In September 2004, a mosque which has operated without planning permission for 10 years, was allowed to remain open in spite of local protest. The Aleef Mosque, in Bolton, opened in the same building as a madrassa and language teaching centre, for which permission was granted.