This short monograph offers a local and longitudinal study of churchgoing, a key metric of secularisation, with reference to York since 1743. Quantitative sources are privileged but carefully reviewed from the perspectives of methodology, reliability, and comparability. They include three Victorian religious censuses and surveys (1834–51) and eleven from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (1901–2011). Measured by an index of attendance (IA), and unadjusted for multiple attendance, at no time since the mid-nineteenth century has a majority of York residents attended church on an average Sunday. The proportion in 2024 (when only 44 per cent of the city’s population were Christian, and 46 per cent without religion) probably slumped to 4 per cent or less. Notwithstanding its fame as an Anglican centre, the Church of England has often had to play second fiddle to Protestant nonconformists in matters of churchgoing numbers in York. 

CLIVE D. FIELD is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham and a former Director of Scholarship and Collections at The British Library. He has published extensively on the social history of British religion since the eighteenth century, with special reference to statistical sources. His books include a four-volume secularisation history of modern Britain concluding with Counting Religion in Britain, 1970–2020: Secularization in Statistical Context (Oxford University Press, 2022). This monograph forms part of a series of local and longitudinal studies of churchgoing decline in English and Scottish communities. The author is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the English Association. He was appointed OBE in 2007 for services to literature.