Holy Trinity, in Portland Street on the edge of Pittville in Cheltenham, was built in 1823, the first church in Cheltenham to be erected since the Middle Ages. Under the energetic pastorship of Francis Close, its first minister, it helped to look after the spiritual needs of Cheltenham’s growing nineteenth-century population. As Pittville developed from the 1830s onwards – without its own church – Holy Trinity became one of the churches to which Pittville’s inhabitants would turn for worship, community, baptism, marriage, and finally, burial.
This section of the Pittville Works website contains images of the Church, its remarkable burial vaults (crypt), and the memorials of Pittville residents. Pittville was also home to many of the clergy of Holy Trinity, including John Browne, Gordon Calthrop, Edward Hardy, Melville Jones, and Edward Lillingstone, whose residence in Pittville is recorded on our database.
We hope to add further memorials, as more links between the Church and Pittville come to light.
If you wish to visit the Church or the vaults, access should be arranged through info@trinitycheltenham.com. For a full list of memorials in the Church, collected by Julian Rawes in 1978, and reproduced here by kind permission of the author, see this page.