In a period of severely constrained opportunity for scholars seeking an outlet for the publication of detailed regional research, Cambridge Scholars Publishing deserves our gratitude for encouraging the submission of manuscripts which originated as doctoral dissertations. Patricia Midgley's study is one such. Her York University PhD on the Churches and the working classes in Leeds was completed in 2011. Her detailed knowledge of key local sources, especially church minute books and school logs, enables her to make a useful contribution to the live debate on the reasons for, and extent of, the declining influence of Churches in urban Britain. Midgley argues convincingly that from 1870 expanded roles for both the state and local government meant that the Churches were beginning to lose ‘their key role in the education of the young and in the provision of social welfare’ (p. 269). This does not mean that religious organisations were supine. Many made sustained attempts to engage with the changing interests of their working-class clientele. A plethora of Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, Bands of Hope and sporting clubs resulted. Churches increasingly competed with other providers of leisure activities. Midgley agrees with Simon Green that this was a contest that the Churches were unlikely to win. What she calls – with wry anachronism – the Churches’ ‘core business’ became increasingly subordinate to the lure of secular initiatives. Meanwhile, church attendance began to drop substantially in the Edwardian age. The key points are effectively made. However, some of the disadvantages of the PhD approach remain. The book's opening chapter is all too patently the unreconstructed ‘literature survey’. Though up-to-date and efficient enough, it fails to engage. In appraising the historiography, Midgley seemingly lacks the confidence to take on the big names, such as McLeod, Hempton and Obelkevich, whose interpretations are more frequently summarised than appraised. The practice of ending each substantive chapter with a conclusion produces variable results. The chapter on Leeds missions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes effective and extensive use of local archives. Its conclusion also uses primary evidence to demonstrate that, although missions failed to halt the overall process of working-class disengagement with organised religion, some which targeted their efforts to fulfil specific needs in the communities that they served effected some degree of social, though more rarely spiritual, renewal. By contrast, the chapter on Leeds Churches during the First World War ends with a very brief conclusion which turns on national church membership statistics. Since these are already available in a well-known secondary source published more than thirty-five years ago, an important opportunity is missed. Nevertheless, Midgley has made an effective contribution which adds significantly both to our understanding of how the churches and chapels attempted to reach the working classes and deflect them from the ways of sloth and sin and why, by the end of the First World War, they had largely failed.