The Labour Church was founded in Manchester in 1891 by John Trevor, architect turned Unitarian minister, as a vehicle for ethical socialism or, as he grandiosely came to regard it, the ‘soul of the labour movement’. It grew spontaneously, through local initiative, but peaked very early, in 1895, when there were fifty-four congregations, mostly in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Although Trevor's founding principles defined the Labour Church as a religious movement, and Turner emphatically argues that it was, differences of opinion soon opened up regarding its purpose and activities. Over time it became more politicised and secularised, many congregations becoming tools of the Independent Labour Party or trade unions. Trevor eventually left the Labour Church in 1902, as persona non grata. Turner provides an authoritative overview of these developments, through six chapters devoted to Trevor's career to 1902 (omitting his later life, until his death in 1930); the growth of the Labour Church; its daily routines and the role of women; its immanentist theology, services and opposition from the Churches; its outreach, including children's work, exploration of alternative lifestyles and sexualities, and its struggle to establish itself in London; and causes of decline. She draws upon materials collected by David Summers for his ground-breaking Edinburgh PhD thesis of 1958, archives, publications of the Labour Church and autobiographies (not least Trevor's own). Liberal quotations from these punctuate the text and some original documents are transcribed in appendices ii–viii. Local newspapers, now far easier to search through the online British Newspaper Archive, could have been more thoroughly mined and might have assisted, perhaps, in enriching appendix i, listing churches which survived more than a year, not least respecting dates of opening and closure. Although the importance of the Labour Church was always disproportionate to its numbers, it is also regrettable that Turner has made no attempt to estimate the size of its peak membership, as distinct from ‘the audience-swelling visits of star speakers’ (pp. 70, 75), finding the challenge too difficult (pp. 4, 60, 224). Certainly, as an embodiment of non-dogmatic working-class religion, the Labour Church, however interesting an experiment, was hugely overshadowed by the working-class presence in ‘orthodox’ denominations. Its significance is possibly greater to the formative years of British socialism. The book's index is rather inadequate. Turner mentions, but rules out of scope, the Labour Church's brief resurgence after the First World War and its spread overseas from 1893 (where its longevity was greater than in Britain). For these aspects, as well as an extended analysis of Trevor's ‘theological socialism’, the reader should consult Neil Johnson's The Labour Church: the movement and its message (London 2018). While acknowledging their partial complementarity, it seems disadvantageous to the authors that two monographs on the same niche subject, both revisions of doctoral theses, have been published simultaneously.