The photo shows the current state of what was Moorgreen Congregational Chapel, an eighteenth-century structure which is now private housing. This appears to have been the location of the chapel featured in Lawrence's early short story 'Fanny and Annie'. Fanny has reluctantly returned to the district to marry Harry, her long-term sweetheart, but suffers the embarrassment of hearing him denounced as a philanderer from the floor of the chapel during a harvest festival service:
Morley was a hamlet on the edge of the real country, and in its little Congregational Chapel Fanny and Harry had first met ... and again the little old chapel was a bower, with its famous sheaves of corn, and corn-plaited pillars, its great bunches of grapes, dangling like tassels from the pulpit corners ... .
It seems likely that Lawrence based his story on a real incident, as he generally did, and it provides a particularly vivid insight into the morality of the non-conformist tradition that was so powerful in late-Victorian Eastwood. Half of the chapel is currently for sale, at £250,000.
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