ABSTRACT
Until recent decades, any sense of a cultural history of Methodism might have been thought a misnomer approaching a contradiction in terms. Accurately or otherwise, Methodists could be perceived as ‘thin-lipped laughterless spoil-sports’2 who shunned the cultural sphere – or at best engaged only in terms of a narrow world of those senses they inhabited, such as church music.3 Their functional architecture could be considered as plain or parody, the artefacts of their religion mere frippery and their art generally nondescript.
