St Anne's Church, Birmingham

In 1847, John Henry Newman came back from Rome to Birmingham after getting permission from Pope Pius IX to create an Oratory of Saint Philip Neri in England. In 1849, he had gathered a group of followers and they initially founded the church in an old gin distillery in Deritend. The area contained poor housing, with many back-to-back rows of houses, intermixed with industry and suffering the social conditions that the country sought to remove decades later. The nature of the housing meant that it was mainly occupied by migrants, in this case workers from Ireland.

The Irish community continued to increase in Birmingham and Catholic churches were built to accommodate the expanding congregations. St Catherine of Siena Church was built on the Horse Fair in 1874 and St Francis of Assisi church was built in Handsworth in 1894. J. R. R. Tolkien worshipped at the church when he lived in Moseley and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900.