From about 1830 he began to convert his parents’ farmhouse in Uppermill into a ‘Gothic’ manorhouse with interiors inspired by Sir Walter Scott's home at Abbottsford, Scotland.
[2] About 1850 Shaw began to distance himself from his father's woollen business, allowing him to devote more time to his architecture, and the mill was finally sold to John Winterbottom Bradbury in 1864.
In the meantime, further church commissions followed as new parishes were created in the 1850s and 1860s to cope with the rapidly increasing populations of Manchester's outlying villages.
George's youngest brother, John Radcliffe Shaw, joined him in the business and was said to possess considerable artistic ability.
A less well known side of Shaw's work was the manufacture of fake furniture, stone monuments, memorial brasses, iron firebacks and firedogs.
It grew out of the experience he gained repairing and restoring antique furniture and woodwork as he transformed the interiors of his own house in the 1830s and received added impetus from 1842 onwards from the commission to create the Trinity Chapel in Rochdale.
[4] In the late 1840s he sold fake Tudor and Jacobean furniture to Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, and Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland.
[8] Shaw also tried to persuade George Bridgeman, 2nd Earl of Bradford, to buy a fake ‘State Bed’ and other items, but it is not known whether he was successful.
The Saddleworth Exhibition was the subject of a gently satirical account in Household Words which described how the families of the district ‘must have dismantled their houses and drawings of some of their most valuable adornments’ to fill the displays.
Much of the land around St Chad's was sold and about 1882 the Manchester & County Bank was built on the east side of site, demolishing most of Shaw's private chapel in the process.