In addition to paying for the building of churches, the Commission had powers to divide and subdivide parishes, and to provide endowments.

Due to factors including the Industrial Revolution, the population of Britain had grown, and it had redistributed, tending to concentrate in urban centres: some older and expanded, others newly created.

[8] A major impediment to increasing the number of churches in the newly expanded towns was the difficulty in providing a regular income for an incumbent parson.

In expanding towns and cities, new churches had tended to be provided in association with residential developments as proprietary chapels, whose licensed ministers received an income from pew rents.

[citation needed] During the early 1810s groups were formed to address these problems by both active parties in the Church of England, the Evangelicals and the High Churchmen.

[12] In December 1815 Joshua Watson and the pamphleteer John Bowdler, wrote a "memorial" to the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, arguing the case for more churches.

[14] In 1817 a committee was appointed to form a society for "promoting public worship by obtaining additional church-room for the middle and lower classes".

[15] This was successful and at a public meeting on 6 February 1818 in the Freemasons' Hall, London, chaired by Charles Manners-Sutton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Northumberland proposed a motion to form the Church Building Society, and this was accepted.

[22] Designs for churches funded in the first grant in London were mainly classical in style; but outside London most commissioners' churches conformed to a characteristic late Georgian Gothic revival style, with little concern for accurate reproduction of medieval Gothic features.

It was common for architects to re-use designs on a number of sites; perhaps varying the window tracery to conform with one or another different period of English Gothic architecture.

A few architects - notably Thomas Rickman, Frances Goodwin and Robert Smirke won a large number of commissions.

The commission were determined the new churches should instead give appropriate architectural expression to the rites of Holy Communion and Baptism; and that these sacraments should not be visually subordinated to pulpit preaching.

The pulpit and parson's reading desk were normally to be set at the east end of the church, on either side of the sanctuary.

Nevertheless within two decades, these design principles had been overtaken by the widespread adoption of 'ecclesiological' ideals in church design, as promoted by the Cambridge Camden Society; so that mid-Victorian High Churchmen routinely deprecated the original liturgical arrangements of Commissioners Churches, commonly seeking to rearrange their eastern bays with a ritual choir and chancel on ecclesiological principles.

[23] Fortuitously in 1824 the Austrian government repaid a £2 million war loan that the British Treasury had written-off within the national accounts, creating an unexpected windfall that could be applied for the purpose.

The highest grant in this second phase was of £10,686 to All Saints Church, Skinner Street in the City of London, but this was exceptional.