This study follows on from Yate’s standard work Buildings, Faith and Worship: the Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600-1900 (OUP 1991, revised edition 2000) and Liturgical Space in Western Europe since the Reformation (Ashgate, 2008) to provide the first detailed study of Scottish post-Reformation church interiors for fifty years.

In the intervening period many of the buildings described by George Hay have been demolished, converted to non-ecclesiastical use or liturgically reordered. However, this study goes further to include many surviving examples not noted by Hay, and extends his work further into the nineteenth century, with a detailed study of buildings up to 1860, and with a more general consideration of later nineteenth and early twentieth century church architecture in Scotland. The detailed study of developments in Scotland, especially those in the Presbyterian churches, are set in the context of comparative developments in other parts of Britain and Europe, especially those in the Reformed churches of the Netherlands and Switzerland to create a groundbreaking new study by an established author.