Gillian Shipton, a former nursery assistant now in her early sixties, was a member of the congregation almost all her adult life. She and her two daughters attended Sunday services there each week and she remembers it fondly as a place of worship.

“There was a grandeur to it; a great spiritual quietness,” she said last week.

Not any more. Today the church — renamed the Pulpit — attends to a different congregation.

On Friday night it was packed with hundreds of casually dressed young people seemingly bent on knocking back as much alcohol as they could. The only reflection required was whether to buy a four-pint pitcher of Stella lager at £8.95 or four alcopops for £10.

As dance beats ricocheted off the sandstone walls, a young woman in a skimpy T-shirt swayed precariously near the lavatories, hurling expletives at her boyfriend.

Across the room a posse of young men, fresh from a football match, amused themselves by downing pints of lager in rapid succession and groping any woman who passed by. A gaggle of police officers stood nervously outside, waiting for the inevitable outpouring at midnight.

The church is not the only one in Cheltenham that has been converted into a bar. In a trend repeated in town and city centres throughout the country, dozens of tea rooms, banks and shops have been closed in the past decade to make way for bars, clubs and other night spots.

“Cheltenham is still an elegant, beautiful town by day,” said Lin Thomas, chairman of the Clarence Parade Tenants and Residents Association last week. “But at night it’s become a completely different place. Every week there are people drinking, fighting and vomiting in the streets.”

It is part of a national transformation that has been variously fuelled by a relaxation in the licensing guidelines, a transformation in the way alcohol is sold and marketed and — perhaps most important of all — an explosion in disposable incomes, especially among the young.

While in 1995 Britons consumed an average of 9.71 litres of alcohol a year, now the figure is up to 11.2 litres a year — the equivalent of 28 bottles of vodka.

Over the same period there has been a more than 40% increase in “violence against the person”. About half of all violent crimes are alcohol related, according to Home Office research.

But others say that is nothing to the human misery yet to come. Health experts say the binge drinking we are witnessing today will result in an explosion in the number of alcohol-related health problems in decades to come.

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