Gospel shop
A gospel shop is old-school slang for a church — the kind of irreverent nickname that suggests the speaker views organized religion with a slightly skeptical or at least irreverent eye.
Definitions
A gospel shop is old-school slang for a church — the kind of irreverent nickname that suggests the speaker views organized religion with a slightly skeptical or at least irreverent eye. It frames religion as a business or storefront selling salvation, which gives the phrase a wry, working-class edge. You'd more likely hear it from a cynical narrator in a Victorian novel than a modern podcast, but it still has enough color to land well in the right context.
He hadn't set foot in a gospel shop since his grandmother's funeral twenty years ago.
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(slang) A church.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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Semantically related
- Gospel grinder61%
(UK, slang, obsolete) A missionary, or distributor of religious tracts.
- storefront church61%
(North America) A church housed in a storefront or strip mall building that formerly had a commercial purpose.
- hockshop61%
An informal American term for a pawnshop — the kind of place where you trade your guitar, old jewelry, or gaming console for quick cash, hoping to buy it back later (you usually don't). While "pawnshop" is the dominant term today, "hockshop" has a grittier, older-school ring to it that fits blues lyrics and hardboiled fiction perfectly. To "hock" something is to pawn it, and the shop where that transaction goes down is the hockshop.
- hookshop59%
Hookshop is dated British slang for a brothel, framing the establishment as a place where 'hooks' (prostitutes, in older slang) ply their trade. The term belongs to 19th and early 20th century vice vocabulary, encountered in social reform literature, police records, and period slang dictionaries. Entirely obsolete in contemporary usage. Like many Victorian brothel euphemisms, it uses an indirect commercial metaphor — a shop where a particular commodity is available — to describe the trade.