Patrick Comerford
In recent weeks I have been visiting a number of churches in Buckingham and the neighbouring, almost suburban, village of Maids Moreton. I have described Saint Bernardine’s Catholic Church on Chandos Road, the former Chantry Chapel on Market Hill, and Saint Edmund’s Church in Maids Moreton.
In earlier postings, I have also described Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church, the Church of England parish church in Buckingham.
But in recent weeks I have also visited three other churches, chapels or former churches in Buckingham, including the Salvation Army Hall, once home to the Primitive Methodists and before them the Baptists; the former Congregational Church, later the United Reformed Church, and now the Radcliffe Centre in the University of Buckingham; and Well Street United Church, on the site of the first Wesleyan chapel in Buckingham, bringing together the Metodist, United Reformed and Baptist traditions in Buckingham.
The Salvation Army Hall in Buckingham is at the south-west side of Moreton Road, close to the junction with the High Street in Buckingham. It has been a Baptist chapel, a school, and a Methodist chapel in the past before becoming a Salvation Army citadel.
The hall was built in 1842 as a Baptist Chapel at a cost of £940, with money raised from public subscription. Some time later, a Baptist pastor denied the divinity of Christ and Baptists in Buckingham were split by a schism. In the chaos that followed, The chapel was closed in 1876 and the building was then used as a Board School.
The Primitive Methodists acquired the building in 1903 and it became known as the Ebenezer Chapel.
The Primitive Methodists in Buckingham first met in a temperance hall but they could not afford it and had to leave and then met in a cottage. They then bought a plot of five cottages and 900 sq ft of land in Prebend End to build a chapel with a burial ground. The Primitive Methodist chapel in Prebend End, measuring 18 ft x 21 ft, opened in July 1843. John Wright was the minister in 1851.
The chapel on Moreton Road changed hands once again in 1909 when it was bought by JR Gough. The Salvation Army acquired the building in 1916. They have been there ever since, and Sunday worship is at 10:30.
The former Congregational church on Church Street, Buckingham, is now the Radcliffe Centre, part of the University of Buckingham. There was an Independent or Congregational congregation in Buckingham from at least 1700, and the ‘Old Meeting House’ was built on Well Street for the Independents in 1726.
The members of the Well Street chapel were torn apart by a schism in 1792, and a number of them left to form their own chapel in Church Street. By 1850, the two groups reunited, and in 1857 they built a new Congregational Church on Church Street.
The church and Sunday school were designed by the Bristol architects John Foster (1830-1880) and Joseph Wood (1822-1905). These brothers-in-law designed so many well-known buildings in Bristol that it has been said: ‘It must sometimes seem that the whole of 19th-century Bristol, or at least all of its significant buildings, owed their design to the firm of Foster and Wood.’ It has been suggested that Foster specialised in the Italianate style favoured in the mid-19th century, while Wood worked in the Gothic.
The church was built in the Early English style of squared Cosgrove with limestone rubble and with Bath stone dressings and slate roofs. It was a rectangular, part-aisled church with a porch at the front, flanked by stair turrets and a classroom range of irregular plan.
The architectural details include a central tall gabled porch, double-leaf doors, a many-moulded doorway with one order of shafts and a hoodmould with labels, a triple niche above and colonnettes and a datestone at the head of the gable.
There are cusped heads on colonnettes, off-set gabled buttresses, lancet windows, chamfered trefoil windows, geometrical tracery, hoodmoulds with label stops, blank arcading, stair turrets, a canted stone bay, dormers, deep circular piers on octagonal bases with moulded capitals, a gallery and a hammer-beam roof.
The church was enlarged with the addition of a Sunday School range in 1876-1879.
The Congregational church became part of the United Reformed Church in the 1972, with the union of the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church in England and Wales. The church in Buckingham later amalgamated with the local Methodists and Baptists to form Well Street United Church, and the church on Church Street closed.
The University of Buckingham bought the building in 1982 and converted into the Radcliffe Centre, a lecture, concert, and event venue named after the Buckinghamshire physician, philanthropist and politician John Radcliffe (1650–1714) of Wolverton; he was MP for Buckingham (1713-1714) and also gives his name to the Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Perhaps it is a twist of historical irony, for Radcliffe strongly opposed Presbyterians. In 1707, he sent £300 to Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, for the relief of the episcopalian clergy in Scotland, and in a letter explained his reasons: ‘The insupportable tyranny of the Presbyterian clergy in Scotland, over those of the episcopal persuasion there, does, I hold with your lordship, make it necessary that some care should be taken of them by us, that are of the same household of faith with them, and by the late Act of Union (which, I bless God, I had no hand in) of the same nation.’
Well Street United Church, which brings together Baptists, Methodists and the URC in Buckingham, was built in 1967 on the site of the former Wesleyan Chapel.
Although there is no record that John Wesley preached in Buckingham, he records in his Journal that on the evening of 20 October, 1778, he preached at Maids Moreton, near Buckingham. Nine years later, a Mr Phillips, a Methodist preacher in Northampton visited Buckingham and preached in the open air in 1787. A small cottage was licensed for worship and preaching took place there once a fortnight.
Soon a larger house was required as the numbers attending grew. It is said the foundation stone for a new Methodist chapel in Buckingham was laid on 2 March 1791, the day John Wesley died in London. A larger building was built on the same site in 1834, with the addition of a lower school.
A crack was discovered in the front wall in May 1964, and for a year services were held in the Guild Room at the rear. After a subsequent fall of masonry the decision was taken to demolish the old building and to build the new chapel, and from May 1965, Sunday morning services were held in the Oddfellows’ Hall nearby.
Work on building a new chapel began in March 1967 and Well Street United Church opened on 24 February 1968. It is an ecumenical partnership between the Baptist, Methodist, and United Reformed Church (URC) denominations.
However, Sunday services are now held at Lace Hill Academy, Buckingham, at 10:30, although church activities continue in the church building in Well Street throughout the week.
The former Oddfellows’ Hall, which the Methodists used briefly for Sunday worship in the 1960s, is a decorative and flamboyant building on a prominent location on the south-east side of Well Street, where its forms the focus to views looking in a south-east direction from the junction with Church Street and Saint Rumbold’s Lane.
The Oddfellows’ Hall was built in 1891 to a design by the architect FA Parkes. It is built of brick with stone dressings, with a gable facing onto Well Street. The gable has an ornate central doorway with brick piers and decorative stone capitals and spandrels. To either side of the doorway are four pane stone mullion and transom windows with decorative coloured glass. Above the entrance is a similar six-light stone mullion and a transom window with a date stone above.
As for the Old Meeting House at 3 Well Street, it housed Buckingham’s British School from 1844 to 1876, and the Salvation Army used it as their citadel until they moved to Moreton Road in 1916. Later, the building had a variety of uses, including the meeting house of the Plymouth Brethren, and for many years it was a garage.
Today the former meeting house is a restaurant and wine bar known as the Garage. The casings of the old petrol pumps can still be seen outside, and the position of the twin doors that were once the entrances to the 18th century chapel are still visible. I must return to photograph the building on another day in Buckingham.
