Patrick Comerford
It is always sad to see a library – particularly a library with a large collection related to theology, church history and religious studies – to close or to move away and to find it is no longer be accessible.
For over a century, Dr Williams’s Library was in Bloomsbury, where it was housed in the former University Hall on the west side of Gordon Square, beside the former Catholic Apostolic Church, now the Church of Christ the King. But the library closed within the past two years, and the collection has been moved to Manchester.
From 1890 until it closed in 2025, Dr Williams’s Library was housed in University Hall, built in 1848 to designs by the architect Thomas Leverton Donaldson (1795-1885), a pioneer in architectural education, a co-founder and President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a winner of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.
Donaldson was born nearby at 8 Bloomsbury Square, the eldest son of the architect James Donaldson (c 1756-1843). His maternal uncle, the architect Thomas Leverton (1743-1824), is said to have designed the south range of Bedford Square.
After attending King Edward Grammar School, St Albans, Donaldson trained as an architect and travelled widely. He found a clerical job at the Cape of Good Hope before joining an expedition to attack the French-owned island of Mauritius. He visited Italy and Greece in 1818-1823 with John Lewis Wolfe and WW Jenkins. Back in London, he joined his father’s practice and designed 4 Hamilton Place for Richard Bingham (1764-1839), 2nd Earl of Lucan, who had extensive estates in Co Mayo.
Donaldson’s first significant work was Holy Trinity Church, Brompton (1826-1829), in South Kensington. With Jacques Ignace Hittorff and Charles Robert Cockerell, he was a member of the committee formed in 1836 to determine whether the Parthenon or Elgin Marbles and other Greek statuary in the British Museum had originally been coloured.
Donaldson reworked substantial sections of the Wilkins building at University College London (UCL) and designed the Flaxman Gallery and library buildings. He also designed All Saints’ Church, Gordon Street (1842, closed 1909, destroyed by bombing 1940) and was involved in the Great Exhibition in 1851.
Donaldson pioneered the academic study of architecture and in 1841 he became the first Professor of Architecture at University College London, a post he held until 1865. He was a co-founder of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1834, was its honorary secretary until 1839, then its foreign secretary for another 20 years.
He designed the institute’s Mycenaean lions medal with the motto Usui civium, decori urbium. He was awarded the institute’s royal gold medal in 1851 and was its president in 1863-1864. He was described by the Prince of Wales in 1879 as ‘the father of the Institute and of the profession’.
Donaldson designed the one-time library on Gordon Square as a Hall of Residence for students of University College London, following an architectural competition. It was built in stone and brick in the late Gothic style in 1848-1849. It was built as University Hall to mark the passing of the Dissenters’ Chapels Act in 1844.
From 1853, University Hall was shared with Manchester New College. Henry Morley, professor of literature at University College and editor of Morley’s Universal Library was the principal of University Hall in 1882-1890.
Manchester New College acquired the lease in 1882 but moved to Oxford in 1890, the building was bought by the trustees of Dr Williams’s Charity to house their library.
The founder of the library, the Revd Dr Daniel Williams (1643-1716), was a leading nonconformist minister in both Dublin and London in the late 17th and early 18th century.
Williams was born into a Welsh family, probably in Wrexham, and his early plans to enter ministry were interrupted by the Restoration of Charles II and the Act of Uniformity (1662). After a few years preaching in England he moved to Ireland, where he was a domestic chaplain to Mary (Chambré) Brabazon, Countess of Meath in 1664-1667.
Williams was then one of the ministers of the Wood Street Chapel, near Whitefriar Street in Dublin, for 20 years, from 1667 to 1687. The chapel had its roots in early Puritans and Presbyterians and became one of the Dublin congregations that lead to the formation of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the Unitarian Church in Dublin.
As religious tensions heightened in Dublin during the reign of James II, Williams believed his life was in danger. He fled to London in 1687, and soon found an influential place amongst London Presbyterians, particularly after the death of Richard Baxter (1615-1691).
He was appointed minister to the Presbyterian congregation in Hand Alley, Bishopsgate, and despite repeated requests to return to Dublin, he remained at Hand Alley for the rest of his life. He received the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1709 from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in recognition of his outstanding services to nonconformity.
Williams died at the age of 72 in January 1716 and was buried in Bunhill Fields. His congregation eventually moved towards Unitarianism, but has long since disappeared.
In his will, he left instructions for his trustees to house his collection as a public library for nonconformist ministers, tutors and students in the City of London. He also left bequests to Saint Thomas’s Hospital, the University of Harvard, and to support missionaries in Scotland, Ireland, and New England.
His trustees built and equipped a library that first opened in Red Cross Street, Cripplegate, almost 300 years ago in 1730. Over the years, the collections were enlarged with gifts of books, manuscripts and portraits. His original benefaction of about 7,600 books became a small part of a library that eventually extended beyond Puritanism to include Biblical subjects, church history, Byzantine studies, philosophy, literature and more.
The library’s original home was bought by the Metropolitan Railway Company and demolished in 1865. The library moved to Bloomsbury and was housed at No 8 Queen Square from 1865 to 1873. It then moved into premises designed by the architect Thomas Chatfeild Clarke (1829-1895) in Grafton Street, now Grafton Way, off Tottenham Court Road.
When Manchester New College moved to Oxford, the library’s trustees acquired University Hall, Gordon Square, in 1889 and the library moved there in 1890. The library had close ties with Unitarians and several of its first directors were ministers associated with Newington Green Unitarian Church, London's oldest Nonconformist place of worship still in use.
The Revd Robert Travers Herford (1860-1950), librarian of Dr Williams’s Library from 1914 to 1925, was a scholar of rabbinical literature, and he was one of the first Christian scholars of the Pharisees to take a neutral view between Talmud and New Testament. He is commemorated by a blue plaque on the façade of the building. His brother, the Revd Ulric Vernon Herford (1866-1938), was one of the most colourful and eccentric Unitarian ministers in Oxford. He was a Unitarian minister in Oxford in the 1890s before seeking consecration by the Nestorian Church in India as Metropolitan Mar Jacobus I in 1902, and then formed the Evangelical Catholic Church.
After a V-1 flying bomb destroyed Essex Hall, the headquarters of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the library offered rooms to displaced workers, and they stayed there for 14 years, until 1958. In 1976, the library acquired the library of New College London, which until then had trained Congregationalist ministers.
Dr Williams’s Library closed in 2025 and its copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio was sold by Sotheby’s at auction in 2006 for £2.8 million. After a prolonged discussion, the trust agreed to house its collection in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, and the Library moved to Manchester in 2024-2025.
Meanwhile, Manchester New College, which moved from Gordon Square to Oxford in 1889, later became Harris Manchester College and became a constituent college of the University of Oxford in 1996.
As for the Wood Street congregation where Williams ministered in Dublin for 20 years, it was joined in 1762 by the Dissenters of Mary’s Abbey and together they moved to Great Strand Street where a new meeting house opened in 1764. They were joined there in 1787 by the Cook Street congregation.
In the 1850s, the Strand Street congregation decided that it needed a new church on a more prominent street. The Unitarian Church on Saint Stephen’s Green, Dublin, opened in June 1863, and it was joined by the Eustace Street congregation in 1867.
The Saint Stephen’s Green congregation in Dublin is part of Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland and also maintains links with Unitarians in England, Scotland and Wales through the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.
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