Patrick Comerford
During my visit to Dublin last month, I revisited the former Welsh Chapel on Talbot Street to see how it has been partly restored in recent years.
London has long had an interesting range of Welsh chapels and churches, from Saint Benet Paul’s Wharf, which became a Welsh church for Anglicans in 1879 and the Welsh Church of Central London, a Baptist church that was built on Eastcastle Street in 1888.
The former Welsh Presbyterian Chapel on Charing Cross Road, close to the junction with Shaftesbury Avenue, belonged to the Presbyterian Church of Wales for almost 100 year years and it was a centre for Welsh community and cultural life in London.
The chapel opened in 1888, the same year as the Welsh Church of Central London on Eastcastle Street, but the last service there was held in 1982. It became a nightclub later in the 1980s, and later the arts venue Stone Nest or Winter House, while retaining some of its unique architectural features such as the umbrella dome.
The Presbyterian Church of Wales, also known as the Calvinistic Methodist Church, has its origins in the 18th-century Welsh Methodist revival. The early movement was led by the Welsh revivalist Daniel Rowland, who was influenced by the teachings of the Welsh Methodist leader Howell Harris and by the writings of John Calvin. The movement had a profound impact on Welsh society and culture, and played a significant role in the Welsh revivals in the 19th century.
Calvinistic Methodism formerly also had a significant presence in England, under the leadership of George Whitefield, and the early Welsh Calvinist presence in London included a chapel in Nassau Street, now Gerrard Place.
Gerrard Street appears to have been laid out in the 1670s to 1680s. The poet laureate and playwright John Dryden (1631-1700) had a house on the south side. Later the street was identified with The Club, founded in 1764 by Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson and whose members later included Edmund Burke and James Boswell. In the 20th century, both GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc dined in a small restaurant in Gerrard Street. Today, Gerrard Street is at the heart of London’s Chinatown.
The Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Connexion was forced to leave its chapel in Gerrard Street in the 1880s with the creation of Shaftesbury Avenue in 1884 and leased the site for a new chapel from the Metropolitan Board of Works in November 1886.
The chapel was built as a Presbyterian church for the Welsh community in London in 1888. It was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by James Cubitt (1836-1914), a Victorian church architect who specialised in non-conformist chapels. His other churches include the former Emmanuel Congregational Church on Trumpington Street, Cambridge.
Cubitt was the son of a Baptist minister, from Norfolk who taught at Spurgeon’s College in South Norwood Hill, then on the outskirts of London. He was articled to Isaac Charles Gilbert in Nottingham (1851-1856) and then joined WW Pocock building Wesleyan chapels. He had his own practice from1862, and formed a partnership with Henry Fuller in 1868.
Cubitt set out his architectural philosophy in his book, Church Design for Congregations. He attacked as obsolete the traditional nave and aisle design, and believed too many architects were failing ‘to produce a grand and beautiful church in which everyone could see and hear the service.’ His chapels are built as broad uncluttered spaces around a central pulpit and the Lord’s Table.
Cubitt designed his Welsh chapel on Charing Cross Road in a ‘Free Norman’ style. His centralised plan had a prominent, lofty octagonal dome, and it was built of white brick ‘Yorkshire parpoints’ with Ancaster stone dressings topped by a slate roof.
The chapel had Norman shafted doorways in the lower central bays flanked by taller twin gabled bays with tiers of Romanesque windows. Internally, the chapel was dominated by a large central square space with short transepts to the east and west. There was an organ above the gallery behind the pulpit.
The minister’s house is at 136 Shaftesbury Avenue was inter-connected and provided the official entrance to the chapel. The building facing Shaftesbury Avenue also housed the chapel library. It is a four-storey house in red brick designed to be reminiscent of the mediaeval domestic architecture of Bruges.
The chapel acquired the freehold of the site from London County Council in 1889. The first marriage to take place at the chapel was of the educationalist Dilys Glynne Jones (nee Davies) and John Glynne Jones, a solicitor from Bangor, in 1889. Later, the Welsh Congregationalist minister, prominent evangelical and medical doctor Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) met his wife Bethan Phillips there.
The Charing Cross Chapel, as the building was known to its congregation, became a place of spiritual and cultural importance for many London Welsh, for whom it was a home away from home and a popular gathering place for family and friends. In its heyday, queues formed down Charing Cross Road, and the sermon was piped into the basement to accommodate an overflow of churchgoers.
During the first half of the 20th century, in the decades before World War II, the chapel had the largest weekly attendance of any Welsh chapel in London. In 1903, for example, a Sunday service om the chapel was attended by 623 people. The chapel was seen as the most fashionable of London’s Welsh chapels because of its location in the West End, and the services were attended by prominent Welsh businesspeople, politicians, and lawyers based in London.
The presiding minister, the Revd Peter Hughes Griffiths (1871-1937), was a celebrity in his native Wales and served as the minister at the chapel for 34 years from 1902 until his death on New Year’s Day 1937.
Occasionally, in the 1950s and the 1960s, the London Welsh Unitarian Congregation also held services there.
The chapel was listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England in February 1982. But that year it became the first of the Welsh chapels in London to close, and the last service was held in the chapel on 9 July 1982.
The interior was altered internally in 1984 for use as an office, retaining space beneath the dome as an atrium, and the building was sold in 1985 for £1 million.
The chapel was the site of the Limelight nightclub in the 1980s, when the performers included Boy George and Duran Duran. It later became a branch of the Walkabout Australian themed pub chain. After the pub closed in 2010, it became a squat, unttil it was bought by a Ukrainian philanthropist in 2011.,br />
With the support of Ekaterina Verozub, the charity Stone Nest took over the long-neglected building in 2013 with the aim of creating a flexible, sustainable performance space. Stone Nest was granted approval in 2018 to transform the site into a space for the performing arts in the West End, as well as hosting a restaurant and bar, while retaining some of its unique architectural features such as the umbrella dome.
Today, only seven Welsh chapels in London continue to perform services in Welsh and minister to the London Welsh communities.
