A Baptist Church in central Cambridge, with a story that goes back more than 300 years to 1689 or earlier

Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge, almost opposite Emmanuel College, was designed by George Baines and Reginald Palmer Baines and was built in 1903-1904 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

As I walking back through Cambridge last week, I stopped briefly outisde Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, almost opposite Emmanuel College, to learn about its history and architecture and to learn little more about the story of the Baptist presence in Cambridge.

The church, built in 1903-1904 at 40-43 Saint Andrew’s Street, replaced a previous chapel that had been built in 1836. But, as a plaque on the façade recalls, there has been a place of worship of some form on the site since 1689. The church predates the street from which it takes its name, has been led by a number of long-serving, distinguished ministers, and has its roots in the mid-17th century Puritans and dissenters.

During the Cromwellian era, the Puritans were triumphant in Cambridge and Anglican organisation had broken down. A report in 1649 showed that the parish of Saint Andrew the Less was the only one in Cambridge with a serving minister, although there were preachers at Great Saint Mary’s and Little Saint Mary’s.

The Independent congregations in Cambridge began to reorganise in the aftermath of the Caroline restoration in 1660, although evidence for those early meetings is sketchy. There are records of a meeting in a Widow Wilson’s house in Saint Andrew’s Street being broken up in 1665: the congregation escaped, but Wilson and the preacher, Thomas Dac, were caught and fined.

During the short-lived indulgence of Charles II in 1672, a licence was granted for a meeting house at Saint Andrew’s Hill or Hog Hill. Three years later, in 1675, there was a meeting in the house of Robert Wilson (1627-1710) in Saint Andrew’s parish. Wilson was a music teacher and one of the original trustees of the new meeting house built on Hog Hill, now Downing Place, in 1687.

Other conventicles or dissenting meetings about that time met in Green Street, facing onto Sidney Sussex College, and Bridge Street, and there were several other smaller meetings. The labels Presbyterian, Anabaptist and Independent were used loosely in those days and at times were interchangeable.

Joseph Hussey became the first pastor of the Great Meeting on Hog Hill around 1691, when the church had 76 members and called itself Presbyterian. When the pastor advocated ‘a more democratic form of church government’ in 1694, the meeting became Congregational, and the Presbyterian minority seceded in 1696.

When Hussey retired in 1719, the church had a congregation of 1,600 and 150 members. A period of disputes and secessions followed, due to personal and economic differences rather than doctrinal disputes. About 100 of the poorer members left the congregation with Richard Davis as their minister in 1721, while the richer majority remained in possession of the building with a pastor named Throgmorton.

A similar schism took place in 1735, and harmony was only restored during the ministry of J Conder (1738-1754). An attempt at a union with the Stoneyard Baptists failed in 1766, and by 1767 the meeting had again dwindled to 100. It was revived by Joseph Saunders (1767-1788), an ally of Charles Simeon, who attended his afternoon services.

Towards the end of Saunders’s ministry, a new meeting-house was built on the old site in Downing Place. Its windows were broken by rioters in 1792. The membership dwindled to 50 or so, partly because the Stoneyard Chapel had become more attractive under Robert Hall. After almost 200 years, the Downing Place chapel closed in 1874, and it was replaced by Emmanuel Church in Trumpington Street, opposite Pembroke College.

A plaque dates Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church in Cambridge back to 1689 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Meanwhile, the second migration from the Hog Hill meeting had led to the foundation of a Baptist community. The 100 poorer members who left in 1721 with Richard Davis as their leader rented a stable and granary in the Stoneyard, next to Hobson’s Spinning House on Saint Andrew’s Street, and formed their own meeting with over 130 members.

There were secessions in 1723 and 1725, reflecting divisions over the question of infant baptism. The seceders of 1725 returned in 1727, and there was a temporary recovery, but the meeting was almost extinct when the Revd Robert Robinson of Norwich accepted an invitation in 1759.

Robinson found the building ‘a damp, dark, cold, ruinous, contemptible hovel’ with a congregation of 34 people. But during his ministry, the Stoneyard meeting grew, the old buildings were pulled down in 1764 and they were replaced with a chapel that could seat 600 people.

Robinson was an inspiring preacher and a hymnwriter, and on Sunday evenings he could attract congregations of up to 200. He was a friend of Charles Simeon, despite their political differences, and of Joseph Priestley, and he made an eloquent but vain appeal for reunion with the Independents or Congregationalists of the Hog Hill meeting.

The Revd Robert Hall succeeded Robinson in 1791, and soon attracted such crowds that the chapel had to be enlarged to hold a congregation of more 800. In the early 19th century, village stations or local chapels were founded by the Saint Andrew’s Street Meeting at Coton and Barton, later chapels were founded in Mill Road, Arbury Road, East Road, Cherry Hinton and Cambridge Place, and the chapel was rebuilt in 1836 on the original site.

During the Great Famine in Ireland, one Sunday collection raised £236, ‘an enormous sum for a small place like this,’ and a second collection the following Sunday raised a further £264.

Charles Spurgeon, one of the most popular preachers of his day, preached in Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church twice, on 6 April and 8 August 1855.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner says the church is ‘a good specimen’ of the work of G Baines and Son (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The early 19th century chapel was replaced by Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church which was built in 1903-1904 at 40-43 Saint Andrew’s Street, on the site of earlier 18th and 19th century chapels.

The foundation stone was laid on 6 May 1903 by George Edward Foster (1840-1906) of Fosters’ Bank, Sidney Street. The new church was designed by the architects George Baines (1851-1934) and his son Reginald Palmer Baines (1879-1960) of G Baines and Son, who specialised in early 20th-century nonconformist churches and chapels. According to the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner this is ‘a good specimen’ of their work.

The Baines practice designed the church in a Neo-Perpendicular Gothic style, blending in some subtle Art Nouveau details. The church has a flint-faced exterior with stone dressings. The original spire appears to have been taken down soon after the church was built.

The foundation stone was laid on 6 May 1903 by George Edward Foster of Fosters’ Bank, Sidney Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The interior retains side galleries and a prominent central oak pulpit that emphasises the traditional nonconformist focus on preaching.

The memorial window above and behind the choir stalls was erected to commemorate members of the congregation who died in World War I. The windows depict three figures from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, symbolising three aspects of the Christian life: the centre light represents Freedom and shows Christian being set free from his burden of sin and guilt at the foot of the Cross; on the left is Truth represented by Mr Valiant-for-Truth; and on the right, Faithful is praying. The images above show the vision of the Celestial City of God, with pilgrims moving towards it.

An additional plaque records those who died in World War II.

The pews were removed and replaced by chairs in 2011 to create a more versatile space.

Inside Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge

After what have been described as a couple of recent ‘bumps in the road’, the church became mistakenly known as a ‘difficult church’. In response, the Revd Steve Langford was appointed as interim minister with the task of preparing the church for the next long-term minister.

Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church became involved in a ministry to the homeless, and in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the church opened its kitchens and cooked up to 100 meals a day for people living in temporary accommodation and hostels. At the same time, the church moved online and it continues to run ‘hybrid’ services.

In 2021 the church entered a partnership with Cambridge Youth for Christ to redevelop part of the church centre, known as No 40, into a drop-in and well-being centre for young people. The church ‘stepped up’ again in 2022 when it opened the church centre for English language classes Ukrainian refugees.

Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church is between the Mandela House City Council building and the Regal Pub/Arts Cinema, close to Downing and Emmanuel Colleges. The Revd Simon Cragg has been the Senior Minister since March 2025. He is from Cambridge and studied at the London School of Theology. The Revd Chris Duffett is the ‘Artist-in-Residence’.

Sunday services begin at 10:45 am with a time of musical worship, prayers and a sermon. There is Communion on the first Sunday of every month.

Sunday services at Saint Andrew’s Street Baptist Church begin at 10:45 am (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The City Temple, a church on Holborn Viaduct with a reputation for having radical preachers

The City Temple on Holborn Viaduct, which has sometimes been described as ‘the nonconformist cathedral’ in London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

While I was visiting a number of churches in the Holborn area of London recently, including Saint Alban’s Church, Holborn, where I was attending an event hosted by both USPG and SPCK, and Saint Etheldreda’s Church on Ely Place, I stopped for a while also at the City Temple on Holborn Viaduct, which has sometimes been described as ‘the nonconformist cathedral’ in London.

The City Temple, beside Saint Andrew Holborn, should not be confused with the Temple Church, between Fleet Street and the Embankment, a mediaeval church known to many only because it features in both The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and the film based on the book.

The church in Holborn is part of the United Reformed Church and one of the oldest Congregational churches in London, with connections with the early Puritans of the mid 16th century. It is famous for its notable preachers, pastors and theologians, especially the Revd Leslie Weatherhead, who led the church from 1936 to 1960, but also Thomas Goodwin, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and Joseph Parker, one of the great Victorian preachers.

The City Temple traces its story back to the Puritans and Calvinists of the 1560s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The first church building on the present site in Holborn was built in 1874, but the congregation was founded much earlier. The traditional date is 1640, when the church possibly started as a nonconformist, congregational church. But evidence suggests it was founded as early as the 1560s by Puritans and Calvinists who refused to conform to the Church of England, to use with the Book of Common Prayer and wanted freedom in their approach to worship.

Throughout its history, the congregation has worshipped in many buildings in London. Since 1874, it has met in its building on Holborn Viaduct, and for long claimed to be the only historic English Free Church in the City of London worshipping in its own building every Sunday.

The City Temple is widely believed to have been founded by Cromwell’s chaplain Thomas Goodwin around 1640. It is the oldest Nonconformist congregation in the City of London, and its first meeting house was on Anchor Lane.

The second minister was Thomas Harrison, who succeeded Goodwin in 1650, when the congregation moved to a meeting house in Lime Street. Harrison remained only until 1655 and a successor was not appointed until 1658, when Thomas Mallory became the pastor. Mallory led the congregation through a difficult period after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The congregation moved several times until it found a more permanent home in the Poultry, Cheapside, in 1819.

When James Spence resigned as the pastor in 1867, the Poultry Chapel offered the position of pastor to Joseph Parker of Cavendish Street Chapel, Manchester, but he did not accept until 1869.

At the same time the congregation was planning to move from its site in Poultry, sold its site for £50,000, and the Poultry Chapel was closed on 16 June 1872. Parker insisted on finding a new site within the City of London and a new site was bought on Holborn Viaduct. Until the new church was ready, the congregation met in Cannon Street Hotel in the morning, in Exeter Hall in the evening, and in the Presbyterian Church, London Wall, for mid-day services on Thursdays.

The City Temple was designed by the architects Henry Francis Lockwood and William Mawson (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The new church was designed by the Bradford architects Lockwood and Mason with an elegant, classical stone-clad façade onto Holborn Viaduct, with a prominent copper cupola-clad tower, providing a glowing beacon in the local community. The Doncaster-born architect Henry Francis Lockwood (1811-1878) and the Leeds-born architect William Mawson (1828-1889) also designed some of the most distinguished buildings in Bradford, including Saint George’s Hall (1851-1852), the Venetian Gothic Wool Exchange (1864-1867), and the Continental Gothic Revival City Hall (1869-1873). They also laid out and designed the mill, model town and church at Saltaire (1851-1876), all in an Italianate Classical style. At the time, Saltaire was one of the most important examples of a philanthropic industrial and housing development in the world.

The memorial stone of the new church, to be called the City Temple, was laid by Thomas Binney (1798-1874), popularly known as the ‘Archbishop of Nonconformity’, on 19 May 1873. The Corporation of the City of London presented a marble pulpit, and the new building was dedicated on 19 May 1874. Because of its location and size, the City Temple soon came to be seen as the nonconformist cathedral, and it became the most important Congregational pulpit in Britain, mainly due to Joseph Parker’s reputation.

As Parker grew older and his health declined, the Revd Reginald John Campbell (1867-1956), a Congregational minister in Brighton, was called as his assistant in 1902. But Parker died suddenly and Campbell became his successor from 1903 to 1915.

Parker had been theologically conservative, but Campbell was a socialist politically and a supporter of the Independent Labour Party, and his theology was as radical as his politics. He introduced Biblical criticism in his preaching, and questioned the traditional authorship of books and the origins of the text.

The theology of Campbell and his friends came to be known as the ‘New Theology’ and he answered his critics in a volume called The New Theology. But Campbell came to a crisis of faith when several New Theologians began to question the deity and even the historicity of Christ.

Campbell preached his last sermon in the City Temple in October 1915 and then resigned from the Congregational Church. A few days later, he was received into the Church of England by Bishop Charles Gore in Cuddesdon, and in October 1916 he was ordained as an Anglican priest. On joining the Church of England, he wrote an account of the development of his thinking in A Spiritual Pilgrimage (1916). He was the Canon Chancellor of Chichester Cathedral when he retired in 1946 at the age of 80. His funeral was conducted by Bishop George Bell.

Campbell’s successor at the City Temple, the Revd Dr Joseph Fort Newton (1880-1950), was an American who was almost as radical theologically. He was educated at the Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, and Harvard, and was a theological liberal. He had been asked to the City Temple at first as a temporary appointment after Campbell's resignation, but he was opposed by the deacons and the internal divisions that ensued led to the deacons being dismissed.

Newton asked for an assistant, and the assistant finally called was Maude Royden (1876-1956), an Anglican and radical pacifist. As a woman, she had been prohibited from preaching by the Church of England.

After World War I, Newton returned to the US in 1919 and in 1926 he was ordained a deacon and priest in the Episcopal Church. He was succeeded at the City Temple by FW Norwood, an Australian Baptist who remained until 1935.

Tthe Revd Leslie Weatherhead rebuilt the City Temple after World War II (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

When Norwood left the City Temple, there were demands within the congregation for the appointment of a Congregationalist as pastor. In the event, however, the Revd Leslie Weatherhead (1893-1976), a Methodist minister then in Leeds, was appointed in 1936.

Weatherhead was a member of Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group from 1930 to 1939, and wrote several books reflecting the group’s values, including Discipleship and The Will of God. He was often seen as the ‘head’ of the Oxford Group in London.

The City Temple was destroyed by fire caused by German incendiary bombs during the Blitz. Weatherhead was able to continue his ministry thanks to the hospitality of a nearby Anglican church, Saint Sepulchre-without-Newgate.

Weatherhead raised the funds to rebuild the City Temple, which was redesigned by by Seely and Paget and reopened in 1958. The completed design included a new copper and sandstone clad concrete and steel-framed form, book-ended by the original surviving front and rear of the church. The City Temple has been a listed Grade II building since 1977.

Meanwhile, Despite opposition, Weatherhead was elected President of the Methodist Conference in 1955-1956. He retired in 1960 and died in 1976.

The present minister, the Revd Dr Rodney D Woods, was appointed in 2001.

The City Temple is currently completing work on a major redevelopment programme, and I was unable to visit the building, which is covered in hoarding and cladding as the work continues. Sunday services are currently taking place in the Chelsea Community Church on Edith Grove.

The City Temple is currently completing work on a major redevelopment programme (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Bury Park Church in Luton opened in 1895 but closed in 2023 as churchgoing changed in recent decades

The former Bury Park Church in Luton was designed by George Baines (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

I have passed through Luton in Bedfordshire on several occasions in recent year, catching flights at Luton Airport. But when I visited Luton recently, I spent much of the day visiting the synagogue and Jewish sites in the town and a few mosques.

I have to return to Luton soon to visit its many churches. But the one church I took notice of during a recent visit was Bury Park United Reformed Church on the corne of Bury Park Road Waldeck Road, a former Congregational and United Reformed church that closed recently and a Grade II listed building.

Bury Park Church was built as a Congregational church. The initiative to build the new chapel came from the King Street Congregational Chapel in Luton. The foundation stone of a temporary church that later became a schoolroom was laid on 3 June 1895 and the opening service in the new temporary building was held on 9 October 1895.

It took some time to raise the funds needed to build a permanent church building. The foundation stone of the new church was laid on 7 April 1903 and the church opened for worship on 18 November 1903. It was built in the perpendicular Gothic style to designs by the architect George Baines (1851-1934), who is known for his many non-conformist chapels and churches.

George Baines was born in 1851 in Kimbolton, Huntingdon, the son of Joseph Baines (1825-1854), a draper, and Eleanor Constin (1819-1915). He married Alice Maria Palmer of Great Yarmouth in the Congregational Church, Stratford, London, in 1875 and they were the parents of four children, three daughters and a son born between 1871 and 1891.

Baines was articled to Jonathan Tobbs Bottle and Henry Olley in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, from 1867 to 1870 and then an assistant to William Gilbee Habershorn and Alfred Robert Pite. He established his own independent practice in Accrington, Lancashire, in 1871, but had moved to London by 1875. He became a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (FRIBA )in 1892.

His works include numerous Baptist chapels and churches, as well as Methodist, Congregational and Presbyterian churches and chapels, and one Roman Catholic church, Our Lady Star of the See Church in Lowestoft (1900-1902). His other works include the Liberal Club in Lowestoft and the gymnasium in Durham Grammar School. Baines formed a partnership with his son Reginald Palmer Baines as G & RP Baines in 1901. He retired in 1929, and died in 1934.

Bury Park Church was built on a prominent corner site in Luton and the schoolroom to the east was built first, followed by the cruciform church. Baines designed the church in a neo-decorated and perpendicular style, and it was built in fine light red brick, with Costessey stone dressings and slate roofs.

There is a cambered tower on the corner, with a short spire and weathervane, and short diagonal angle buttresses; a moulded parapet and plain corner turrets; a cornice band with rosettes and gargoyles on buttresses; four-light louvred window in each face; and lancet windows, plain stone bands, and a door on west side.

The west front has a large gable with a decorated apex over a large seven-light window. A single-storey porch on a half hexagonal plan has a gabled parapet over the main door. The four buttresses have empty niches. A small turret on the south echoes the main tower.

The north side has a similar large gabled window and two two-light square headed windows underneath. It is flanked by two small turrets. The was a single-storey link to the schoolroom at the east, with three lancet windows in a coped gable over the porch entrance.

I did not get inside the closed church, but I understand that inside it had four large pointed arches springing from foliated capitals on square marble columns, a ribbed ceiling, and a semi-circular pew arrangement. The panelling behind the organ had the same ogee motif as that in the window tracery. The church also had some plain Art Nouveau-style glass and a two-manual 13-stop pipe organ by Norman and Beard.

Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea, laid one of the foundation stones in 1895 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

One of the foundation stones of the church was laid on 3 June in 1895 by Cyril Flower (1843-1907), 1st Baron Battersea, a former Liberal MP for Luton, a patron of the arts. He was the third of 18 children of Philip William Flower, a property developer, of Streatham. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1870.

Like his father, Cyril Flower also became involved in property development, primarily in Battersea. He was first elected to Parliament in 1880 as the MP for Brecon, and then sat for Luton from 1885 until 1892. He was a Junior Lord of the Treasury in Gladstone’s third Liberal administration. When his constituency in Luton was abolished in 1892, Gladstone put Flower in the House of Lords as Baron Battersea of Battersea. A year later, he turned down the offer to become the Governor of New South Wales in Australia. Flower was also a great art collector and a patron of James McNeill Whistler and also supported members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Flower married Constance de Rothschild in 1877. She was a daughter of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, and they met in 1864 through his friendship with her cousin, Leopold de Rothschild. However, Battersea was gay and a close friend and possible lover of Frederic WH Myers. His other friends included Henry James and Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

Battersea’s sexuality became a public scandal in 1902. One man and two underage teenagers from landed families were jailed after a trial in Norwich, but he was secretly granted immunity from prosecution by Arthur Balfour’s government, saving the rich Liberal peer and other prominent public figures from disgrace. He died of pneumonia in November 1907 at the age of 64. Lady Battersea died in November 1931.

The Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church in England and Wales came together in 1972 and formed the United Reformed Church and from then the church in Luton was known as Bury Park United Reformed Church.

Due to changing demographics in the area and dwindling numbers of churcgoers, the congregation amalgamated with the other United Reformed Churches in Luton and the church closed 2½ years ago after holding its last service on 9 July 2023. A sign outside still proclaims ‘Jesus Welcomes All’.

The north side of the former Bury Park United Reformed Church in Luton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The former Welsh Chapel on Charing Cross Road was at the heart of Welsh life in London for a century

The former Welsh Presbyterian Chapel on Charing Cross Road opened in 1888 and closed in 1982 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

The former Welsh Presbyterian Chapel on Charing Cross Road, close to the junction with Shaftesbury Avenue, was designed by James Cubitt (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

Chinatown grew up around Gerrard Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue, where the Welsh Presbyterian Church had its original home (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The 300-year-old ‘Old Meeting House’ in Buckingham has survived being in ‘moth balls’ for three decades or more

The ‘Old Meeting House’ is a former Independent or Congregational chapel at 3 Well Street, Buckingham, dating from the early 18th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

When I was looking at a number of chapels and churches in Buckingham in the ‘nonconformist’ tradition – including the Salvation Army hall on Moreton Road, the former Congregational Church in the Radcliffe Centre on Church Street and the Well Street United Church – I missed photographing the ‘Old Meeting House’, a former Independent or Congregational chapel at 3 Well Street, dating back to the early 18th century.

For many years, the building survived as an old-style garage. But rhe premises had remained vacant for about 30 years or more until a number of successive but failed efforts to run restaurants, wine bars and coffee shops.

Throughout all those changes over the decades, the old pumps with their ‘retro’ casings have remained in place on the footpath outside the former garage. When I first saw them, they brought back childhood memories of Lehane’s garage in Cappoquin, Co Waterford, which I recalled in an interview with The Guardian back in 2018.

I promised myself in a blog posting on Sunday afternoon (16 November 2025) that I would have another look at the building, and so I went back to see it again yesterday (17 November 2025).

The former nonconformist chapel or meeting house was built almost 300 years ago in 1726, and it was enlarged in the early 19th century and altered at different times in the 20th century. It was first built as a Meeting House or chapel for the Presbyterian congregation in Buckingham. The congregation was formed ca 1700, and they were the heirs of the Puritan tradition of the previous century. Later they became Independents or Congregationalists.

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.

Many of the fittings in the Old Meeting House were moved to the new chapel moved to the new building on Church Street, including a wall monument to the Revd Enoch Barling, minister in 1818-1832.

The Old Meeting House 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. Its last religious use was as a meeting house for the Plymouth Brethren, who met on the upper floor.

The old meeting house or chapel is built in red brick in Flemish bond with limestone dressings at the front, a body of coursed limestone rubble, and hipped plain-tile roofs concealed by a parapet at the front. It is a two-storey building with a three-window front and was built on a rectangular plan.

In the 20th century, a wide central garage entrance was installed at ground-floor level, with double-leaf doors. During the refurbishment, the building retained the two windows that replaced the original twinned entrance doors of the Old Meeting House, with their round-arched heads and the raised stone surrounds with imposts. There are also small, leaded panes in the heads in a fanlight pattern.

There is a three-light window and below it a stepped stone sill. The sill of the window to the right has been cut by a 20th century door, approached by three stone steps. The first floor windows have small, leaded panes and raised stone surrounds with segmental-arched heads, key blocks and stepped stone sills. The building also has a partly rendered coursed and squared limestone plinth.

The central bay breaks forward slightly and has a stepped stone first-floor string course, with full-height brick pilaster strips at either end, and there is a hollow-chamfered stone cornice and a stone-coped parapet.

The vintage petrol pumps with their ‘retro’ casings remain in place on the footpath outside the former garage (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Although I did not see inside the building yesterday, I understand the interior has been divided horizontally with a floor that incorporates remains of the meeting gallery round three sides, and the building still has an early 19th century former gallery staircase, and that the roof structure of original core survives complete.

Howard Rogers (1900-1956) from Fringford was the first owner of Well Street Garage. Bert Shorey of the North Bar Garage in Banbury bought the Well Street Garage and bicycle shop in 1961, along with the fuel contract for the petrol pumps.

Bert ran two garages, while Dan Shorey was a semi-professional motorcycle racer in the summer months, doing the ‘Continental Circus’ of Grand Prix racing. Part of the success of the garage in attracting a specialist clientele was its proximity to Silverstone, near Towcester, and also the popularity of the Isle of Man TT races in the 1960s.

Well Street Garage closed around the 1980s, and it remained empty for 30 years or more, although the Cleveland-style globes remain on top of the casings of the petrol pumps. The building Grade 2 listed building was kept in a moth-balled state and it is said it became a financial burden on successive owners as they tried to save it from falling to the point of ruin and collapse.

The former chapel and garage was eventually bought in 2016 and refurbished as a restaurant and wine bar, known as the Garage. Unfortunately, the restaurant and wine bar did not survive the Covid period, and closed in 2020. A second restaurant there came to an end after 12 months or so in September 2021. It reopened as Black Goo, a coffee bar and restaurant, in May 2022, but it too closed in August 2023.

Today, the former meeting house or chapel is the Studio, an independent dancewear shop specialising in pointe shoe fittings, and the offices of AW Architectural Design. The casings of the vintage petrol pumps can still be seen outside, and the twin doors that were once the separate men’s and women’s entrances to the 18th century chapel can still be seen.

Well Street, Buckingham Street, looking north towards Bridge Street, with the former ‘Old Meeting House’ on the left (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

A walk around some churches and chapels that tell the story of Buckingham’s ‘nonconformists’

The Radcliffe Centre of the University of Buckingham … a former Congregational church and later part of the United Reformed Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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 on Moreton Road in Buckingham … it has been a chapel for both Baptists and Primitive Methodists (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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 Congregatoinal Church on Church Street was designed by the Bristol architects John Foster and Joseph Wood and built in 1857 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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 former Congregational Church, now the Radcliffe Centre, with the spire of Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church in the background (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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 was enlarged with the addition of a Sunday School range in 1876-1879 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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, with the spire of Saint Peter and Saint Paul Church in the background (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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 on Well Street, where Buckingham Methodists held Sunday services in the 1960s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

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.

In recent years, the former meeting house was a restaurant and wine bar known as the Garage; today it is the Studio, an independent dancewear shop specialising in pointe shoe fittings, and the offices of AW Architectural Design. 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.

A Welcome sign at the Salvation Army Hall in Buckinhgham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Updated: 17 November 2025, with updated details of 3 Well Street.

Four churches or chapels in Bicester tell the stories of Methodists and of Dissenters in Bicester

Bicester Methodist Church on the corner of Sheep Street and Bell Lane was built in 1927 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

During my recent walkabouts in Bicester, I have visited both Saint Edburg’s Church, the Church of England parish church, and the Church of the Immaculate Conception, the Roman Catholic parish church.

I also went in search of the site of the pre-Reformation Augustinian priory in the Oxfordshire market town. Little remains of the original Priory but excavations and written accounts have provided a picture of the priory and what life was like there.

Old Place Yard with its turreted dovecote, is believed to occupy part of the site of the 12th century priory. The present dovecote at Old Place Yard was heavily altered in the 1960s after the original structure and stable buildings were damaged in a fire in the 1960s.

But as I walked around I found four other churches or chapels in Bicester: two Methodist churches, one still active and the other now a shop on Sheep Street; a former Congregational church on Chapel Lane; and the unusual Dissenters’ chapel in the cemetery beside Saint Edburg’s Church.

A cross embedded in the brick work on the north side of Bicester Methodist Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Bicester Methodist Church in the centre of the town is at the end of Sheep Street on the corner with Bell Lane. It was built in 1927 to replace the original Methodist church on the opposite side of Sheep Street, and was originally known as the Grainger Hargreaves Memorial Church.

Methodism in Bicester began after a Mrs J Bowerman was ‘awakened’ while she heard John Wesley preaching in Brackley in Northamptonshire, close to Banbury, Bicester and Buckingham, in 1748. When she and her husband settled in Bicester, they first attended Saint Edburg’s Church, but they soon arranged for the Methodist minister in Brackley to visit Bicester. A room in a farmhouse on what became the site of the later Wesley Hall was used for those early services, and a building in Sheep Street was licensed as a chapel in 1816.

As the Methodism grew in Bicester, it was threatened with schism. In May 1843, preachers of the Primitive Methodists or ‘Ranters’ in Oxford began to preach in the Market Square and attempts by local people to stop them preaching created a disturbance.

Over time, two separate branches of Wesleyanism emerged in Bicester. One stayed on the site of the farmhouse and eventually built what became the Wesley Hall; the other bought a site in North Street and built a chapel there in 1840. A schoolroom was added 40 years later. The chapel was enlarged, new seats were installed in 1892 and the gallery was added, and an organ was installed in 1904.

The two separate churches eventually outgrew their buildings and outgrew their differences. They came together in 1890 and formed the United Methodist Free Church. They decided to build one shared church, a site was acquired by 1919 and a row of cottages at 72-78 Sheep Street was demolished to clear the site for the church. The old chapel in North Street was sold in 1925 to the Jersey Lodge of Masons and became the Masonic Weyland Hall.

Wesley Hall on Sheep Street, Bicester, is now a bedding and furniture shop (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Wesley Hall in Sheep Street continued to be used as a church until the new one was built. It was then used as a church hall and as a Sunday School until a new hall was built behind the new church. Wesley Hall was sold to Woolworths in 1955. It later became Coxeters furniture shop and is now Home Comforts.

When the new church opened in 1927, it was named the Grainger Hargreaves Memorial Church in memory of the Revd Grainger Hargreaves (1855-1923) who had spent many years of his ministry in China and then in Australia and New Zealand. He was chair of the Oxford District and Superintendent of Wesley Memorial Church for 18 years. He moved to Bicester in 1921 but died on Christmas Day 1923.

The foundation stone was laid on 23 September 1926, and new church was opened by Mrs J Vanner Early of Witney on 23 June 1927. The builders were Cannon, Green and Co of Aylesbury.

The name Wesley Hall and the date 1863 can still be seen on the Sheep Street facade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The architectural historian Sir Niklaus Pevsner, has described Bicester Methodist Church as ‘an extraordinary mixture’ of architectural styles and motifs. The three tall lancet windows in the centre of the front façade harken back to the earliest mediaeval Gothic design, the flowing curvilinear tracery at their heads is typical of art nouveaux, while the central fielded panel with its very unusual flanking geometric pilasters has art deco styling.

Methodist churches were often built as rather simple chapels, with a single main entrance opening into an open meeting hall. The form of the building in Bicester, however, is much more complex with small projecting wings on the side elevations and an imposing façade with decorative stone and brickwork. A tower was originally planned for one corner.

Inside, the central hall or nave faces a raised platform with pointed arches and carved foliate capitals and it looks like a Victorian gothic revival chancel in all but name. The ceiling is fashioned like a Tudor hammer-beam roof. The curvilinear motif outside is repeated in the pierced wooden panels between the collar beams. The windows have domestic Edwardian stained glass flower motifs, but great swags of art nouveau tracery.

A two-manual organ by Albert Keates of Sheffield installed in 1942 was a gift from George Layton, one of the church the organist for 50 years. He had opened the first garage in London Road in Bicester in 1910.

The planned tower was never built, but an extension, built at the rear in Victoria Road in the 1950s, hosts many community events.

The Revd Jocelyn Bennett is the minister of Bicester Methodist Church. Sunday services are usually at 10:45 am and 6:15 pm, and the church provides opportunities through the week for times of prayer and worship. The church is also used by Bicester Elim Church on Sunday afternoons.

The former Bicester Congregational Church on Chapel Street, Bicester (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The story of Dissenters in Bicester goes back to the reign of Elizabeth I, when a dispute over doctrinal matters broke out between the vicar and his parishioners. Order was restored, but Nonconformity resurfaced in 1654 when the Cromwellian commissioners appointed as vicar William Hall, a ‘godly and painful’ preacher who had been the curate in Bicester for some years.

The Bicester Congregational Church emerged after Presbyterians and ‘Independents’, the heirs of the Puritan tradition, were ejected from parish churches in 1662.

A Presbyterian congregation met secretly before being formally licensed in 1672 after a meeting in Bicester with John Troughton, who had been ejected from Saint John’s College, Oxford. Troughton was licensed as a preacher under the Declaration of Indulgence, and when he died in 1681 he was buried at Bicester parish church.

By 1669, ‘separatists’, said to be 100 to 200 in number, met in the barn of a baker, Thomas Harris. Samuel Lee, an eminent Puritan divine who lived at Bignell in 1664-1678, also ‘sometimes kept conventicles at Bicester’. Nevertheless, the Compton Census of 1676 and Bishop Fell in a report ca 1685 recorded no dissenters.

Henry Cornish became the first pastor of the congregation in 1690. A contemporary, critical pamphlet said he preached ‘for profit’s sake to silly women and other obstinate people’. Cornish died in 1698.

A chapel was first built Water Lane, now Chapel Street, and was licensed for public worship in 1728. The chapel became an important centre for Nonconformists in the surrounding area and a Sunday school was established in 1794. The chapel was enlarged and licensed for marriages in 1839 and a schoolroom was added in 1873.

A Presbyterian congregation met secretly in Bicester before being legally licensed in 1672 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The exterior front of the chapel is built of chequer brick with a hipped roof and broken pediment. There are some ashlar dressings and Welsh-slate roofs. There are tall round-arched windows and the left bay has been altered to form a rose window above an added pedimented porch, with a round-arched doorway surrounded by rusticated stone blocks. The arched windows in the front gable walls have wooden Gothic-style tracery.

The denominational labels used by the Bicester congregation are interesting. After the Toleration Act of 1689, Presbyterians and Independents in England formed what was known as the ‘Happy Union’ until it ended in acrimony in 1694.

In Bicester, on the other hand, Presbyterians and Independents continued to work together late into the 18th century. In 1738 and 1759, the vicar described them as Presbyterians; in 1808, he said they described themselves as Independents. The earliest surviving minute-book, from 1771, refers to ‘the Congregation or Society of Protestant Dissenters from the Church of England commonly called Presbyterians’.

John Ludd Fenner, who was the pastor in 1771-1774, was a Unitarian, but later returned to the Congregationalists; Edward Hickman, who died in 1781, was a Calvinist; another minister was from the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion; while other preachers and ministers included Calvinists, Arminians, Arians, Socinians, Baptists and Methodists.

In the 19th century, the church was served by Independents or Congregationalists, as they were beginning to be called. The seven young men who entered the ministry from Bicester chapel in 1810-1855 included three became Baptists.

Some of the colourful pastors from the past included: Samuel Park (1739-1766), who was ‘gay and light in his practices, fond of convivial company’; David Davis (1768-1771), ‘a slave to his ale and pipe’, who absconded with unpaid debts; and TH Norton (1899-1902), who abandoned his wife and ran away with the wife of one of the deacons.

The Revd SG Burden was appointed to a part-time post in Bicester in 1952 and was also the pastor of Launton. When the Presbyterians and Congregationalists united, it became Bicester United Reform Church in 1972.

The church closed in 1978, the building was converted into a private house, and the war memorial was moved to Bicester Methodist Church. The building was later used as a snooker hall and is now a restaurant.

The Dissenters’ Chapel in the cemetery beside Saint Edburg’s Church, Bicester (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Dissenters’ Chapel in the cemetery beside Saint Edburg’s Church in Bicester, was built in 1861 to accommodate non-conformists in the town. The ground was separate to the main Anglican churchyard, but the Bicester Herald reported concerns among some residents that dissenters would be allowed access through the main churchyard entrance.

To mollify the parishioners and the congregation of Saint Edburg’s, it was agreed that the dissenters would instead use the Piggy Lane entrance.

The turreted dovecote on Old Place Yard is believed to occupy part of the site of the 12th century priory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The Whitefield Memorial Church on Tottenham Court Road lives on as the American International Church

The American International Church, behind the trees and the food stalls Tottenham Court Road, was once the Whitefield Memorial Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

During my ‘church crawling’ adventures in the Bloomsbury, Soho and Fitzrovia areas of London in recent weeks, one of the interesting churches I have stopped to look at is the Whitefield Memorial Church on Tottenham Court Road, now the home of the American International Church.

On these sunny, summer days, the church is partly hidden behind the spreading trees and the many food stalls along this stretch on Tottenham Court Road. But many people are familiar with the open space on the south side of the church, now known as the Whitefield Gardens, one of the last undeveloped bomb-sites in central London.

The American International Church was formed to cater for American expatriates living in London. It was originally the American Church in London but changed its name in 2013 to reflect the 30 or more nationalities involved in its membership and supporting its activities. The church is particularly known for its soup kitchen, which feeds around 70 people a day.

The south side of the church faces onto the former burial ground, now Whitefield Gardens (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

But the church building itself dates back to 1756, when the first chapel on the site was built for the evangelical preacher George Whitefield (1714-1770). Whitefield had been driven to seek a place where he would be free from opposition from the Vicar of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields at the Long Acre Chapel where he had been a minister.

Whitefield got a lease of the site for his chapel in Tottenham Court Road in 1756, and the first chapel, between Tottenham Street and Howland Street, was surrounded by fields and gardens. The foundation stone was laid by Whitefield in June 1756, and the dedication service took place on 7 November 1756.

The chapel was funded by Whitefield’s patron the Countess of Huntingdon, and it was built and probably designed by Matthew Pearce, with burial grounds to the north and south. The initial popularity of the chapel led to it being enlarged in 1759-1760, and a vault was also prepared beneath the chapel.

Whitefield hoped he could be buried there along with his wife Elizabeth and the brothers John and Charles Wesley. But Whitefield died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, on 30 September 1770 and was buried there. John Wesley preached Whitefield’s memorial sermon in the chapel later that year.

The Church of England had refused to consecrate this ground so after Whitefield’s death in 1770 his successor, the Revd Torial Joss, took a creative, if unusual approach. Saint Christopher-le-Stocks Church, near the Bank of England was being demolished to allow an extension to the bank. Joss arranged for ‘several cartloads’ of earth to be transported from that consecrated churchyard to Tottenham Court Road.

When the original lease expired in 1827, the freehold was bought by trustees, who refurbished the chapel, and it reopened in October 1831.

Some of the graves from the former burial ground can be still seen in Whitefield Gardens (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The burial ground was in use from 1756, apart from an interval of eight years in 1823-1831, but was closed in 1851. Notable burials at the church included the writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who died in 1797; the surveyor George Gauld (1731-1782); the hymnwriter Augustus Toplady (1740-1778), author of ‘Rock of Ages’; and the great clown and harlequin JS Grimaldi (1802-1832).

The chapel was refurbished yet again in 1856, only to be almost wholly destroyed by fire in February 1857. The property was then bought up by the London Congregational Building Society who built a new church designed by John Tarring.

By 1860, the chapel had bought its own site plus the burial ground to the south. However the site to the north was sold to an unscrupulous businessman, Nathan Jacobson. He bought the land expecting to be able to develop it, but removing coffins and bodies was not a straightforward task and he repeatedly failed to do it in a way that satisfied the law.

Jacobson died in 1881, and while the ownership of the land was disputed it was leased by a fairground operator who moved noisy machinery onto the site in 1887, disrupting services in the Tabernacle, leading to complaints and legal proceedings that continued until about 1890, when the council bought the land, landscaped it and turned it into a public garden with a playground. The burial ground on the south side was treated in the same way at the same time.

Meanwhile, the foundations began to give way in 1889, probably because the many burials inside the building had disturbed the filling to the pond underneath. The chapel was closed, the building was taken down, and the grounds were eventually laid out and opened as a public garden in 1895. The coffins in the crypt – including that of Elizabeth Whitefield, but not the lead coffin of Augustus Toplady – were moved to Chingford Mount Cemetery in north London in 1895.

In those intervening years, while the chapel was closed and being rebuilt services took place in a temporary iron structure until the new building was opened in November 1899 as Whitefield’s Tabernacle or Whitefield’s Central Mission. Toplady Hall, below the church, was named after the Revd Augustus Toplady.

The Revd Silvester Horne, who was the minister from 1903 until his death in 1914, was the father of the broadcaster Kenneth Horne.

The church was used as a hostel during World War II, and a deep level bomb shelter was built in the east section of the old northern burial ground.

The building was totally destroyed on Palm Sunday 25 March 1945 by the last V-2 rocket to fall on London during World War II. The bomb also destroyed the five houses on Tottenham Court Road and the old Chapel Street, but left what is now Caffé Nero relatively intact.

A new church, the Whitefield Memorial Church, designed by EC Butler, was built in 1957 and the grounds became a public thoroughfare.

‘Love London’ … the church adopted a welcome statement in 2022 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The American International Church, an independent congregation within the Thames North Synod of the United Reformed Church, has been at the building since 1972. Its history begins with members of the US military worshipping at the Grosvenor Chapel, close to the US Embassy then on Grosvenor Square, during World War II, with services led by US Navy chaplains.

After the war, the congregation grew with US diplomatic and military personnel and their families still relying on military chaplains. The church became independent of that support in 1969, became the American Church in London and called the Revd William Schotanus as its first minister.

After worshipping in several places, the American Church moved to the Whitefield Memorial Church in 1972, when it was offered by the United Reformed Church. The URC was formed that year from the union of the Congregational Church in England and Wales and the Presbyterian Church of England.

In 1986, the church launched the Soup Kitchen, serving a hot meal to people in need. Still housed in the church, the Soup Kitchen now serves meals six days a week. The community outreach has expanded to include a seasonal night shelter staffed by volunteers from the congregation in partnership with the C4WS Homeless Project.

In the mid-1990s, the American Church formally joined the United Reformed Church, which owns building. The premises also house the London Chinese Lutheran Church.

The congregation has become more international iIn the 21st century, bringing together people from every continent. In 2012, the congregation voted to change its name to the American International Church to reflect the broad range of membership. The church adopted a welcome statement in 2022 and registered for same sex and opposite sex weddings, as a clear sign of inclusion to the LBGTQ+ community.

The north side of the church, looking towards Tottenham Court Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

The adjoining grounds have recently had a series of interpretive panels designed by Groundwork Camden. They depict scenes in the history of the chapel, Whitefield’s links to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and the abolition of slavery as represented by Olaudah Equiano, who was buried there.

Some of the original graves remain on the south side of the church on the west side of Tottenham Court Road. The Fitzrovia Mural towers above the paved open space now known as Whitfield Gardens. This is one of the last undeveloped bomb-sites in central London, and the colourful mural, created in 1980 by Mick Jones and Simon Barber of the Art-Workers Co-Op, is a story worth telling another day.

• The main Sunday service is at 11 am, with Holy Communion on the first Sunday each month, followed by coffee and tea. The Revd Jennifer Mills-Knutsen has been the Senior Minister since 2016. The Revd Jared Jaggers has been the Associate Minister since 2020.

The colourful food stalls in front of the church on Tottenham Court Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)