Dr Williams’s Library leaves Bloomsbury after serving theologians and church historians for 300 years

Dr Williams’s Library first opened in 1730 and was on Gordon Square from 1890 until it closed in 2025 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

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’.

Thomas Leverton Donaldson designed the former library on Gordon Square as University Hall in 1848 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

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 Revd Dr Daniel Williams (1643-1716), a leading nonconformist minister in Dublin and London, endowed the library in his will

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.

Dr Daniel Williams remembered in a plaque at the entrance to the former library (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

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.

The Revd Robert Travers Herford was the librarian of Dr Williams’s Library in 1914-1925 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

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.

The Unitarian Church on Saint Stephen’s Green … the spiritual heir to the ministry of Daniel Williams in Dublin in the late 17th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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 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 former Welsh Chapel on Talbot Street, Dublin, is beginning to look better four years after my last visit

The former Welsh Chapel on Talbot Street, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

During my visit to Dublin this week, I visited three churches in the north inner city: Saint Mary’s Cathedral, known for almost 200 years as the ‘Pro-Cathedral’, on Marlborough Street; Saint Francis Xavier Church, the Jesuit-run church popularly known as Gardiner Street Church, between Mountjoy Square and Dorset Street; and the former Welsh Church on Talbot Street.

I last wrote about the former Welsh Church on Talbot Street almost four years ago (5 January 2022), describing the sad decay of the building and how it was covered with graffiti.

In recent months, comments were posted saying my photographs of the building had become outdated and that work and painting of the two connecting buildings had been completed at the end of last year and the start of this year (2024-2025).

Another reader commented on how just before last Christmas the building had been greatly improved, many of its original fixtures could now be seen, including the stone carving with the words ‘Welsh Church’, graffiti had been removed, and further work was in progress.

So, after visiting the colourful murals by on ‘Memory Lane’ by Fionnuala Halpin in Talbot Lane, I returned to see the former Welsh Church that tells an important part of the story of the cultural diversity of church life in Dublin for many generations.

The lettering ‘Welsh Church’ has been restored on the pediment facing onto Talbot Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Welsh chapels are not confined to Wales. I once received a warm welcome in a Welsh chapel in Chester when I was in my teens, and I have since come across Welsh chapels and churches in London and Birmingham. But I was surprised to learn last week that there had been a Welsh chapel in Dublin from 1838 for more than a century.

For over a century, from 1838 to 1942, a Welsh chapel in Dublin, with services in the Welsh language, was a meeting place for sailors in Dublin port and a hub for Dublin’s resident Welsh community.

Before the chapel was built, religiously-motivated Welsh sea-captains, such as Israel Matthew from Holyhead and John Williams from Caer, went from ship to ship and pub to pub inviting Welsh seamen to prayer meetings on board ships in Dublin port. Then, a Welsh congregation began using the Dutch Lutheran chapel on Poolbeg Street, although all collections went to ‘the Dutch.’

The Calvinistic Methodists in North Wales, later known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales, decided in the 1830s to build a chapel in Talbot Street, Dublin, close to the junction with Lower Gardiner Street and close to the port. At first, it was mainly for visiting Welsh sailors, and it was hoped sailors from Holyhead would spend an extra hour in prayer and an hour less in the pubs.

The site for the chapel was secured by John Roberts, a Holyhead businessman, thanks mostly to the efforts of the first pastor, the Revd Robert Williams. The foundation stone of the chapel was laid in 1838, and the new church, named Bethel Church, was 40 ft x 27 ft, built of brick and cornerstone of Whitland granite from south-west Wales, at a cost of £500.

When the chapel opened in 1838, there were 18 registered city members, but it had a seating capacity of 300. Because it was so close to the docks, visiting Welsh seamen could go to church there, finding opportunities to meet other people from Wales and to socialise in their own language.

The sailors mainly worked on merchant and passenger ships from Holyhead, but some also came on ships carrying slate from quarries in Penrhyn and Y Felinheli, beside the Menai Strait. By the mid-19th century, the chapel attracted not only Calvinistic Methodists but sailors from other denominations.

The congregation also drew from the 300 Welsh soldiers stationed in Dublin, patients coming from Holyhead for treatment at the Adelaide Hospital, and Welsh people who moved to Dublin to work as maids, nurses, and other professionals, or who found Trinity College Dublin was the nearest university to many parts of North Wales.

The services were conducted in the Welsh language and the chapel remained under Welsh supervision throughout its existence. Ministers were normally sent from Wales, but at times when the chapel had no resident minister it relied on ministers sent for short periods or who travelled from Holyhead on Sundays to lead the service.

The chapel became a focal point for the small Welsh community in Dublin, and numbers reached 77 by 1861. By then, the chapel was too small for the numbers attending, and a gallery was built over the chapel door in 1862, with additional seating for another 60.

The background of the sailors who went to church there was reflected in the customs in the chapel. The ground floor was referred to as the ‘Main Deck,’ and there the men sat on the ‘starboard side’ to the right and the women on the ‘port side’ to the left. The gallery was known as the ‘Quarter Deck’ and only sailors were allowed to sit there. At each end of the gallery were spittoons filled with sawdust so sailors could smoke or chew tobacco during the services.

In fact, only sailors were allowed on this quarterdeck. The story is told of a captain visiting with his wife, but when she tried to enter the gallery she was told: ‘Main deck for you my girl!’

The Revd Evan Lloyd was the chaplain of the ‘Welch Methodist Preaching House’ in 1862. He was popular, although another city centre chaplain accused him of being ‘the father of all the Welsh girls in Dublin.’

The chapel was linked to Anglesey from 1865 on. Further building work in 1894 was supported by donations from Methodists across Wales, a ‘Wesleyan nobleman,’ and a member of the Moravian Church, and ‘even received help from the Papists.’

In the 1901 census, the chaplain, the Revd John Lewis (42), was living at 77 Talbot Street with his wife Elizabeth and their son Alun (1). Later, the Lewis family lived behind the church in Moland Place. Lewis was known to Dubliners as the ‘Welsh bishop,’ and wore a wide, flat hat on his missions around the city. His hat is said to have been hit by a bullet during the Civil War.

There were almost 40 members in 1902, and 60 in 1910. The chapel had 57 baptisms between 1839 and 1923 and 18 marriages, the first in 1892 and the last in 1936.

Members of the chapel came from all social classes. Clerks, domestic servants, sailors, hotel-owners and tailors featured in its records. For example, the chapel members in 1914 included the housekeeper, housemaid, parlourmaid and cook employed by Sir John Purser Griffith (1848-1938), a senior civil engineer and politician, at his home in Rathmines Castle. Almost all these servants were from Anglesey, like their employer. Purser Griffith did not belong to the chapel but he gave it substantial funds.

The housekeeper at Rathmines Castle, Caernarvon-born Mary Parry, married the Revd Owen Selwyn Jones, a widower and Minister of the Gospel with an address at Llanrhos, North Wales. The wedding took place in the Welsh chapel in 1916 and the witnesses were John Lloyd-Jones, who was Professor of Welsh in University College Dublin, and Elizabeth Roberts, the parlourmaid at Rathmines Castle.

The Welsh Chapel on Talbot Street closed in 1942 and was sold in 1944 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Ernest Blythe (1889-1975), the Minister for Finance (1923-1932) and later managing director of the Abbey Theatre (1941-1967), also had an interest in the Welsh language. He was born into a Church of Ireland and Unionist family near Lisburn, and also became a key figure in the Blueshirts and other pro-fascist and antisemitic organisations.

When Blythe joined the Gaelic League to learn Irish, another member told him of the Welsh community in Dublin with its own church and services in the Welsh language. ‘I went there one Sunday morning to revel in the sound of a language closely related to Irish,’ he later recalled. To improve his knowledge of the Welsh language, Blythe occasionally attended the chapel and took Welsh classes in the 1930s from the minister, the Revd John Lewis.

Chapel membership declined during World War I and fell again after Irish independence, and the church may have been damaged during the War of Independence. There was an explosion outside nearby Moran’s Hotel in July 1922, and several houses and businesses on the street claimed compensation. The many claims in the area at the time include one from William Griffith, a boot merchant next door at 78 Talbot Street.

By the 1930s, the chapel had only about 20 members. The last resident minister, the Revd John Lewis, was minister from 1894 until 1934, when he retired to Wales after 40 years of ministry. After Lewis, visiting ministers came from Anglesey to conduct services in the chapel in Dublin. The last service was held in 1939, before the outbreak of World War II made the crossing between North Wales and Dublin too difficult.

A decision was taken to close the chapel in 1942. When it was sold in 1944, there were only 13 members.

In June 1944, the Irish Independent reported that ‘a regrettable break in the few remaining links binding the Irish people with their fellow Celts, the Welsh, will follow on the closing down of the Welsh Church, Talbot Street. This church, the only one of its kind in the country, will be offered for sale on June 20.’

Professor John Lloyd-Jones said that when the chapel closed ‘the heart of the Welsh community in Dublin had been taken out’. Howell Evans wrote in 1981 that ‘looking back … had there been no Welsh Church I would have lost my language and Welsh interest.’

For many years, the building was used as a shoe shop under the name Griffith’s. The name Griffith’s survives in the tiling at the entrance door.

Today the former chapel is a brightly-coloured ‘Five Star Internet Café,’ with a pool room upstairs. the outline of the original chapel can be seen on the Talbot Street façade. Inside, computers and telephones on the ground floor and pool tables upstairs hide the previous life of this former chapel.

Following a campaign by the Welsh Society in Ireland, the building now has protected status and the sign of the former ‘Welsh Church’ can be seen once again.
 

The Welsh Chapel on Talbot Street, Dublin, as it looked almost four years ago in January 2022 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Additional reading:

Blythe, Earnan P, ‘The Welsh Chapel in Dublin,’ Dublin Historical Record, Vol 14, No 3, Old Dublin Society, 1957, pp 74-79, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30102651.

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)