It would be too sweeping to say that the early meeting houses were that architecture of the people which had been driven out ofthe churches merely because the early Puritans were mostly intellectuals and their ministers clergy who had been ejected from their livings, displaced heads of colleges and scholars. The congregations, according to the Lambeth returns, consisted of a good sprinkling of landowners, schoolmasters and merchants. The earliest meeting places were cottages and larger private houses, for ministers and congregation expected to be replaced in the church at some change of government.
When the Restoration brought about a High Church reaction, and later when William III, the one and only Royal Calvinist, failed to insist that the Church of England was Presbyterian, Baptist or Independent, the dissenters started to move out from their cottage meetings and to build their own conventicles.
The earliest Nonconformist places of worship, built specifically for worship, are all later than 1650. They were designed as preaching houses.2 Usually they are plain, often delicate, compositions with windows on three sides and the pulpit approached by steps against the fourth. Sometimes there is a clear space in the middle of the room, for a communion table.Galleries round three sides were often added.
In their simplest form, in the Quaker meeting houses where the doctrine of the Society demanded no worldly ostentation whatever, the buildings have the quality of a well-scoured farmhouse kitchen—a stone or tiled floor, scrubbed oak open seats, white walls and clear glass windows. Sometimes in the older meeting houses the walls were covered to the height of a man’s shoulder with rush matting. One might say the Quakers were the Cistercians of Nonconformist builders. The Unitarians (then Presbyterians) were the Cluniacs. They did not despise decorative treatment, angels’ heads as exterior keystones,broken pediments, excellent brickwork. The Unitarian Year Book gives the dates of the foundations of various churches, and where these have not been rebuilt much excellent work is to be found.
Among the best Nonconformist churches of this first phase, what we might call the theological style, are Friars’ Street, Ipswich; Mary Street, Taunton; Churchgate Street, Bury St. Edmunds; Underbank, Stannington; the Octagon, Norwich. All these have lavishly furnished interiors, somewhat after the manner of a Wren church.
Of the buildings belonging to the Quakers, necessarily far simpler, Jordans, near Beaconsfield, is probably the best example, though I have attended numerous small country meetings where a scrubbed and white-washed austerity still recalls the strictness of old Friends. The earliest Baptist churches, notably Cote, Oxon (1657), have the austerity of Friends’ Meeting Houses.
Friars’ Street, Ipswich. 1700. Plaster walls and white woodwork. This and the following three chapels illustrated represent the theological style belonging to the convinced phase of Nonconformity when it emerged from secret meetings and built its own conventicles.
The first Methodist preaching house was not built until 1739 in Bristol and it survives almost as it was, for Sir George Oately, the Bristol architect, has carried out a conservative and sensitive restoration of the old place. This building is the first of a larger series of chapels than that of the first group and I think we might name it the first building of the architecture of Enthusiasm.
Consider the difference between the motives for building Methodist chapels and those for building Unitarian, Independent, and even Bapist places of worship. The latter were built for congregations versed in theology, to hear the Word of God from Ministers who held similar views on the Word to those of the congregation.
Underbank Stannington, nr. Sheffield. 1742. Local grey stone.
When John Wesley died in 1791 there were 60,000 Methodists in Great Britain and 11,000 in Ireland; most of them were in the northern and western counties of England and in the north and east of Ireland. These people were mostly men who had not previously bothered about spiritual matters; they were workers from early and dismal, industrial districts, half starved people who saw no hope of ease and happiness in this life and were attracted by the promises of indescribable ease and happiness in the next. Where Wesley or Whitfield lifted their voices, people fell down with groans and wrestled with the Evil One.
Exterior and interior of Unitarian Chapel, Bury St. Edmunds. Early eighteenth-century. Dark red brick, white paint. Unitarians were intellectuals. They had no moral objections to decoration and built many lovely chapels with Wren-like exteriors and fine woodwork within. They were not allowed towers or spires.
