Cote Baptist Chapel, nr. Bampton, Oxon. 1651. Grey limestone among the willows, elms and flat landscape of the upper Thames. Interior: high pews, white walls, gallery and clear glass. Neighbouring brooks and ponds suitable for baptism. The simplicity of these Puritan Chapels, built for people who believed and argued not for people who believed and sang or shouted praise, was deliberate.
The first chapels to be built by the Methodists were meant to serve as overflow preaching houses when the Established church was either too far distant, too hostile, or too small in seating capacity for the numbers attracted by the new preaching. Like the buildings of the earlier group, they were designed to seat as many people as possible within a good view of the pulpit. Crosses, altars and decoration were regarded as unnecessary, for there were such things at the Parish church. They followed, in plan, the “theological” preaching houses, but they were larger, flimsier buildings, and did not scorn a bit of carpenter’s or plasterer’s moulding here and there by way of internal embellishment. They were erected mostly by pious merchants or landowners whose enthusiasm extended to their pockets. They were hardly any of them erected from the subscriptions of the people. Indeed enthusiasm in the late eighteenth century was as rife as Tractarianism was seventy years later and touched similar classes at the top, though it had a greater hold than Tractarianism over the people at the bottom of the social scale.
Lady Huntingdon Chapel, Worcester. An “enthusiastic” interior in a Chippendale Gothic style, with nineteenth-century liturgical movement additions. Clustered columns, cornices, gallery pews, buff, yellow and white paint, dark green walls, organ with stencilled pipes, stained glass and pulpit rails are Victorian. Entrance screens (not shown) have good early nineteenth-century coloured glass. This chapel belongs to the second phase of Nonconformity (Wesley and Whitfield) when the buildings often conform to classic rules of proportion and are indistinguishable externally from contemporary buildings of the Establishment.
Louth, Lincs. Methodist, 1835. Small town Enthusiasm: not architect designed but by a builder with a Georgian tradition and some Adam-style casts. Windows not spoiled by cathedral glass of liturgical movement, two rows allow for gallery between first and second floors. Later it became customary to bring the galleries across the single long windows on entrance front to give a non-domestic appearance to the façade. This and the following five illustrations show the development of a native English style.
Blockley, Gloucestershire. 1835. The façade, except for the large windows and wide door, is in the Bath tradition which often survived as late and as far east as this.
Swaffham, Norfolk. Methodist c. 1870. Fanciful; a certain debt to Soane and Wightwick. White brick, frosted glass and bright coloured borders.
Market Harborough, Leicestershire, c. 1850, White brick and pale yellow stucco.
When great cities prospered after the depression following the Napoleonic wars, and Methodist merchants grew richer, stately chapels were built in the chastest Greek or Commissioner’s Perpendicular. Liverpool, Manchester, London and Bristol still contain a number. But they were built at a time when education in architectural matters was confined to those classes which were rich enough to have an extensive education or to recognize established taste when they saw it. There was little to choose between an early nineteenth-century Methodist, New Jerusalem, Roman, Independent or Unitarian chapel in a large town (where most Nonconformist building at this time took place) and a Proprietary chapel or new chapel of ease erected for the Established Church. They did not have bells or towers, but their internal arrangements were similar. Enthusiasm was strong in parts of the Established Church.The pulpit dominated the altar. Several octagonal, circular, and hexagonal churches were built for the Establishment (the Octagon Chapel, Bath; the Octagon Chapel, Wisbech; St. Andrew’s Church, Dublin—circular—and a dozen or more) while those which retained the rectangular plan, also favoured by Nonconformists, had exceedingly shallow chancels and the pulpit was more than often in front of the Table. On the Nonconformist side, there was an ‘Established’ look at, for example, the Wesleyan Chapel, Stanhope Street, Liverpool (c. 1820), where a contemporary account says “A powerful, fine wind organ, by Bewsher and Fleetwood, gives solemnity to the services;
