Oundle. 1863. Grey limestone. It has the enormous pediment that became almost a hall mark of the mid-nineteenth-century chapel.
The architecture of enthusiasm reflected the cultivated taste of a class which had not yet lost its authority. The difference from the Establishment was one of plan, and often that difference was slight.
Where, in the country and in small towns, there was less wealthy patronage for the enthusiastic chapels, the buildings were unpretentious and what the Little Guides would call “barn-like” structures, an epithet which those guides apply to many a not dissimilar late eighteenth-century church. By “barn-like” I mean serviceable structures obeying the traditional rules of proportion and solid craftsmanship to be found in all Builders’ Assistants from The Builder’s Jewel, to Nicholson. The interiors were often wholly delightful: pale pink walls, Chippendale Gothic ceilings, high grained-oak pews, white gallery fronts and double rows of clear glass sash-windows round three sides of the building, and against the blank fourth wall a fine mahogany pulpit, sometimes inlaid and moulded. The town of Bridport, Dorset, has two little-spoiled chapels of the enthusiastic period comprising several of the features.
Donhead, Wilts. Methodist c. 1860. Chilmark stone with paler dressings, Soane-ish door and Gothic glazing bars.
At last we come to the most interesting phase of Nonconformist architecture, that which shows more surely than any Victorian Established church, whether high, low, broad, Gothic, Romanesque or Classic, what was the true architecture of the people. Not since medieval days had the people clubbed together to adorn a place of worship and this time it was not a shrine but a preaching house. In mining districts and lonely villages of Wales, among the gleaming granite and slate of Cornwall, down the brick-red streets of Leeds, Belfast, Liverpool and Manchester, in almost every city and corrugated suburb of Great Britain and the Six Counties Area, wedged in on the common land beside country houses and red and blue among the thatched roofs of southern villages or the stone roofs of northern ones, stand the chapels of the mid-nineteenth century. Despised by architects, ignored by guide books, too briefly mentioned by directories, these variagated conventicles are witnesses of the taste of industrial Britain. They try to ape nothing. They were anxious not to look like the church, which held them in contempt; nor like a house, for they were places of worship; nor like a theatre, for they were sacred piles. They succeeded in looking like what they are—chapels, so that the most unobservant traveller can tell a chapel from any other building in the street.3
The nineteenth century was a period of great religious revivals and this is not the place to examine their causes. The chapels were built as the result of those revivals and they represent pennies saved which might otherwise have been spent on drink, or profits from tiny shops and lean farms and gardens where farm workers had toiled until sundown. They contain, more often than not, a social hall and school-room for the the many P.S.A. meetings, groups, Fellowships, prayers and study meetings which occur on every weekday in a thriving Nonconformist community. They are the public equivalent of the parlour mantelpiece. All sorts of people connected with the chapel contributed their bit; the local builder supplied the labour and the plan; the ironmonger the cast iron railings and the lamps; the timber merchant the wood; a builders’ merchant gave of his best in ridge tiles, stonecaps and dressings; another builder undertook to look out coloured glass and window frames; carpenters in the congregation fixed the pews; painters did the graining and the stencilling; the linen draper looked to the cushions and coverings; and when it was all finished the stationer at his own steam press produced the illustrated account of the opening ceremony. Those who had no trade or craft directly connected with the chapel subscribed all they could. Pitch pine pews, green walls, brass, Lombardic and handsomely-painted pulpit, lamp brackets, carpeted alleys, stencilled texts and homeliness—it was better than the best house in the circuit. And yet it was built more on the lines of a pre-Reformation Catholic church than the correctest Pugin or boldest Butterfield. These were indeed the thresholds of a better world than this, the brick and stone expression of individual conversion and acceptance, not the stilted copying of a religion based on Prayer Books and Missals and idol worship.This was the Liberal vote.
Blaenconin, on the Cardigan–Narberth Road. c. 1830. This and the following illustrations belong to the Celtic tradition. There are far more chapels in Wales and Cornwall than in the rest of Britain. They are national emblems. The chief characteristics of Welsh chapels are a disregard of the established rules of proportion, very varied proportion for each building, though not much structural originality, and strong colour schemes.
Belgelley, Pembrokeshire. 1866. Blue-grey walls with paler granite dressings; purple brown door; slate roof.
Between Cardigan and Aberayron.
