Kilgelley, Pembrokeshire. 1869.
It would be a pleasure to try to trace some individuality of style belonging to each of the denominations of Nonconformity.But this is possible only in the most general way. In England the five chief divisions are Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, Brethren and other denominations. Wales is a separate study and Scotland does not come within the scope of this article.
Near Cardigan. Classical arrangement with duplicated door.
The Methodist church today is a Union of various Methodist Societies which sprang up so soon as Wesley’s followers started to ordain their own ministers without the medium of a Bishop of the Church of England. The oldest were the Wesley an Methodists and on the whole they were the richest. Their buildings, when they are not of the chaste, enthusiastic period, were rebuilt quite late in the nineteenth century and in a solid style generally faintly echoing the ancient Gothic style of the Established Church, externally at any rate.
The Primitive Methodists broke from the Wesleyans in 1810. They were humbler and more wildly enthusiastic people than the Wesleyans. They favoured camp meetings, female preachers, and the uttering of loud ejaculations during inspired prayers. By 1851 they had 3,000 chapels. Their architecture is very rarely Gothic; they are often tiny structures on waste spaces by the roadside in the country or high flimsy-looking Italianate barns in the towns. They employed architects more rarely than any other denomination.
The United Methodists arose in 1850 and were an amalgamation of various offshoots from the original society. Their buildings were humbler than those of the Wesleyans and abound in Cornwall and Durham.
Humbler too, but unclassifiable, are the buildings of the various other branches of Methodism, now united, except for Calvinistic, in the Methodist Church.
Congregational churches are definitely more easily identified than others. These churches have each their own government but belong to a central Union whose headquarters are the freestone Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street (1874). They are a survival of the original Independent churches of the seventeenth century and have preserved a certain traditionalism in their architecture, even in their later nineteenth-century buildings. Congregational churches are more sedate and less home-made looking than those of any other denomination. Often an architect was employed. The earliest ones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Somerset are imposing classic buildings. That at Frome is famous. Until about 1860 most Congregational churches were built in a classic style, a public-worship variation of the middle class villa of the date, running through from Greek to Roman and Italianate. Possibly because there was something traditional and respectable about Gothic towards the latter half of the last century, later Congregational churches are Gothic, and Basil Champneys’ Mansfield College, Oxford (1889–90) is one of the best bits of Perpendicular Revival in that city.
Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall. Methodist, c. 1830. Yellow-washed preaching house, pointed window and dark-grained oak door alone suggest a place of worship.
Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall. Interior: Luxurious Lombardic Italianate woodwork. Table below the pulpit. Flowers are a twentieth-century innovation, herald of liturgical movement in much recent Nonconformity.
The Baptists roused themselves in the late eighteenth century when they started their great missionary effort. The General Baptists (not to be confused with the Strict and Particular Baptists, who are small and Calvinistic) are the largest body of Nonconformists in the world and their largest following is in America. In England the Baptists made their greatest progress in the 1860’s, when Spurgeon was one of the most famous men in England. They increased threefold. Their new churches had some of the traditionalism of the Congregationals. They usually built large classic conventicles of which that at Newington Butts was, as it were, the cathedral. Their architecture has never been sufficiently studied and it would be a good thing if the Baptist Historical Society were to produce a record of their chapels as thorough as that produced by the Unitarians.
Plymouth Brethren are one of the few Nonconformist bodies still increasing. They are divided among themselves, but their meeting places can be distinguished from others by the board which generally says
THE LORD’S DAY.
Breaking of Bread, 11 a.m.
The Gospel will be preached here (God Willing) 6.30 p.m.
The sect is of nineteenth-century origin and its buildings are a cross between the Quaker meeting house and the Primitive Methodist chapel.
Tisbury, Wiltshire. Methodist. A Nonconformist’s answer to the Establishment’s Gothic revival. A mixture of all Gothic styles in Chilmark stone, battleship grey. The Georgian traditions survive in the two-storey window arrangement for galleries and in the Church of Ireland pinnacles.
Louth, Lincolnshire. Congregational, c. 1885.
