The Chapels Society

Matt Davis pieces together some hidden history on the south coast…

Thomas Elworthy (1826–1899) is little known outside his adopted home town of Hastings, East Sussex, but he was a key part of civic life throughout the Victorian era. He was involved in local politics, property development schemes, and the creation of a magnificent waterworks in the nearby countryside which still supplies the town’s drinking water; but his most visible legacy is a set of high-quality Nonconformist chapels in and around Hastings. Some survive only in photographic form, having been lost to urban redevelopment, but enough of his output survives to prove he could work comfortably with various architectural styles and meet the requirements of different groups: Baptists, Methodists and Congregationalists (his own denomination). His first ecclesiastical work after going into practice in 1857 was the 350-capacity Memorial Baptist Chapel (1864–65) at Bank Buildings in Hastings town centre. This is early compared to his other chapels; and it had such a strange, troubled history that it was already disused long before Elworthy’s career ended! During the Chapels Society’s visit to Hastings in May 2025 which I led (reviewed in Newsletter 93; also see the visit notes here), I told members the story of the chapel which, as modern-day researchers looking at old newspapers will discover, very quickly had the word ‘Scandal’ suffixed to its name.

Rather than commemorating an eminent Baptist, the Memorial Chapel was almost certainly named after the adjacent Albert Memorial Clock Tower, newly completed in 1864. It was founded for General Baptist secessionists, led by Rev. J. C. Fishbourne, from the (then) Particular Baptist chapel which had stood 400 feet away in Wellington Square since 1838 (the Illustrated Christian Times in fact described the new chapel’s members as consisting of ‘Baptists and Independents’). Work on the Memorial Chapel started in late 1864 and it opened on 30 August 1865 at a cost of £3,000. It was surrounded by buildings and so was top-lit: the roof was in fact almost entirely of glass, with a series of clear domes underneath and gas burners in between to supplement the natural light. The gallery was of iron and mahogany. The dimensions were 55 x 40 feet and there were two schoolrooms at the rear. John Howell and Son – the leading firm of builders locally at the time, responsible for many of the town’s most important churches and chapels – built the chapel.

Suggestions of the problems to come were perhaps hinted at during the foundation stone-laying ceremony on 3 November 1864, when Rev. Fishbourne referred to the ‘struggle of 18 months’ experienced in getting to this stage and remarked that ‘those who supposed [he] had had motives in erecting the chapel were quite mistaken’. Nevertheless, things progressed normally at first; but in November 1872 Rev. Fishbourne was removed from his position as pastor and the chapel was locked up to prevent his having access. Two months later came the ‘Memorial Chapel Scandal’, as local journalists called it, when on 26 January 1873 the chapel reopened with a new pastor. Directly before the service Rev. Fishbourne marched in with some associates, ‘coolly mounted the platform’, argued with the new minister (who promptly retired to the vestry), and took the service. This consisted mainly of a speech stating that legal action was forthcoming and that he would stay in Hastings until suitable apologies were made for what had happened to him. Further remarks suggested he had been treated unfairly with regard to money, and indeed the subsequent arbitration found that the root of the scandal was Rev. Fishbourne’s remuneration, the payment of his rent, the debt remaining on the chapel, and who owed whom money. There were unhappy parallels with earlier events at Wellington Square, where a row in 1862 had culminated in all the deacons resigning and paved the way for the secession.

Information about what happened next is sketchy, but evidently the church was fatally wounded. The chapel passed to the Primitive Methodists, who established a Sunday school in 1874 and licensed the chapel for marriages two years later. Perhaps it proved too expensive to run, though, because it was put up for auction in February 1882, eventually being sold privately beforehand instead. Reports at the time claimed it was to become a museum and public library, but nothing came of this. In 1889 the ground floor became a newspaper publisher’s office; the upper floor was an auction hall by 1896; public meetings were later held there; and between 1910 and 1925 part of the building was used as a cinema. (Rev. Fishbourne, meanwhile, had died in January 1875 at the age of 46.)

The building returned in part to religious use in the 20th century. The Open Brethren, always strong locally, registered ‘one large room on the first floor’ (presumably the old auction hall) as a place of worship in February 1903, calling it ‘Central Hall’. Although the registration was not cancelled until August 1921, they actually left in 1911: after a short stay in the Public Hall in nearby Robertson Street, they moved to Stonefield Road, to a building originally erected as a school and later used as an art gallery, and remained there until 1991. The Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance subsequently occupied parts of the Memorial Chapel on and off for about 60 years, again using the name ‘Central Hall’. They first registered the upper hall in 1929, then added the lower hall (the old cinema) in 1931, but stopped using the building in 1938 – only to re-register the upper hall in 1957, remaining there until 1981 when they moved to a purpose-built church in the suburbs (a remarkable building, incidentally, like a stretched pyramid in form). The Memorial Chapel passed into secular use again as numbers 6a and 6b Bank Buildings, being subdivided into offices and ground-floor shops, but its chapel origins remain legible. And what a show the upper part makes: stuccoed, severely symmetrical, featuring an odd mix of Doric and Corinthian pilasters, segmental and triangular pediments above the windows, and owing something to the Regency-style terraces of Nash and Burton. In the light of his later works, it seems amazing that Elworthy really designed it. Wellington Square, meanwhile, remains in use as the main Baptist church serving central Hastings.

Matt Davis takes a look at a neat little chapel in his home town…

Poets Corner is a densely built network of terraced streets north of Portland Road in what was originally the parish of Aldrington, annexed by Hove Borough in 1893. In the heart of the area can be found an attractive little chapel – its original name, Rutland Hall, picked out in fancy terracotta letters (although the ‘N’ and the ‘D’ have been missing for many years!). Its present congregation have been using it only since 2008; but to tell its story properly, we must go right back to 1683 and to Hove’s noisy neighbour, Brighton, where a connection can be traced to that famous resort’s oldest Nonconformist place of worship. Other connections can be traced as well: to two of the most interesting and prolific local firms of architects, to various characters from local religious history, and to several other local churches past and present – proving as always that no church or chapel can really be considered or understood in isolation.

Brighton was a modest fishing village in the late 17th century, growing slowly in importance but of little significance beyond its local area. The four-street layout with narrow streets and connecting passageways (locally ‘twittens’) has been preserved for the most part and now forms ‘The Lanes’, a tourist-friendly zone of small shops and restaurants. In 1683, on one of the little streets, Union Chapel was founded for a varied group of Protestant Dissenters, as they were known at the time – modern denominational labels having not yet developed. By 1823 it was a Congregational chapel, and in that year some members established a Sunday School in Hove, which was then a tiny village, in a building owned by John Vallance (after whom the Vallance Estate, an area of good-quality Victorian housing, was later named.) A church developed from this, and in 1870 Cliftonville Congregational Church was built at the top of Ventnor Villas. It is now known as Central United Reformed Church and is one of six extant churches of that denomination in what is now the City of Brighton and Hove.

In turn, Cliftonville founded a daughter church in the rapidly developing parish of Aldrington. Rutland Hall was built in 1900 on Rutland Road, a recently developed side-street off Portland Road: the first houses there were built in 1894. A typical small turn-of-the-century chapel, it is given some distinction by the terracotta detail on the façade. It cost £3,500. The architect was William H. Nash, a local man who was responsible for a very similar looking mission hall on Sutherland Road in Brighton in 1893. Rutland Hall was built on the initiative of William Allin Hounsom and Ambrose Spong. The latter was the minister at Cliftonville Congregational Church for 36 years from 1872, and he bought and donated the site on Rutland Road; Hounsom, a close friend, lived nearby and was a longstanding member at Cliftonville, as well as a major landowner, a Justice of the Peace and a ‘stalwart figure in Congregationalism in Sussex and beyond’ (a description taken from The First Ten Years 1938–1948: The Story of the Hounsom Memorial Congregational Church, Hove, Sussex, published in 1948.)

In 1937, the Sussex Congregational Union decided to reach out to another rapidly developing residential area in Hove – the Hangleton estate. Concerned that no Nonconformist denomination had yet provided a chapel to serve this large area, it was decided that a Congregational church should be built there as soon as possible, and that Rutland Hall should be sold to help finance it. The chapel closed in December 1937 and was sold for £2,000; worshippers joined either the Cliftonville chapel or the new Hounsom Memorial Church, named after William Allin Hounsom (who had died in 1934). This church remains in use today as part of the United Reformed Church. It was one of many architectural works by Brighton-born John Leopold Denman, whose stylish and neatly detailed buildings and impressive pubs can be found across the city and more widely in Sussex.

The purchasers of Rutland Hall were an assembly of Open Brethren who had met in a hall nearby on Connaught Street since, coincidentally, 1900. Retaining the name ‘Rutland Hall’, they registered the chapel for their use in December 1937. The assembly continued to meet for the next 70 years but faded away by 2008 – at which point another congregation came into the picture. Stoneham Road Baptist Church, which served the Poets Corner area, had been founded in 1904 as a daughter church of Holland Road Baptist Church, a fine Grade II-listed chapel which is the main Baptist church in Hove. The Stoneham Road building, designed by Brighton’s other prolific firm of architects Clayton & Black, was in poor condition by the start of the 21st century, and planning permission was granted in 2008 for its demolition and replacement with houses. The congregation acquired Rutland Hall and moved in, naming it ‘West Hove Community Baptist Church’ as a sign of their new start in a new venue. Its name was changed again recently to ‘New Life Christian Church’. This is a good illustration of how a chapel building can pass through multiple owners during its existence, all of whom have slightly different requirements – although it does not quite match the five congregations which used a recently closed chapel in Sevenoaks, Kent, whose story will be told in a future Chapels Society Newsletter!

Matt Davis visits the Warwickshire–West Midlands borderlands…

Any chapel-crawlers alighting at the lightly-used Lapworth railway station in Warwickshire are probably visiting the famous Umberslade Baptist Church – one of the exemplars of Victorian Birmingham’s Nonconformist confidence, now owned by the Historic Chapels Trust. Before embarking on the long walk to Umberslade, they should do what I did and make a short detour to see Lapworth Community Church – a delightfully intact late Victorian mission room now used by an independent Evangelical church.

Although it is separated from Solihull’s suburbs only by the M42 motorway, and also has the M40 uncomfortably close by, the area around Lapworth is still remarkably rural. It has always been a large parish, and the huge and distinctive parish church of St Mary the Virgin is quite distant from both Lapworth and Kingswood villages. William Lees was a lay reader at the church in the late Victorian era. Before 1886, he started a mission at Kingswood to cater for the area’s working-class population: railway workers, labourers on the canal – the Stratford-upon-Avon and Grand Union Canals meet at Kingswood Junction – and those in service with members of the gentry, whose large estates dominated the area. A house in Station Lane was used for worship until its owner built a hall on to the side of her home in 1886. Soon after this a proper chapel superseded it.

William Lees was associated with the mission until his death in 1907, after which the chapel was promptly renamed ‘Lees Memorial Hall’. Soon afterwards it moved towards an Evangelical position, albeit strictly non-denominational. Accordingly, on 26 November 1909 it was formally registered for worship (still as ‘Lees Memorial Hall’) for a congregation which described itself on its registration certificate as ‘…a Congregation or Assembly of persons worshipping Almighty God purely on the lines of an Evangelical undenominational mission’. Registration for the solemnisation of marriages followed in 1914.

Next to the mission hall was a large house which became a manse in 1921. Full-time ministry was maintained for more than 50 years, but decline set in after World War II and the chapel closed in August 1976. The attractive building’s future was uncertain, and in less architecturally enlightened times (say, 10 years earlier) it could perhaps have faced demolition. Instead the manse was sold in 1978 and the money raised was used to renovate the chapel – because soon after its closure new impetus was provided by the ‘big city’ up the road (or rather, by a group of worshippers in Birmingham’s prosperous southern appendage, Solihull). This is far from the only example of a rural Nonconformist chapel being reinvigorated by a thriving church in a nearby urban area.

Members of a non-denominational fellowship in Solihull decided to restart services at Kingswood in 1977. A minister was appointed, and strong growth was enjoyed. Alignment with the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches in 1984 gave what was now known as ‘The Lees Chapel’ the benefits of being part of an informal umbrella network while retaining local autonomy.

The chapel building may be modest in size and scale, but it is a real delight. Positioned on a generous plot between large houses, and with fields opposite, it retains something of the rural character it would have had when built. Red brick is the main material, but good use is made of decorative elements: an elaborate string-course below the gable, human face label-stops above the pointed-arched windows, prominent dentil decoration on the gabled porch, a fleur-de-lis finial, homely dormer windows to the sides, and a lovely carved stone above the double doors. As well as the longstanding name ‘Lees Memorial Hall’, this gives the original name of ‘Kingswood Mission Room’, the date of construction and the text ‘In this place will I give peace’ – a lesser-known Bible quotation, taken from Haggai 2:9 in the Old Testament. In full, that verse is ‘“The glory of this latter temple shall be greater than the former,” says the Lord of hosts. “And in this place I will give peace,” says the Lord of hosts’ (New King James Version). William Lees therefore continues to be commemorated even though a new name, Lapworth Community Church, was adopted in September 2022. It may be a four-mile walk from the chapel to Umberslade – or six if a detour is taken to look at the parish church from which it was founded – but anybody who does happen to be chapel-crawling in this part of Warwickshire should make sure they turn left, not right, out of Lapworth station!

Matt Davis finds an eye-catching chapel with an interesting history…

Corfe Mullen is a pleasant place on the Dorset Heaths: a large village on the cusp of being a small town, and indeed Town Council status has recently been sought. It is attached to the South East Dorset conurbation (Bournemouth–Christchurch–Poole) and forms its north-westernmost part. The village has a conventional linear pattern of development, north–south along the Wimborne Road with the ancient parish church standing alone to the northwest. A good number of chapels can be found here and in the associated hamlets of East End and Lambs’ Green, but most are hidden away and surprisingly hard to see. The former Wesleyan Methodist chapel at East End (1926–2014) hardly looked like one to begin with and has in the last three years been greatly extended to form a house; its predecessor at Lambs’ Green, now holiday cottages, is down a narrow, unmade track; the Methodist chapel in the village centre, built in 1927 for Primitive Methodists in a very similar style to East End and converted c. 2015 into a nursery school, is hidden behind high fences and fast-growing bushes; Knoll Farm Church (previously Knoll Farm Christian Mission), an independent Evangelical/Pentecostal church founded in the 1970s, is literally a farm – the various agricultural buildings were converted c. 1984 to create multiple spaces for worship and other activities – and is approached along an exceptionally long road; and Corfe Mullen Baptist Church, a chapel of 1879 beautifully extended in recent years, is known as ‘Chapel in the Valley’ and is hidden away in that valley down a steep, narrow lane. (It stands on the site of the original chapel of 1813.) The other Nonconformist place of worship in the village, though, makes up for it with its showy, eccentric styling and clear visibility in the heart of the village. Its history is also of interest – reflecting trends that can be seen elsewhere in the country.

Colonel Charles Albert Duke George was born in Wimborne in 1842. Aged 25 he founded the building firm George & Harding, which took that name in 1883 when Henry Harding became an equal partner. George was a Town Commissioner and Alderman in Bournemouth and was responsible for much of its suburban development in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the 1920s he was living in a large house (now demolished) in Corfe Mullen, but he was clearly not ready to retire. In 1926 and 1927 he built both of the Methodist chapels named above, which explains their stylistic similarity. They are plain, small, domestic-style buildings which gave no clue as to what he was going to do next. In 1932, at the age of 90, he built ‘Central Hall’ on Wimborne Road, very close to his house – although old maps suggest it was not quite within its grounds – and submitted its registration certificate on 30 July that year. Formal registration for ‘Christians not otherwise designated’ took place 12 days later. ‘Central Hall’ suggests a link with Methodism, but that was not so. The chapel was probably non-denominational, but there are suggestions it may have been associated with the Open (Christian) Brethren, who have always been strong in the nearby Bournemouth and Poole areas – and the fact that the chapel was at the junction of Central Avenue perhaps supports this conjecture, because ‘Road Name’ + ‘Hall’ has long been a common naming convention for Open Brethren meeting rooms.

In any case, Colonel George – who died in 1935 – ended his career with a flourish: the chapel has an extraordinary façade. The main body of the building is gabled, tall and disproportionately narrow, with bands of yellow brickwork at the sides and an eye-catching stripy horizontal pattern of three rows of bright red bricks followed by two rows of yellow. A very tall crow-stepped gable leads up to a curved stone finial. The only other curviness on this particularly angular building is the tall arched window with thick mullions and transoms. Flanking the main building are two single-storey wings, mirror images of each other, with the same striped brickwork, short porches and paired rectangular windows, all topped off by incongruous decorative battlements. There are similar paired rectangular windows on the side elevations. All in all, not a standard suburban interwar chapel! By 2007 the chapel was known as Corfe Mullen Family Church. New signage was added in contrasting blue and bright yellow, including the wording ‘JESUS IS LORD’ above the main window.

Meanwhile, in the Upper Parkstone area of Poole a few miles south, Sunny Hill Road Community Church occupied a plain brick hall with some decorative artificial stonework (a remarkably common feature on chapels in this area) on Sunny Hill Road. The building opened in 1962 and was registered with the name ‘Heatherlands Hall’ for Christian Brethren, replacing an earlier Gospel Hall nearby which had existed since the early 1890s. Over time the church moved towards non-denominational Evangelicalism – a common trend among churches originally associated with the Open/Christian Brethren movement – and by 2009 it was known as Sunnyhill Community Church, with ‘Sunnyhill’ now being one word. Around this time Sunnyhill and Corfe Mullen Family Church started working together, which led to a formal merger in 2017. The aim was to operate as a multi-site ‘campus’ church, not necessarily using traditional chapel buildings – a notable 21st-century trend which can be seen in many places. The name ‘Sunnyhill Church’ was adopted, the Sunny Hill Road chapel was sold and was demolished in late 2020 or early 2021 – a site visit in September 2022 showed the site was still awaiting development – and the church set about establishing its campus model. Services have been held at a school in the Canford Heath area of Poole since 2017 and at Ferndown village hall since 2019. More permanent premises are being sought, but what form they will take remains to be seen: a traditional chapel building seems unlikely. Growing churches with an Evangelical style often go for large warehouse-style buildings with good road access and lots of car parking; examples can be found in industrial areas and business parks in many towns across Britain.

It appears that worship activities no longer take place at the old ‘Central Hall’ in Corfe Mullen, although this is unclear. In any case it is used as Sunnyhill’s registered office. The ‘JESUS IS LORD’ wording added by Corfe Mullen Family Church is still clearly in evidence, and large signboards advertise Sunnyhill Church and its contact details. It remains one of the most interesting chapel buildings in a part of the country which is not short of them. If visiting Corfe Mullen to photograph it, note that it faces directly east, so you will be facing west: for best results, go on a sunny morning!

(The firm of George & Harding finally closed down in 2009 after completing its last building, a Travelodge hotel near Heathrow Airport.)

Past President Tim Grass makes an unexpected discovery…

Brown signs to tourist destinations can take you down some unexpected turnings. Along the A629 between Penistone and Huddersfield, a brown sign points down a narrow lane to a Friends’ Meeting House. Even better, it turned out to be open for Heritage Open Days, and we were welcomed by two members. The meeting house forms part of a hamlet which became known as Quaker Bottom. Converted from a barn in 1697, it was largely rebuilt in 1754 and the present front dates from 1864, although if you explore the tree-shaded burial ground at the rear you can still evidence of the building’s earlier forms. Inside, what struck me was the attractive panelling of the upstairs shutters and behind the ministers’ bench. The large windows on the south side of the building (none on the north) make for a beautifully light room, in a secluded location. It reminded me of the Strict Baptist chapels in which I grew up.