Old Jewry Meeting-house

The Old Jewry Meeting-house was a meeting-house for an English Presbyterian congregation, built around 1701, in the Old Jewry, a small street in the centre of the City of London. Its first minister was John Shower.[1] In 1808 new premises were built in Jewin Street.

Origin

Edmund Calamy the Younger, an ejected minister, gathered a congregation from 1672 at Curriers' Hall. After his death in 1685, it moved to Jewin Street in 1692, and, expanding, under John Shower, had a purpose-built meeting-house constructed nearby in Old Jewry. This structure, opened in around 1701, gave the congregation its name for over a century.[1][2]

New building
Old Jewry Chapel in Jewin Street, 1808–1846

In 1808 the meeting-house was rebuilt in Jewin Street, on a site almost opposite the one it had occupied between 1692 and 1701,[1] for Abraham Rees as minister. (It was distinct from the Jewin Street Chapel, an Independent congregation, also known as "Woodgate's Meeting-House" after the previous minister; at the time the minister there was Timothy Priestley.[3][4] See also the Jewin Welsh Presbyterian Chapel, which had premises on that street.)


The move came about because of the imminent end of the lease in Old Jewry, in 1810. The architect of the new chapel was Edmund Aikin. The old brick meeting-house was knocked down, to make way for the "New Bank Buildings", designed by Sir John Soane.[5][6]

A decline in the congregation caused the closure of the chapel in 1840. It passed from Presbyterian control in 1841. The new Methodist tenants demolished the chapel in 1846, rebuilding it in a Gothic style in 1847.[4]

Ministers

Notes
  1. Walter Wilson (1809). The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses, in London, Westminster, and Southwark. Printed for the author. pp. 302–4.
  2. Mercer, M. J. "Shower, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25472. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. John Britton; Edward Wedlake Brayley; James Norris Brewer; Joseph Nightingale; John Evans; John Hodgson; Francis Charles Laird; Frederic Shoberl; John Bigland; Thomas Rees; Thomas Hood; John Harris (1815). The Beauties of England and Wales. Printed by Thomas Maiden, for Vernor and Hood [and 6 others]. pp. 342–3.
  4. John James Baddeley, Cripplegate, one of the twenty-six wards of the City of London (1921) pp. 278–9; archive.org.
  5. Howard Colvin (1978). A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840. John Murray. p. 60. ISBN 0-7195-3328-7.
  6. Sir John Soane's Museum Drawings, London: New Bank Buildings, Princes Street, City of London, 1807-10 (115).
  7. Walter Wilson (1809). The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses, in London, Westminster, and Southwark. Printed for the author. p. 306.
  8. Clarke Huston Irwin, A History of Presbyterianism in Dublin and the south and west of Ireland (1890) p. 309; archive.org.
  9. Godfrey Holden Pike (1870). Ancient Meeting-houses: or, Memorial pictures of Non-conformity in old London. S. W. Partridge & co. p. 157.
  10. Robert Aspland (1840). The Christian reformer; or, Unitarian magazine and review [ed. by R. Aspland]. p. 124.

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