Cross Street Chapel is a Unitarian church in central Manchester, England. It is a member of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the umbrella organisation for British Unitarians. [1]
The Act of Uniformity 1662 imposed state control on religion by regulating the style of worship in the Church of England. However, many clergy rejected the restrictions, and of the 2000 ministers who were ejected from the established church, Henry Newcome established his own congregation that same year. The "Dissenters' Meeting House" was opened in 1694 and holds a special place in the growth of nonconformism within the city.
In 2012, the chapel became the first place of worship to be granted a civil partnership licence when the law changed in England. [2] During the construction of Manchester Metrolink's second city crossing in the City Zone, 270 bodies from what used to be the chapel's graveyard had to be exhumed and reburied. The work took place from 2014–17. [3]
The building was renamed the Cross Street Chapel and became a Unitarian meeting-house c.1761. [4] It was wrecked by a Jacobite mob in 1715, rebuilt and destroyed during a World War II air raid in December 1940. A new building was constructed in 1959 and the present structure dates from 1997. The Gaskell Room of the new building houses a collection of memorabilia of novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.
Urban historian Harold L. Platt notes that in the Victorian period "The importance of membership in this Unitarian congregation cannot be overstated: as the fountainhead of Manchester Liberalism it exerted tremendous influence on the city and the nation for a generation." [5]
The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches is the umbrella organisation for Unitarian, Free Christians, and other liberal religious congregations in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was formed in 1928, with denominational roots going back to the Great Ejection of 1662. Its headquarters is Essex Hall in central London, on the site of the first avowedly Unitarian chapel in England, set up in 1774.
Thomas Worthington was a 19th-century English architect, particularly associated with public buildings in and around Manchester. Worthington's preferred style was the Gothic Revival.
Theophilus Lindsey was an English theologian and clergyman who founded the first avowedly Unitarian congregation in the country, at Essex Street Chapel. Lindsey's 1774 revised prayer book based on Samuel Clarke's alterations to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer inspired over a dozen similar revisions in the succeeding decades, including the prayer book still used by the United States' first Unitarian congregation at King's Chapel, Boston.
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Thomas Bayley Potter DL, JP was an English merchant in Manchester and Liberal Party politician.
William Gaskell was an English Unitarian minister, charity worker and pioneer in the education of the working class. The husband of novelist and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, he was himself a writer and poet, and acted as the longest-serving Chair of the Portico Library from 1849 to his death in 1884.
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Henry Newcome was an English nonconformist preacher and activist.
York Unitarian Chapel is a building on St. Saviourgate, York, England. It is a member of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the umbrella organisation for British Unitarians.
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Brookfield Unitarian Church, Gorton, Manchester, England is a Victorian Gothic church. It is a member of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the umbrella body for British Unitarians.
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John James Tayler (1797–1869) was an English Unitarian Minister.
Hope Street Chapel was a Unitarian place of worship in Liverpool, England. It stood on Hope Street next to the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, about halfway between the Anglican and Catholic Cathedrals. The congregation had previously been based in Paradise Street and before that in Kaye Street. The church was opened in 1849, and demolished in 1962.
The Unitarian Church in Ireland presently consists of two Congregations, Dublin and Cork, part of the Synod of Munster, in the Republic of Ireland, which has itself been part the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland since 1935. Some congregations remain closely associated with the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. These churches would abide by the traditional Unitarian principles of Freedom, Reason and Tolerance.
Renshaw Street Unitarian Chapel was a Unitarian place of worship in Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, England. It operated from 1811 until the 1890s and was particularly well frequented by ship-owning and mercantile families, who formed a close network of familial and business alliances.
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Plunket Street Meeting House, was the site of two churches, first a Presbyterian Church, then an independent reformed faith evangelical church on Plunket Street, Dublin. It was situated between Patrick's St. and Francis St.
John Yates (1755–1826) was an English Unitarian minister, for over 30 years at the Paradise Street Chapel in Liverpool. He was an abolitionist, a supporter of radical causes, and a member of the Roscoe circle of progressives.