Essex Street Chapel

The chapel was located just off the Strand, on a site formerly occupied by Essex House, London home of the Earl of Essex, hence the name of the street and the hall. It was about halfway between the City and Westminster, in the legal district of London. From the mid-18th century, some rooms within the former nobleman's palace were used as the auction room of bookseller Samuel Paterson. This was easily adapted into a simple meeting house, but within a few years there was enough of a congregation, and enough donations, to have a new edifice raised on the foundations of the old. This was completed by 1778, with financial support from Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, founder of the…

By the 1880s demographic change, mainly the movement of population out of the very centre of London, meant that membership had fallen significantly. As long ago as 1867, Rev Robert Spears had led the formation of a Unitarian congregation a couple of miles to the west; this group had grown and moved several times, but had no home. Sir James Clarke Lawrence, Lord Mayor of London and Liberal MP, purchased and donated some land at Kensington Gravel Pits (now Palace Gardens Terrace), and a temporary corrugated iron church had been built. Meanwhile, the main Unitarian bodies, the British and Foreign Unitarian Association and the Sunday School Association, needed better offices. Eventually it was…