Lewes Free Presbyterian Church

The ancient market town of Lewes has a well-established history of Protestant Nonconformism. Many chapels were established in the 18th and 19th centuries in the town itself and in its suburbs of Southover and Cliffe. One such place of worship was the Jireh chapel. In or around 1805 a dispute arose between Jenkin Jenkins, the minister at Cliffe's Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion chapel, and its congregation. He was dismissed by the Countess's Trustees and arranged for a new chapel to be built for him nearby. (The Countess of Huntingdon chapel, which opened in 1775, survived until the 1880s but has been demolished.) Jireh Chapel was placed in the hands of trustees about 1807. Prior to that…

Although externally clad in red brick and tiles, the chapel is completely timber-framed. Above this, three evenly spaced sash windows, an oculus and the stone tablet sit below the gable. A chimney breast extends up the west wall. The roof is covered with slate tiles and has a small boxlike louvred projection, topped with a pyramid-style cap, in the middle. There are four pairs of sash windows in the north and south walls, which are faced with mathematical tiles and slates respectively. Inside, wood predominates: the barrel-vaulted timber roof is supported on wooden columns attached to the gallery which runs around all four sides of the interior. The galleries are in turn held up with five…

Since December, 2024, the chapel has been used for worship by the Strict Baptist church formed at Galeed Chapel, Brighton, in 1869. Two Sunday services and evening meetings on Wednesday and Friday take place each week. The church was designated a Grade I Listed building on 25 February 1952.