Nottingham’s High Pavement Chapel

by Robert Morrell

Standing on its cliff-top eminence on the south-east corner of Nottingham’s famous lace market, the cathedral- like High Pavement Chapel has for over a hundred years stood as a visible manifestation to liberal Christianity in a great Midland city.

The chapel was the meeting place for local Unitarians, who had met and worshipped since 1691 at High Pavement, though the congregation has its origin in the Act of Uniformity of 1662, when almost two thousand ministers were dispossed for refusing to accept its terms. These included three ministers in Nottingham, the Revs, John Barret, John Whitlock and William Reynolds, and it is to these individuals and the public support they received, despite persecution, which was eventually to develop into the Presbyterian and Unitarian groups. The Nottingham Presbyterian organisation was established by 1655, according to the Rev, Gordon Bolam’s High Pavement Chapel, Nottingham (Nottingham, Nd.), though in another publication, 1662- 1962, Three Hundred Years. The Story of the Churches Forming the North Midland Presbyterian and Unitarian Association, the same author gives the date as 1656. 

The needs of the High Pavement congregation were ministered to by a number
of very able people, some of like whom, the Rev. George Walker, FRS. 

Another, P.W. Clayden, went on to become editor of a national daily paper, though he ministered to a London congregation at the same time. The minister who gave High Pavement its distinctive Unitarian character was the Rev. James Tayler, who was minister at the chapel for twenty-nine years, from 1802 till 1831. In the words of the Rev. C. Gordon Bolám, he declared his Unitarianism and “carried his people with him”.

A man who created considerable controversy was the very able orator, J.M. Lloyd Thomas. He was appointed in 1900, who built the congregation considerably, however, he departed to take over a Unitarian chapel in Birmingham in 1912. This may well have been more of a blessing than a blow to Nottingham, for while Thomas’s strong advocacy of Christian Socialism might have been acceptable to most of the Nottingham congregation, for the Unitarians had a strong radical streak in their history. His attachment to a ritualistic religious group called the Society of Free Catholics, of which he became President, may well have produced not only controversy but a split which could have destroyed the congregation. This could have particularly happened if he had openly sought to have his Unitarian ministerial status “upgraded” by obtaining what ritualists termed “valid orders”. Thomas did not openly seek to bring ritualism to Birmingham’s Old Meeting, but there were rumours about the ideas he entertained.

 

It was in 1876 when the present neo-gothic chapel was erected, replacing a two hundred year old meeting house standing in a court behind High Pavement. According to John Blackner, writing in 1815, the old meeting house, as he calls the chapel, was fifty-nine feet by fifty feet, and while by no means the largest such building in Nottingham it was, in his words, the most majestic as well as possessing the most commanding appearance of any chapel in the town. Built from Bulwell stone, the new building mirrored many of the other churches of its era, a time when church building in Nottingham was undergoing a boom. The architect was Stuart Colman, but according to Nikolaus Pevsner, his design has no special architectural merit. However, there is a rather fine east window which was made by William Morris and Company to a design by Burn Jones, a leading pre-Raphelite artist.

The congregation was non too happy about their fine new chapel for it was found to be draughty and never warm enough in winter; they did not have a very high opinion of the the acoustics either. The draughts were never eradicated despite all attempts to if some comments on the chapel in The Unitarian for May 1985 are to be believed, Blackner also noted that the congregation in his day “was one of the most respectable….in the town”.

The building was used as a place of worship for Unitarians until 1982. It was then converted into the Nottingham Lace Museum, but this venture proved financially unviable. The building was then converted to its current use, as a public house.

Article originally published in Hidden History Magazine, 1987.

 

Nottingham’s High Pavement Chapel Seen from the South, September 2019- Photograph Credit: Joseph Earp.