8 - The PM Chapel

Summary

The nineteenth-century Nonconformist chapel is usually compared unfavourably with its Anglican counterpart: until recently, it was all too often dismissed as ‘mere grasping after respectability’. Perhaps that explains why its supporters have focused on either those well-endowed examples that possess architectural merit, or rare iconic buildings such as the New Room in Bristol. Yet that approach is ultimately self-defeating. The Church of England, with its superior funding, access to land and historical legacy, was able to set a standard to which the chapel could not offer a competitive threat: the Anglican unit spend on churches built between 1800 and 1851 was double that of Nonconformists; and in the second half of the century, when much of their build activity was refurbishment, they still spent about 50% more per seat than their competitors could afford to lay out on their new builds. Furthermore, the lower Anglican hostility to the ‘Romanising’ associations of Gothic offered a design ethic that, initially at least, many Nonconformists had no desire to embrace.

The case for the chapel took a decisive step forward with the publication of the first of four volumes emerging from Christopher Stell's survey of England's Nonconformist places of worship, which was intended to identify all, irrespective of merit, dating from 1850 or earlier, plus any notable examples from that point to 1914. Since then, local history groups have followed his example, notably in the case of the East Riding. Yet the smaller, plainer chapels so characteristic of the PMC continue to be disregarded as a source, with three writers of the last quarter-century seeing them as the product of aesthetic and economic poverty: their ‘architectural development’ as ‘modest’; aimed at the ‘lower social classes’; and at the bottom of the Nonconformist cost spectrum.

If instead the chapel is seen as an expression of the Nonconformist Evangelicalism of the period – and of its inherently competitive nature – a very different image emerges. Many chapels dating from the early years of the nineteenth century survive, largely unaltered, in the area between the Derbyshire foothills of the Pennines and the Welsh border. This contains the PMC's original heartland; here the chapels exhibit a broad unity of character in which geography and community, rather than denomination, appeared to account for most differences between them; and surprisingly, many early PM examples were more than a match for their contemporaries.