Cross Street Chapel is a Unitarian

church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a place/building for Christian religious activities and praying * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian comm ...

in central

Manchester Manchester () is a city and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. It is a member of the

General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (GAUFCC or colloquially British Unitarians) is the umbrella organisation for Unitarian, Free Christians, and other liberal religious congregations in the United Kingdom and Ire ...

, the

umbrella organisation An umbrella organization is an association of (often related, industry-specific) institutions who work together formally to coordinate activities and/or pool resources. In business, political, and other environments, it provides resources and iden ...

for British Unitarians.

History

The

Act of Uniformity 1662 The Act of Uniformity 1662 ( 14 Cha. 2. c. 4) is an act of the Parliament of England. (It was formerly cited as 13 & 14 Cha. 2. c. 4, by reference to the regnal year when it was passed on 19 May 1662.) It prescribed the form of public prayer ...

imposed state control on religion by regulating the style of worship in the

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the State religion#State churches, established List of Christian denominations, Christian church in England and the Crown Dependencies. It is the mother church of the Anglicanism, Anglican Christian tradition, ...

. 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. In April 1693 a new meeting-house was proposed. Ground was bought on 20 June at Plungen's Meadow (now Cross Street); the building was begun on 18 July, a gallery was added as a private speculation by agreement dated 12 February 1694, and the meeting-house was opened by Newcome on 24 June 1694. The "

Dissenters A dissenter (from the Latin , 'to disagree') is one who dissents (disagrees) in matters of opinion, belief, etc. Dissent may include political opposition to decrees, ideas or doctrines and it may include opposition to those things or the fiat of ...

' Meeting House" holds a special place in the growth of

nonconformism Nonconformity or nonconformism may refer to: Culture and society * Insubordination, the act of willfully disobeying an order of one's superior *Dissent, a sentiment or philosophy of non-agreement or opposition to a prevailing idea or entity ** ...

within the city. It was wrecked by a Jacobite mob during the

1715 England riots Events For dates within Great Britain and the British Empire, as well as in the Russian Empire, the "old style" Julian calendar was used in 1715, and can be converted to the "new style" Gregorian calendar (adopted in the British Empire in ...

on 10 June but it was rebuilt and enlarged. The building was renamed the Cross Street Chapel and became a Unitarian meeting-house . It was destroyed during the Second World War

Manchester Blitz The Manchester Blitz (also known as the Christmas Blitz) was the heavy bombing of the city of Manchester and its surrounding areas in North West England during the Second World War by the German ''Luftwaffe''. It was one of three major raid ...

in December 1940. A new building was constructed in 1959 and again in 1997. In 2012, the chapel became the first place of worship to be granted a

civil partnership A civil union (also known as a civil partnership) is a legally recognized arrangement similar to marriage, primarily created to provide legal recognition for same-sex couples. Civil unions grant some or all of the rights of marriage, with ch ...

licence when the law changed in England. During the construction of

Manchester Metrolink Manchester Metrolink is a tram/light rail system in Greater Manchester, England. The network has List of Manchester Metrolink tram stops, 99 stops along of standard-gauge route, making it the Transport in the United Kingdom#Trams and light ra ...

's second city crossing in the

City Zone Zone 1 of the Manchester Metrolink light rail network is the heart of the system where all of the other lines converge. Its boundaries approximately mirror the city's Inner Ring Road. Within Zone 1, first opened in 1992 as the City Zone, trams l ...

, 270 bodies from what used to be the chapel's graveyard had to be exhumed and reburied in Chorlton’s Southern Cemetery. The work took place from 2014 to 2017.

The chapel

The present structure dates from 1997. The Gaskell Room of the new building houses a collection of memorabilia of

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living wage, living writing novels and other fiction, while other ...

Elizabeth Gaskell Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (''née'' Stevenson; 29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer detailed studies of Victorian era, Victoria ...

Notable ministry and congregation

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." * Sir Thomas Baker *

William Fairbairn Sir William Fairbairn, 1st Baronet of Ardwick (19 February 1789 – 18 August 1874) was a Scotland, Scottish civil engineer, structural engineer and shipbuilder. In 1854 he succeeded George Stephenson and Robert Stephenson to become the third ...

William Gaskell William Gaskell (24 July 1805 – 12 June 1884) 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 ...

* James Heywood *

Eaton Hodgkinson Eaton Hodgkinson (26 February 1789 – 18 June 1861) was an English engineer, a pioneer of the application of mathematics to problems of structural design. Early life Hodgkinson was born in the village of Anderton, near Northwich, Cheshire, ...

* James Kay-Shuttleworth, 1st Baronet * Henry Newcome * Thomas Potter * John Henry Reynolds *

Thomas Worthington Thomas or Tom Worthington may refer to: *Thomas Worthington (Douai) (1549–1627), English Catholic priest and third President of Douai College *Thomas Worthington (Dominican) (1671–1754), English Dominican friar and writer *Thomas Worthington (g ...

List of ministers

* Henry Newcome 1662–1695 * John Chorlton 1687–1707 * James Coningham 1700–1712 *Eliezer Birch 1710–1717 * Joseph Mottershead 1717–1771 *Joshua Jones 1725–1740 *

John Seddon John Seddon is a United Kingdom, British occupational psychologist and author specializing in organizational change within the service industry. He is the founder and managing director of Vanguard, a Consulting firm, consultancy firm establishe ...

1741–1769 *Robert Gore 1770–1779 * Ralph Harrison 1771–1810 * Thomas Barnes 1780–1810 *John Grundy 1811–1824 * John Gooch Robberds 1811–1854 *John Hugh Worthington 1825–1827 *William Gaskell 1828–1884 *James Panton Ham 1855–1859 *James Drummond 1860–1869 *Samuel Alfred Steinthall 1870–1893 *Edwin Pinder Barrow 1893–1911 *Emanuel L.H. Thomas 1912–1917 *H. Harrold Johnson 1919–1928 *Charles W. Townsend 1929–1942 *F.H. Amphlett Micklewright 1943–1949 *Fred Kenworthy 1950–1955 *Reginald W. Wilde 1955–1959 *Charles H. Bartlett 1960–1967 *Kenneth B. Ridgway 1969–1971 *E.J. Raymond Cook 1972–1987 *Denise Boyd 1988–1996 *John A. Midgley 1997–2008 *Jane Barraclough 2008–2014 *Cody Coyne 2014–present

References

External links