Before the seventeenth century there were no Nonconformist chapels at all— only secret gatherings which the authorities called ‘conventicles’. Then, as Nonconformist bodies grew (there were around three dozen groups in London in 1646), some congregations took over unused church buildings or other existing properties. One of the earliest of these in Old London was the King’s Weigh House at the west end of Eastcheap. It had been first a church then was turned into the King’s Weigh House, where merchants weighed their goods on official scales. Two ministers who had been forced out by the Act of Uniformity founded there a Presbyterian chapel which lasted well into the nineteenth century.
Another famous Nonconformist chapel, also extinct, was located at 32 Fetter Lane. This was started by a minister named Turner who had served faithfully in the City during the Great Plague. Richard Baxter says in his journal, ‘I began a Tuesday lecture in Mr Turner’s church ... with great convenience and God’s encouraging blessing; but I never took a penny for it from anyone’. Records indicate that this same chapel was attacked in 1709 by a mob, who carried the contents away and burnt them in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Later it became a chapel of the Moravians, and the great Count Nicholas Zinzendorf preached here sometime after 1738. Here, too, John Wesley ministered in the early part of his career.
Not far away, at 96 Fetter Lane, was a Baptist congregation founded by Dr Thomas Goodwin, who ministered during the troubled times between 1660 and 1681. Goodwin was an outspoken and controversial figure who held both Calvinistic and Arminian doctrines. This building was rebuilt in 1732 and lasted into the nineteenth century. One of its better-known pastors was the Rev. John Spurgeon, father of the famous Charles Haddon Spurgeon of Metropolitan Tabernacle. Southwark, which had less-stringent laws than London, was home to several early Nonconformist chapels. There was, for example, a Presbyterian chapel in Park Street where Richard Baxter also preached for a time. On Zoar Street, a short distance westward, a Congregational chapel was established in the 1680s under John Chester. Here John Bunyan preached to great crowds on one or two occasions.
The Baptists built a chapel in a secluded court called Goat’s Yard in 1672. The first minister was Benjamin Keach, a popular preacher, and it is said that his chapel would hold a thousand people. He was the author of a Baptist Catechism which is still in print. The Baptists also had a building on the riverside, the ‘Baptisterion’, where they could hold public baptisms by immersion. The passageway leading to it was called, appropriately enough, ‘Dripping Alley’. By the early eighteenth century the Nonconformist meeting places in London alone had increased to nearly forty—there were still more in Southwark and Westminster. Many of these consisted of buildings converted from other uses or rented halls. But as the eighteenth century progressed it became possible for these congregations to construct buildings specifically for their own use.
The four most famous were Spa Fields Chapel, Surrey Chapel, Whitefield’s Tabernacle and Wesley’s Chapel. The Spa Fields Chapel was built in Clerkenwell on a site originally occupied by an amusement palace. In 1777 the property was purchased by the Countess of Huntingdon and rebuilt for use by the Calvinistic Methodists. Surrey Chapel was constructed in 1783 for use of the Rev. Roland Hill and his large congregation. It was in Southwark on the road leading south from Blackfriars Bridge. Like Spa Fields Chapel, it was round, with a cupola on top to let in light. George Whitefield’s first chapel (which he called a ‘tabernacle’, alluding to its temporary nature) was constructed in 1741 in the Moorfields not far from Wesley’s Foundry. In 1756 he put up a plain brick building on Tottenham Court Road, which was known as ‘Whitefield’s Tabernacle’ for nearly two centuries. It and all the others are now only memories. Wesley’s Chapel on City Road is the last and only Nonconformist chapel still standing in London.