Default Image Place of Worship has been
Demolished.
Image by courtesy of
openclipart.org

St Barnabas's Church (Demolished),
Ashley Road / City Road,
St Paul, Bristol, Gloucestershire.

Cemeteries

We believe the Church did NOT have a graveyard.

Note: any church within an urban environment may have had its graveyard closed after the Burial Act of 1853. Any new church built after that is unlikely to have had a graveyard at all.

Church History

This Place of Worship was founded in 1843, but we understand it was closed in 1955.

Kelly's Directory of Bristol of 1902 states that a parish of St Barnabas was created in 1843, from the parishes of St James and St Paul, but a portion was taken from it in 1883 to create a new parish of St Agnes. The church, in the Ashley Road, was described as a plain cruciform building of stone, erected over a spacious vaulted crypt about 7 feet in height, and consisted of chancel, nave, transepts and a tower with spire. The chancel had several stained windows, one of which was a memorial to the Rev. John Jefferis Coles M.A. first vicar, who died in 1866. There were 600 sittings, and the parish records dated from 1846. The living was said to be a vicarage in the gift of the Bishop of Bristol, and had been held since 1890 by the Rev. Thomas Joseph Weight M.A. of Hertford College, Oxford, honorary canon of Bristol.

The Church Commissioners Report on Pastoral and Closed Churches, on the Church of England website recorded its formal closure on 10th May 1955, for subsequent educational use. Phil Draper, on his ChurchCrawler website, provides the information that it was used firstly as as a school assembly hall, and then a community centre, until 1983, when it was demolished for rebuilding the Malcolm X Community Centre.

One ecclesiastical-looking building does however remain, and by comparison with Old Maps, showing a "complex" which included Church, Vicarage, and a School, this appears to have been the School.

Denomination

Now or formerly Church of England.

If more than one congregation has worshipped here, or its congregation has united with others, in most cases this will record its original dedication.

Maps

This Church was located at OS grid reference ST5949774162. You can see this on various mapping systems. Note all links open in a new window:

• St Barnabas's Church (Demolished), St Paul, Bristol shown on a Google Map.
• Places of Worship in Bristol shown on a Google Map.
• Streetmap.co.uk (arrow on map shows the Place of Worship's location) (verified 2018-10-15)
• Bing (Ordnance Survey option) (verified 2018-10-13)
• Bing Maps ('Bird's Eye' View) (verified 2018-10-15)
• Ordnance Survey "getamap" (NB some of the 'Change Map' options may require a subscription) (verified 2018-10-15)
• OpenStreetMap (Maps © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA) (verified 2018-10-15)
• A Vision of Britain Through Time - useful for Boundary Changes (verified 2018-10-15)
• www.magic.gov.uk (Modern Maps with various overlays) (verified 2018-10-15)

Resources

I have found many websites of use whilst compiling the information for this database. Here are some which deserve mention as being of special interest for St Paul, Bristol, and perhaps to Local History and Places of Worship as a whole.

• The Church Commissioners Report on Pastoral and Closed Churches, found on the Church of England (null) (verified 2018-10-04)
• The Church officiando's “Bible” - Phil Draper's ChurchCrawler (null) (verified 2018-10-16)

The above links were selected and reviewed at the time I prepared the information, but please be aware their content may vary, or disappear entirely. These factors are outside my control.