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

Mission Room (Demolished),
Ashton Road,
Ashton Gate, 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 before 1884, and it has since been demolished, but we don't know when.

I spotted this Mission Room when I was checking the location of Ashtongate Chapel on Old (pre 1900) Maps. It was situated on the west side of Ashton Road, just south of its junction with North Street. This is approximately where Frayne Road meets Ashton Road today, and in fact Frayne Road appears to have been built over its site. The only other building on that side of Ashton Road in the 1880s was labelled as "Lodge", on the south-west corner of a side road leading to Clift House - an isolation hospital for Diphtheria sufferers. Parkland lay to the south, as it does today. It was then named Bedminster Park, but is now "Greville Smyth Park".

To the best of my knowledge, the first known appearance of the Mission Room is on the Bristol Town Plans of 1884. Ten years earlier, Ashmead's Maps of Bristol of 1874 show the building as a School. Interestingly, the buildings which later became Ashton Gate School are shown in 1874, but unlabelled as such. According to the British Listed Buildings website, the School was opened in 1876, so presumably it was in the process of being built then. The School is also noted as having its own Chapel, at the east corner of the building. The BLB site describes it as having a "3-window range with a 12-foil rose window in the gable [and] the quatrefoil-headed windows rise through the eaves into dormers".

The Mission Room is not mentioned in Kelly's Directory of Bristol of 1902, nor in 1914, so it has not been possible to discover its adherence to a particular denomination. One possibility is that it was built as a School-cum-Chapel, but once the new building had its own Chapel it became redundant; and certainly its disappearance from records by the 1900s make that a possibility. The last OS Maps to show it are dated 1894-1896.

Denomination

Now or formerly Mission Hall.

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 ST5717371736. You can see this on various mapping systems. Note all links open in a new window:

• Mission Room (Demolished), Ashton Gate, 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 Ashton Gate, Bristol, and perhaps to Local History and Places of Worship as a whole.

• Learn more about Buildings of special or historical interest on the British Listed Buildings (null) (verified 2018-09-19)

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.