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

Barton Street Unitarian Chapel (Demolished),
Eastgate Street (formerly Barton Street),
Gloucester, Gloucestershire.

Cemeteries

This Chapel had 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 1699, but we understand it was closed before 1968.

The location of the Chapel can be seen on Old Maps. It was on the north-east side of what was then Barton Street, but is now Eastgate. The division between the two was formerly at the junction with Brunswick Road, Barton Street extending from there to the junction with India Road, whereas today Eastgate runs from The Cross to All Saints Church, and Barton Street starts at that point.

The Chapel was built in 1699 for a society of Presbyterians and Independents, of which James FORBES, formerly lecturer at the Cathedral was pastor. The Independents left in 1715, three years after Forbes's death, to form a separate church in Southgate, whilst the Presbyterians retained the building, "to which they called ministers of increasingly unorthodox views". By 1815 it had become Unitarian. In 1893, the chapel was refitted, but by 1968 it had become derelict, though it is believed a congregation continued to meet privately, by 1986 it had been demolished. However there is a photograph of it in Jill Voyce's book Gloucester in Old Photographs (from the County Library Collection, 1985), showing it had a three-bay front, with 2 tiers of round-arched windows, central doorway, and denticulated pediment.

The burial ground which was attached was cleared in August 1969, and the remains were reinterred in the Old Gloucester Cemetery on Tredworth Road; however examination of the cemetery records has revealed that only a few names of those buried have survived. The Gloucestershire Family History Society do however have a record of the MIs, and there are transcriptions of those inside the Chapel in the list of City of Gloucester Places of Worship on Stuart Flight's "Glosgen" website.

Note: Revd. Thomas Dudley Fosbrooke's An Original History of the City of Gloucester (1819) states that the Unitarians were meeting in Barton Street, citing the premises as one of eight non-conformist chapels in Gloucester at that time. [Other Sources: John Williams, and Non-Conformist Chapels and Meeting Houses, Gloucestershire (1986)]

Denomination

Now or formerly Presbyterian/Unitarian.

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 Chapel was located at OS grid reference SO8340918386. You can see this on various mapping systems. Note all links open in a new window:

• Barton Street Unitarian Chapel (Demolished), Gloucester shown on a Google Map.
• Places of Worship in Gloucester 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 Gloucester, and perhaps to Local History and Places of Worship as a whole.

• Stuart Flight's webpages of City of Gloucester Places of Worship (null) (verified 2018-11-08)

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.