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St George's Church,
Great George Street, BS1 5RR,
Brandon Hill, Bristol, Gloucestershire.

Cemeteries

This Church 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 1823, but we understand it was closed in 1984.

"St George's, Great George-street, Park-street, is a fine building. The living is a vicarage, value £285 per annum, in the gift of the Dean and Chapter of Bristol." [Extract from Webster & Co.'s Postal and Commercial Directory of the City of Bristol, and County of Glamorgan, 1865]

St George's is indeed a rather a splendid building, built to a design by Sir Robert Smirke in 1823, originally as a chapel of ease of St Augustine the Less, in the City. It became a separate parish in 1832. It is said to have been paid for by a special fund set aside by Parliament to celebrate the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo - thus becoming known as a "Waterloo Church"... John Latimer, in The Annals of Bristol in the Nineteenth Century (1887) notes that the Act of Parliament appropriating "the sum of one million sterling of the national funds towards the erection of additional churches in populous places", was passed in 1819, for which "an early application was made to the Ministry by the authorities of St. Augustine's parish, for a grant in aid of the erection of a proposed church near Brandon hill. The sum granted, in October 1819, was one-third of the cost of the building and site (£7,000), and the work was begun shortly afterwards, "the workmen in the first place removing seven houses partially erected on the spot many years before, but never finished".

The church was consecrated in September, 1823; then in December, 1832, a portion of St. Augustine's parish was separated from the mother church, and formed into an independent parish, called St. George's, the incumbent of which became a vicar. The new church, as originally built, was destitute of a chancel, but an annexe, after the model of some ancient basilicas, was erected in 1871.

The Church Commissioners Report on Pastoral and Closed Churches, on the Church of England website recorded its formal closure on 1st April 1984, for "Music or Drama". It was subsequently leased to the BBC, but is now St George's Bristol Concert Hall.

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 ST5814272983. You can see this on various mapping systems. Note all links open in a new window:

• St George's Church, Brandon Hill, 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 Brandon Hill, 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)
• Now “one of the country's leading concert halls”… St George's Bristol (null) (verified 2018-11-23)

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.