On this day … 8 November 1876

The Preston Guardian carried a report celebrating the 160th anniversary of Unitarianism in the town, although the celebration itself rested on fairly shaky foundations. Preston’s nineteenth-century historians are agreed that a chapel was built on some waste ground at the bottom of Church Street early in the eighteenth century, but they opt for different dates between 1715 and 1717.

What they are all agreed on is that that chapel was home to a congregation of Nonconformists, established under the patronage of the Hoghtons of Hoghton Tower, who had already built a Nonconformist chapel in Walton-le-Dale, where they were the lords of the manor.

How the congregation came to reject the idea of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus and embrace Unitarianism is not known. What is known is that during the course of the eighteenth century the shift in belief took place, for the chapel was certainly Unitarian by 1762, when the baptism of the first children as Unitarians was recorded.

Anthony Hewitson was in no doubt that its origins were Nonconformist, as he writes in his Our Churches and Chapels:

‘… a little building was erected for the Nonconformists of Preston on a piece of land near the bottom and on the north side of Church-street. This was the first Dissenting chapel raised in Preston, and in it the old Nonconformists — Presbyterians we ought — to say spent many a free and spiritually-happy hour.’

As the congregation moved over to Unitarianism it began to attract the local gentry, including the Lutwidge family, who at the time were leasing Cooper Hill in Walton-le-Dale from the Hoghtons’. Henry and Jane Lutwidge had their son Charles baptised at the chapel in 1768 (for good measure, the boy also had a christening at St Leonard’s parish church in Walton-le-Dale).

The worshippers were predominantly middle-class well into the nineteenth century, as Hewitson noted:

‘The congregation is quite of a genteel and superior character. There are a few rather poor people embraced in it; but nine out of ten of the regular worshippers belong to either independent or prosperous middle class families.

‘The congregation, although still “highly respectable,” is not so influential in tone as it used to be. A few years ago, six or seven county magistrates might have been seen in the chapel on a Sunday, and they were all actual “members” of the body; but death and other causes have reduced the number of this class very considerably, and now not more than two are constant worshippers.’

When Hewitson published his book, the minister at the chapel, the Rev Robert Orr, had only recently arrived in Preston. Hewitson painted his pen portrait:

‘Mr. Orr is an Irishman, young in years, tall, cold, timid, quiet, yet excellently educated. He is critical, seems slightly cynical, and moves along as if he either knew nobody or didn’t want to look at anybody. There is somewhat of the student, and somewhat of the college professor in his appearance. But he is a very sincere man; has neither show nor fussiness in him; and practices his duties with a strict, quiet regularity.’

Hewitson would have it that he ‘only laughed right out about once in his life, and had repented of it directly afterwards’, and suggested that if ‘he were livelier and smiled more he would be fatter and happier’.

Yet such a stern demeanour was in keeping with his position as a Unitarian minister in Preston, where, as noted above, Unitarianism grew out of the Nonconformity which had its roots in the strict puritanism of the seventeenth century.

Hewitson felt the building itself reflected such beliefs:

‘The edifice wherein our Unitarian friends assemble every Sunday, is an old-fashioned, homely-looking, little building — a tiny, Quakerised piece of architecture, simple to a degree, prosaic, diminutive, snug, dull. It is just such a place as you could imagine old primitive Non-conformists, fonder of strong principles and inherent virtue than of external embellishment and masonic finery, would build.’

The late Paul Swarbrick added the following information on Preston Digital Archive ten years ago:

‘The building was almost demolished by the current owner at the time and as far as I am aware the new construction was going to be used for rented residential purposes. It was discovered that this was a listed building and had to be reinstated but obviously not back to the original form. The story behind all this is somewhat long and convoluted and near impossible to gain information on what really happened … No surprises there then!’

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Source
Hewitson’s Our Churches and Chapels: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10479