Tower and Town, March 2022

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Marlborough’s Methodists

Sandwiched between Majestic Wine and the Masonic Lodge is Christchurch Methodist Church. Followers of the revival movement started within the Anglican church by John Wesley in the 18th century. He visited Marlborough and preached from horseback in 1745 and again in 1747. Those who heard him and wished to take his new approach initially met in each other’s homes; in that tradition a house-group still meets each Wednesday, currently on Zoom.

Christchurch is part of the Methodist North Wiltshire Circuit where Ministers and lay local preachers travel to preach in chapels from Gloucestershire to the edge of West Berkshire. Reverend Stephen Skinner is the current ordained minister who has responsibility for Marlborough along with three other Methodist congregations.

The current church grew from a small meeting house that was built in the gardens on the site. The Christchurch Concord of 31st January 1816 shows the site was purchased by George & Elizabeth Pocock, William & Anne White and eighteen others ‘in consideration of £153’. A small chapel was built on Oxford Street. By the 1851 census, we know there were 225 people at morning worship, 50 in the afternoon and a further 125 in the evening. The chapel was extended in 1872.

A subscription begun in 1903 and the sale of the original chapel to the Masonic Lodge eventually raised £2,500 to pay the architects, Gordon and Gunton of London and the builder Mr S Cripps of Marlborough, resulting on 9th February 1910 of the laying of the cornerstone of the building “of an earnest Methodist type”. The Sunday School on Oxford Street opened on the same day. This school in the Wesley Hall was the first freely available school to the children of Marlborough. It was commandeered through World War I as an Auxiliary Hospital. On Methodist Union in 1932, the Primitive Methodists and the Wesleyans joined together to form the Marlborough Methodist Church. Then in 1984, the church was renamed Christchurch, when the Marlborough United Reform Church merged with the Methodist Church. Initially Christchurch and Wesley Hall were separate buildings joined by an external wrought iron staircase to the schoolrooms. At the end of the last millennium the two were joined as the Crush Hall and a new kitchen was built to form one building. Many residents of Marlborough will have visited these as a space for many meetings and activities over the years.

The present congregation have inherited the call from those who first heard it 206 years ago. We pray we will grasp the present and live it to his glory.

Sandra and David Wylie