Kidderminster, Worcestershire

A small glory

Yesterday some inner imp in me made me decide to visit Kidderminster. It’s a sad place, hardly designed to improve one’s mood, where Victorian civic buildings abut large-size charity shops, where once magnificent Victorian carpet factories overlook vacant lots, where an inner ring-road slices through the townscape. And yet there is magnificence (not least those carpet factories, one of which houses the Museum of Carpet), if you look for it.

Here’s one building stuck between shopping centres and car parks that deserves a second look. It’s currently behind a locked gate and signs warning one to keep out, but I could still see enough to make me stare. A church, clearly, but of what denomination? I found myself speculating whether it might be Catholic or perhaps rich carpet-manufacturers’ Methodist. But no, this place of worship, originally built in 1782 but given this impressive front in 1883, is actually Unitarian. What a splendid display of Gothic revival with its 14th-century touches – those pointy buttresses, the horizontal band of quatrefoils running below the big windows, and all those curvy ogee canopies (mostly adorned with crockets) above every opening. All particularly effective when the sun chooses to shine on it, bringing out the ruddy colour of the rock-faced sandstone walls.

It was once more magnificent still – there was a stone parapet running along the top of the gable and that lump of stone in the gable’s centre, as well as bearing an inscription with the dates of foundation and rebuilding, supported a central turret that has gone. What a pity those elements have bitten the dust. I also mourned the closed gate and doors. I’d have fancied a look inside (the church contains a 17th-century pulpit once in the parish church and some late-Victorian stained glass, among other things. Maybe one day.

Ilminster, Somerset

Meeting place

When I was told that one name for this building in Ilminster was the Old Meeting, my first thought was that it was rather showy for the Quakers, who often favour domestic and unobtrusive buildings for their meeting houses. But it wasn’t a Quaker building but a meeting house for the Unitarians, who built it in 1719 and set it proudly towards the top of the hill on which the town centre stands. The structure has been modified several times since, with the addition of a schoolroom behind in the mid-19th century. Julian Orbach, in the Pevsner volume for Somerset: South and West, thinks that the large windows and the pedimented doorcases on either side may be 19th-century additions too – there are records of alterations to the meeting house in 1851, 1894, and 1913.

Whatever the precise history of the building, it still makes an attractive structure and if it looks a bit of a stylistic mishmash, such mélanges of Tudor gothic and simplified classical produced some attractive results in provincial town architecture of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. I’d call this example attractive too, although might some might prefer a more ‘correct’ mastery of detail – the pediments of the doorways conceal shallow segmental arches: an odd mix. But I’m pleased to say the building has found a fitting use as a local arts centre, with exhibitions held in the main space and the schoolroom behind converted to a café. The café spills out into the garden at busy times – and was still doing so in the summer when I was last there, with customers taking advantage of the fresh air to mix and enjoy a coffee in relative safety. A local asset, in good and bad times alike.

Bridport, Dorset

Chapel in a garden

Bridport’s Unitarian chapel was built in the 1790s after a group split from an existing independent congregation in 1742. The then minister, Thomas Collins, refused to affirm the divinity of Christ, leading some 200 people to leave and set up their own congregational chapel elsewhere in the town. Those who remained continued under Collins’ ministry, and in 1974 they agreed to build a new chapel, then called the New Meeting, the building that survives today.

The building is a standard 18th-century chapel, with symmetrical front, round-headed windows, hipped roof, and central porch, the latter given a touch of elegance by its semi-circular shape and Ionic columns. But the most distinctive thing about it today is its position, set back from the street and fronted with greenery and flowers. It’s hard to imagine a better setting for a chapel in the middle of a town. The congregation invites passers-by to sit and enjoy the green space, where they can find rest, relaxation, and, perhaps encouraged by the gentle cooing of the doves, spiritual enrichment.

The doves have their own miniature building, which can be seen on the left in my photograph. It’s ornate, octagonal, and painted the same white as the bricks of the chapel’s facade. The occupants perched obligingly and eyed me as, taking welcome relief from Bridport’s busy main street, stopped to take the photograph. Christians have long used the dove as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Unitarianism rejects the Trinitarian notion of the deity, so have no place for that symbol. However, doves have long been linked with peace and purity, and few, in this tranquil setting, would take issue with that.